Edward Conze and Ellen Wilkinson 1935
There are four distinct stages in the history of the National Socialist movement in Germany. The first stage lasts from the foundation of the party to the Putsch [1] of 1923; the second, from the breakdown in that year to the electoral victories of 1930; the third, the period of intense propaganda and growing power from 1930 to 1933; the fourth, in power.
After the German defeat in the World War, and the revolution which followed, a number of reactionary groups came into existence, in order to fight Communism and get rid of the Republic. Differing in certain of their aims, they all hated the revolution and everything connected with it. The ex-officers were the backbone of these groups and the middle classes their main support, but they would have been able to do very little against the aroused and angry workers if they had not been financed and armed by the Social-Democratic Minister of the Reichswehr, Herr Noske. The Social-Democratic leaders were more afraid of the temper which the Communists were arousing in the streets, than of the officers who hated the whole Republic.
The struggle between the workers and the other classes had been particularly bitter in Munich. After the breakdown of the Bavarian Soviet government, Munich became the natural centre of the worst reaction. The military, whether as regular army or irregular bands, were the masters of Bavaria. A man called Adolf Hitler began to be noticed. He was the son of a subordinate Austrian official, and had fought as a German soldier in the war. His early life had been spent in desperately trying to earn a living, but though he had had to take temporary jobs as a workman, he had all that nervous dread of being reduced to the status of a working man, which is so strong a feature of the petty German official class. He was full of vague aspirations. He had that strong nationalist feeling which is shown by Southern Germans who are continually in quarrelsome contact with other races.
Hitler at this time, he was just 30, was the right kind of man to become the mouthpiece of ruined, frightened middle-class people, whose struggles with poverty, and dread of being ‘de-classed’, he so thoroughly understood. His personal complex against Jews he shared with all the reactionary groups that were being fostered in Bavaria by the Reichswehr, because nearly all the leaders of the Munich Soviet government had been Jews.
In its earliest days there seemed nothing to distinguish Hitler’s small movement from the other Bavarian groups. But there were differences and these became important. Hitler’s group wanted to win over the workers at a time when the other movements had no other idea than to shoot or torture any worker who dared to lift his head. It called itself the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), and had a programme and wanted to act as a political party at a time when the other groups had no other desire than to rampage round Bavaria with arms in their hands, no other aim than a general longing to get back to prewar times and put an end to the Republic.
Yet at the same time, and this was to become perhaps the most important factor in its success, the leaders of this small group saw that in the state that Germany was now reduced to, the streets must be conquered and held before real power in the state could be gained, a notion that the democratic parties with their eyes fixed on England as a model, and their thoughts concentrated on the winning and management of votes, did not understand and refused to countenance. This fact turned the scale again and again at critical moments, until the final seizure of the supreme power in the Reich by this once insignificant group. And, though this was not apparent at first, this group had as leader a man who was to prove that he had a natural flair for politics, and an uncanny understanding of ordinary human nature.
By 1920, this man, Adolf Hitler, had become the acknowledged leader of the NSDAP. From the younger members of it he formed an active group to steward meetings, act as a claque for applause, throw out disturbers, and call attention to their movement by beating up Jewish-looking people in the streets or on the trams. In 1921, these became known as the SA (Sturm Abteilungen) – the Storm Troopers, who added the sticks and revolvers of enthusiastic young men to the political talent of Hitler and the popular appeal of his programme. These men were drilled by the Reichswehr, and for months were paid out of Reichswehr funds, to which formal training they added their own experiences of street fighting. Even in these early days, preparations were being made for the Putsch which took place two years later. Captain Röhm became, after Hitler, the most important man in the movement, and showed himself a capable military organiser.
The numbers of the party grew rapidly. The 60 of 1919 became 3000 in 1920, had doubled in the next year, and reached 15,000 in 1923, of whom 12,000 were enrolled in the SA. Two streams of thought, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say feeling, were even then discernible. Included among the SA were many of the men who had helped to crush the Bavarian workers’ government with great brutality.
A diary, published later by one of them, tells with gusto how he hunted down the Socialist workmen, and what he did to them. It is almost unreadable by any normal person. They had murdered dozens of Republican political leaders. Assassination was regarded by them as one of their normal moves in the political game. Cut off from their families, without hope of, or even wish for, any settled position in life, they held the lives of others cheaply, and placed little value on their own. They hated the organised working class, but respected those of them who put up a fight.
But side by side with these men were genuinely working-class recruits, most of them unemployed, who were attracted partly by the corporate life, partly by the possibility of getting a regular job in the Reichswehr, and partly by the Socialist character of the party programme and Hitler’s speeches. From this working-class nucleus came many of the most effective propagandists, who stuck stubbornly to the Socialist part of National Socialism, and who were responsible for the hold that the movement was to obtain later among the unemployed and despairing masses.
The circumstances of the time fought for Hitler. His movement expressed something that a large number of people really wanted. The invasion of the Ruhr roused national feeling to fever heat. The inflation impoverished the middle classes. The exchange became the centre of interest, as did the speeches that Hitler made about it twice a week. Mussolini’s march on Rome showed that Fascism could make a comparatively bloodless and convenient kind of revolution which showed a full appreciation of the position and privileges of the middle classes. This period of quick growth ended when, on 9 November 1923, the Nazis dared a Putsch in Munich. It was badly prepared, and was carried out against the will of the local Reichswehr officers.
One volley settled the Putsch. Fourteen men, four of them workers, were killed. The rest fled. Hitler took refuge with his friend Hanfstaengl. Only General Ludendorff marched on – alone. This was the only time, it is important to note, that the Nazis had to face fire from the troops, though the Communist workmen and the Left Socialists had to do so time and time again, with the certainty of brutal punishment in barracks or prison if they were caught.
The Second Period: Hitler seemed utterly discredited at the time, and strong action could have broken his movement. But the legal proceedings were allowed to become a nation-wide advertisement for him. A Social-Democratic Republic, which had, according to Herr Noske’s own statement, been responsible for the killing of about 15,000 workers up to then, allowed him to be sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and released him eight months later. In prison he received friends, held party conferences, wrote his book, Mein Kampf. For a time the party broke into sections, bitterly fighting each other. But, in the elections of April 1924, the Nazis got 1,990,000 votes, which gave them 6.5 per cent of the seats in the Reichstag.
The ‘dollar prosperity’ which followed the acceptance of the Dawes Plan proved stronger than Hitler. Enormous credits streamed into the country, principally from America. As a good deal of this money was used for public works and building of various kinds, unemployment decreased considerably. In the elections of December 1924, the Nazis lost over 50 per cent of their April vote. The following year their presidential candidate, Ludendorff, received only 200,000 votes. Many of their followers went to the German Nationalist Party, ashamed of having belonged to the Nazis.
The National Socialist leadership, however, learned from its past mistakes. None of the important errors made previous to the 1923 debacle were made again. Arrangements were made to carry the Nazi gospel to the industrial centres of Northern Germany – Hamburg, the Ruhr, Berlin, where a new section of the party was founded which only in 1929 became really subordinated to Hitler. This section strongly stressed the Socialist aspects of ‘National Socialism’, and reaped a first harvest of workers who, disappointed with the results of Social-Democratic participation in the government, and of the numerous Communist insurrections, were attracted by this new kind of ‘Socialism’.
Hitler in this period began to select his party leaders systematically and with great care. He was not hampered by elections. His monarchical leadership was partly based on his ability to get men of very different talents to work together and through him, partly because the control of all the party money was kept in his hands. He was utterly indifferent to the moral character of his associates, and some of them were such notorious evil-livers that the more solid type of German citizen kept away from the Nazis for a long time.
Hitler had to be careful personally, for he was technically an alien. It was not until 1927 that he was allowed to speak again in Germany. In these years he was as anxious as Sir Oswald Mosley is at the present time in England to give the public the impression that his was an unarmed movement, that his followers hardly knew which was the business end of a revolver. The SS (Schutz Staffel) was founded during the same period, mainly at the instigation of Goering, to be the ‘internal police’ over the Storm Troopers. They became the Prætorian Guard of the movement.
Though their numbers were steadily growing, the Nazis’ main problem was that their opponents did not take them seriously, and the masses of the population remained indifferent. The methods by which they forced themselves on public attention make an amusing chapter of the history of propaganda methods. Rows in plenty, which made people talk, as the fracas in the Olympia meeting of May 1934 put Sir Oswald Mosley on the front page of papers which had been boycotting him. Under cover of the parliamentary immunity which covered anything a Reichstag deputy signed, the Nazi papers concentrated on personal scandal against opponents.
The Nazi paper in Cologne, to give an example, lived on minor scandals connected with Jews and had little influence. It wanted a first-rate scandal, truth being a secondary consideration. There was a big Jewish butchering concern which had spread through the town and had opened shops and restaurants everywhere. It was as well known to Colognians as Lyons and the ABC are to Londoners.
The Nazi paper ran a splash story, with many quotations from the Talmud, that one customer had found half a mouse in his stew. They had the customer, the mouse, and witnesses. Not even the Siberian beetle that was supposed to have appeared in the breakfast butter of a Cambridge undergraduate created a greater sensation. All Cologne was soon talking about the Mouse of the House of Rosenthal. The firm denied that the mouse could conceivably have been their mouse, and went to court. It was months before the case came up for trial.
During the whole of this time, the story of Rosenthal’s mouse was kept going. A boxing champion duly appeared as a witness. Every stunt that could be thought of was added. The firm was, of course, ruined, but Dr Ley, now leader of the German Workers’ Front, and then the editor of the Westdeutscher Beobachter, which ran the story, had gained the ear of the public for the Nazis.
Dr Goebbels insisted that every Nazi must wear his swastika. Swastikas were painted everywhere. Slogans and ‘Heil Hitlers’ competed with the Communist hammer and sickles. Pushing Nazism under the public nose became the main preoccupation of leaders and followers alike.
Common Cause with Hugenberg: In 1929 the Young Plan was accepted, much against the will of a considerable part of German industry. This gave the occasion for a common attack by the Nazis and the Nationalist Party. This, the party of the big industrialists, who had no roots whatever among the German people, and no idea how to make a popular appeal, badly needed the sort of propaganda machine that the Nazis had elaborated. The referendum which the two parties forced only received 5,800,000 votes, but it opened the ear of the small towns and the country to the Nazis. In these areas, the Hugenberg press machine was better than theirs.
After a year of intense propaganda, which is unparalleled even in the history of postwar German politics, and that is saying quite a lot, the Nazis gained an electoral success which brought them to the forefront of German political life. They polled 6,400,000 votes in 1930, as compared with the 800,000 they had polled in the last election of 1928. The policy of the Nazi leaders was completely changed by this success. They had always assumed that they would have to conquer state power by a coup d'état, carried out by a small and well-trained minority.
Like all people, whether writers or political leaders who have not won mass support, the Nazi leaders had hitherto affected to despise it. Not until the twelfth edition of Mein Kampf did Hitler delete the famous and significant sentence: ‘The German has not the slightest idea of how a nation must be misled if the adherence of the masses is sought.’
In 1923, Hitler had declared that the democratic principle of majority rule ‘always means only the victory of the meaner, of the worse, of the weaker – especially of the cowards and the irresponsibles’. Or as in another speech: ‘We do not want millions of indifferent followers. The history of the world has always been made by minorities.’
In the difficulties of 1928 Hitler consoled his men with: ‘If one day the great masses came to us with “Hurrahs,” then would we be lost.’ Now the masses were apparently coming over with ‘Hurrahs’, and the Nazi leaders were thrilled at the possibilities this opened to them.
The Third Period: When Hitler had to appear in a court at Leipzig shortly after this election he swore: ‘We shall attain our goal by legal means.’ He now felt that he had to convince either a majority or at least a very large minority of the German people before it would be wise for him to take power – but it took some time before his whole movement became accustomed to the changed situation, and Hitler had to make appropriate speeches to keep their hearts up as when, in 1931, he declared that the legal way was not the inner desire of his heart, but he chose it because an insurrection would lead to defeat and bloodshed. The lesson of 1923, which Hitler had taken to heart then, had to be impressed on his impatient followers, not as alive as he was to the changes in the situation which the new voters created.
The years 1930 to 1933 would form an amazing chapter in any History of Propaganda, if one could be written. The Nazi leaders realised the strength that came from having the bureaucracy on their side. ‘We must make the attempt to get the police force of the state into our hands in a way which looks legal, at least to the outside. Of course this legal way must be accompanied by a more or less illegal pressure.’ Legality was emphasised to the law-abiding citizen. The SA man was trained for situations ‘in which the Fatherland can only be saved by violence’.
Aristotle defines a demagogue as one who flatters the masses. By this definition Hitler and the Nazi orators were the perfect demagogues. They flattered each blond German by assuring them that it was scientifically proved that they were superior to any other race in the world – just when the result of the war had made them not so sure about it. They fostered the legend that the Germans had not really been beaten in the war, but had been stabbed in the back by Jews and Marxists.
Each class in turn, peasant and industrial worker, capitalist and landlord, students and the middle classes, were solemnly assured that they were the most valuable element in the country and would be the real power in the Third Reich. They promised everything to everybody – except the Jews. As Heiden, the historian of the Nazi movement, says: ‘The Nazis wanted to mix the cards so that each player could win.’
In the heat of the worked-up emotion of these years, people did not want to criticise, to compare. They wanted to be told what to believe. Hitler told them. No village was left untouched. The popularity of their appeal to all classes, the large funds which made such spectacular electioneering possible, combined with the despair and hopelessness of the economic situation to prepare their soil for them.
The figures of the elections, which the Nazis forced again and again, during these months are worth consideration:
Date Votes (million) Percentage September 1930 6.4 18.3 March 1932 11.3 30.0 April 1932 13.4 37.0 July 1932 13.7 37.0 November 1932 11.7 (loss to nationalists) 33.1 March 1933 17.5 43.6
The bulk of this increase in votes did not come from the organised workers. Their votes remained remarkably steady. The Social-Democratic Party lost some, but the Communists gained. Most of the new Nazi voters came from the numerous smaller bourgeois parties who were gradually squeezed out of existence, and a large number from the politically indifferent who are always susceptible to violent propaganda methods.
The depression became catastrophic when the ‘dollar prosperity’ ended and the USA wanted their loans back. Unemployment, which had been 650,000 in 1925, and 1.3 million in 1928, rose to three million in 1931, and doubled in 1932. The Nazis exploited every feature of the depression. They used the Reichstag as a theatrical stage for propaganda performances, being careful not to disappoint anyone by trying to do any positive work. The MPs were used, because of their immunity, for spectacular defiance of the law, while their free railway tickets carried them round the country on propaganda tours. The last thing they thought of doing was attending the Reichstag except for a stunt. Nazi MPs boasted how many cases were pending against them.
After 1930, the Nazis got control in one or two of the smaller states, such as Thuringia and Brunswick. They usually limited their activities to getting control of the police, and to attacks on professors, pacifist teachers and modern art. They thus gained the sympathy of the middle classes, without annoying the indifferent workers, who had more pressing things to worry about than modern art at the time. They amused the people by baiting the Social-Democrats where these were in control, knowing that they had not the moral strength left to do anything more serious than threaten.
During 1932 an atmosphere of violence and terror spread through the country. Röhm was back from Bolivia. In 18 months he had transformed the SA into a disciplined military body – disciplined to carry through the murder of opponents that the government made only half-hearted attempts to punish. Chancellor Brüning had become convinced that in some mystic way the Nazis represented the New Generation. Sentences of one or two years, in prisons where the movement could ensure that they would be treated like pets, were positively sought for as insurances for jobs in the coming Third Realm.
The issuing of personal libel under the signature of MPs became such a scandal that a law was passed in 1931 to forbid MPs to sign as the responsible editors of papers. But the Nazis had by that time, and in anticipation of it, built up an organisation for the oral transmission of slander that neutralised this belated effort to purify German politics.
In 1930, a law was passed preventing any Nazi being a civil servant in Prussia. A few over-zealous Nazi teachers were dismissed, and some meetings and demonstrations banned. Once the uniform of the SA was banned, but not the party. The SA men went round in white shirts and secured a fine advertisement. When, in April, the Storm Troopers themselves were banned for a time, they were simply merged into the general organisation of the party.
Why Didn’t the Government Act? The short answer is that they did not want to. Brüning’s government was a tolerated lesser evil. It could not appeal to the democracy of Germany, because the Reichstag had been suspended since November 1930, and the Chancellor was ruling by decree. Each government in turn had less support in the Reichstag than its predecessor. Von Papen had less than 10 per cent of the newly-elected Reichstag at his back when he took office. The Nazis, on the other hand, would have prevented anything being done – even if the capitalist party leaders had known what to do. The unrest which the Nazis were largely responsible for creating caused the flight of capital. Their repeated declarations that they would recognise no agreement signed by any government not their own, ruined any hope of success in foreign negotiations.
The Conservatives would have been glad enough to take in the Nazis as a reasonably docile minority any time they were willing; but the Nazis were too wily to be caught as the Social-Democrats and the English Labour Party had been caught. They demanded ‘All power to Hitler’. Thus any government in which capitalists and landowners predominated was as paralysed to take action against the Nazis as is the insect which a wasp stings for the purpose of laying her eggs in it.
The vote of the Social-Democrats, which remained, as has been said, remarkably steady, covered the extent to which the position of the party was being undermined in popular esteem. Every loss in votes was explained away. The Social-Democratic leadership after their electoral victory in 1928 had become impregnably self-satisfied. They had allowed themselves in 1919 to be manoeuvred by the generals who had lost the war, and the big industrialists who had done pretty well out of it, into signing the Treaty of Versailles. They then became prominent advocates of the policy of partial fulfilment, which in view of the French attitude was the only possible one immediately after the war. They were conscious of their own good intentions in both cases. But when France became less able and less willing to resist pressure from Germany, it was easy for the Nazis to make them appear as responsible for giving way to the national enemies far more than they need have done.
The Social-Democrats were more open to legitimate attack in certain important municipalities which they controlled. They paid much higher salaries than the Prussian state had ever done – and did not get more efficient or as honest service. Prussia had known how to pay in honours and status for official poverty, avoiding the worst corruption of the French poorly-paid official by insisting on high respect being paid to the official class. While disapproving equally of exaggerated official status and poor salaries, the Social-Democrats were not able, or did not trouble, to find a formula which worked better in the Prussian conditions. The new and highly-paid officials were not inaccessible to corruption, and some of them were involved in certain big scandals with Jewish contractors, of which the Nazis made the most.
It is rather interesting to speculate how the Nazi local regimes would stand at this moment scrutiny as close as that which was directed against all the actions of their predecessors. Some of the ‘fattest’ Nazi administrators began their political life by attacks on the Social-Democratic bonzen – one of Germany’s most popular terms of abuse in the years 1910 to 1932, and used to express about a thousand per cent more contempt than the most diehard English Tory can put into the words ‘fat trade-union official’.
The active members of the Social-Democratic Party at this time could compare more than favourably with the best the Nazis could produce, but their most urgent warnings failed to arouse in their leaders any sense of danger. One of the present writers saw a good deal of this leadership while helping the party in the elections of July 1932. An excellent and devoted party leader like Frau Juhacz, the head of the Socialist women’s organisation, simply could not understand why anyone among the workers could have any grievance against the party which had done so much for them.
The party executive continued to regard the Nazis’ propaganda as an epidemic of nonsense which would soon pass away if it were ignored. Had any of them understood, or tried to understand, the case for the Nazi movement, it might have been possible to take steps to counteract the sweeping propaganda. But they felt that, at all costs, the one sound policy was to give sufficient time for the tide of Nazi nonsense to ebb. They therefore clung to the policy of the ‘lesser evil’, willing to support anyone, willing to cooperate with all the reactionary forces in Germany if necessary, in order to keep the Nazis out of office.
As the Vorwärts said in 1931 about the Brüning budget: ‘We, the Social-Democrats, have many complaints against the present government and its budget; but this budget and this state is still better than Fascism.’ In voting for Brüning in 1931, they declared that otherwise the powers of the Reichstag would be transferred to Hindenburg. In 1932, Hindenburg had become the lesser evil, and by 1933 even Hitler himself seemed a lesser evil than the Communists.
The Coalition government of Hermann Müller, himself a Social-Democrat, had a bad enough record for oscillating between weakness to the employers and severity to the workers, which was not improved when, in the new depression, they had to consent to reductions in wages and other unpopular measures.
‘Cannot the Social-Democrats organise something against this?’, was the bewildered thought of many foreigners who watched the arrogant bearing of the Nazis in their great processions through the streets in 1931 and 1932. The Socialists had founded a protective organisation for their meetings as far back as 1924. It was known as the Reichsbanner, and by 1931 it had developed a nucleus of 160,000 strong men.
Max Hölterman, a young worker from Magdeburg who displayed considerable organising ability, conceived the idea of the ‘Iron Front’, which adopted the ‘Three Arrows’ (Drei Pfeile) as a countersign to the swastika. The Iron Front included the Reichsbanner, the trade unions, who had started their own protective organisation, the Hammerschaft, and the Workers’ Sports Organisations. The older Social-Democratic leaders were not enthusiastic about the new organisation.
The trade unions alone had enough money to have financed a movement which could have held the Nazis in check. But, to do the leaders justice, they hated the idea of seeming to countenance civil war. They hoped that things would not get worse. By the time a very grudging official recognition turned into a certain measure of consent, it was really too late. But no one who saw, as the present writers did, the fine material of the Reichsbanner, could deny that had they been able to secure even a part of the money and equipment and leadership that was poured into the SA, the Nazis would not be the rulers of Germany today.
The Communist Counter-Organisation: The Communists did not make the fatal mistake of the Social-Democrats. Far from belittling the Nazi danger, they were the first of the German political parties to see where Hitler’s strength lay. In the year 1931 in particular, they were serious competitors for the allegiance of the sections of the workers suffering most from the economic crisis.
During that year Communist activity was unceasing – strikes of minorities in the factories, street demonstrations of the unemployed, conflicts with the police in resisting the new repressive ordinances. But they gradually lost the initiative to the Nazis, partly because they had nothing like the Hitler resources; their actions tended to be less and less well-prepared. Because of this and because they had no sympathisers among the governing groups, their actions nearly always ended in defeat, while because of secret sympathy in higher quarters the Nazis could show a series of practical victories, which gave them great prestige.
Unfortunately the Nazi success led the Communists into imitating their policy – but always after the Nazi orators had marked the territory as their own. The Nazis gained considerable influence by their opposition to the Young Plan. In 1930, after much hesitation, the Communists published their programme for the ‘National and Social Liberation of the German People’. In leading this fight against foreign capital, they had no less an authority than that of Lenin, but only after the Nazis had thoroughly cornered this ‘market’ did they begin to lay stress on it.
In 1931, the Nazis and the Stahlhelm demanded a referendum against the Social-Democratic Prussian government. They agitated for it for six months. A fortnight before the voting date, the Communist Party suddenly decided to favour the idea, ordered its followers to vote against the government and, amid the incredulous smiles of the entire population, announced that it had now become a ‘red referendum’.
In May 1931, the Communists produced a programme for helping the peasants by emergency measures without touching their private property. But the Nazis had had a year’s start to dig themselves in among the peasantry on those lines, while the Communists had much of their propaganda of that year to live down.
The new policy was on the lines of Lenin’s conciliation of the social revolutionary peasants in Russia, but the mass of the people, or the peasants, did not take the new nationalistic and peasant policies seriously, because they had already learned to associate this kind of policy with Nazism. The actual effect of this change was to enhance the feeling that the Nazis must, after all, be right, if their bitterest opponents were now beginning to talk the same way. It was not bad tactics for the Communist Party to voice popular demands, but it was fatal to follow behind the Nazis.
The Way to Power: In January 1933, Hitler was made Chancellor of the Reich after three years of intense propaganda and political excitement. It happened just when it did, and not later, not because of intrigues for Hitler, but because the landed interests in East Prussia were threatened. They had got rid of Brüning when he had wanted to touch a little of their property. When General von Schleicher tried to get them to heel by threatening the exposures of the Osthilfe scandals through which the Junkers had helped themselves rather liberally to public money, the Junkers had Hindenburg on their side. Only a complete suppression of free speech and free press could hush up the unsavoury details.
At the same time, big business was afraid that the Nazis were disintegrating. The Social-Democrats, it was felt, were no longer any use as a mass basis for German capitalist employers, who had begun to accept the Nazis, not very willingly in some quarters, instead. Now the Nazis seemed to be losing hold. What would happen if the masses turned Communist? Feeling that anything was better than that, Hitler was made Chancellor in a minority government.
But Hitler had no intention of being in office without power. The Reichstag went up in flames. The middle classes were stampeded. The most brutal terror of arrests and torture of Socialists, Communists and pacifists followed. Four million who had previously not voted came out to vote for Hitler, who promised they would not have to vote again for four years. The details of that orgy of suppression have been printed widely in the English press and do not concern us here. The point of supreme importance for the future of Germany is that with it all the Nazis only secured 43 per cent. Only with the aid of his Nationalist allies was Hitler able to claim that he held the 51 per cent – at once, the dream, the aim, and the excuse of the reformist Social-Democrats.
The Nazis then established their totalitarian state. They soon got rid of their Nationalist allies. No other party, no other press, no other political meetings than theirs were tolerated. Great German journals were either suppressed or transformed into Nazi papers. The result was that one year later Hitler himself complained that ‘there is no pleasure in reading 15 papers when all have almost the same text’. Other people also stopped reading the papers – and by the hundreds of thousands.
In a few months, Hitler had suppressed more than Mussolini had been able to do after as many years. That was the result of having got so large a minority, practically half the entire population, on his side first. Agitation provided a scapegoat. Did not the solidarity of the Jews abroad, it was argued, show at last even to the blindest German that the international conspiracy of the Jews against the Nordic race was a fact?
With the complete seizure of power, Hitler and the National Socialist Party started on a series of new difficulties which are dealt with in Part II of this book. The immediate effect of power was to show how wide were the gaps in the party that had been hidden by the excitement of the conquest of power. It was easy to promise anything and everything to get power. To try to keep those promises was a very different thing. The party could be held together for a time, by the terror against any opposition, the shooting of the leaders of all the discontented elements on 30 June 1934, and the Goering actions against the 10 per cent who had dared to vote against Hitler being President as well as Chancellor.
Opponents of any kind are rendered helpless by such methods, until sufficient general sentiment against the regime develops a form of leadership out of itself. The policy of economic nationalism, and the attempt to liquidate the influence of international banking capital over Germany, had led them into severe financial difficulties. In his attempt to satisfy everybody Hitler has satisfied nobody; but it is equally true and much more important that he has as yet exasperated no vitally important section. No opposition to him is able to gain mass support. Every interest feels that at the moment the alternative to Hitler might be worse. The workers fear a Junker – military dictatorship which would certainly be worse for them than the Nazi Party with its wide popular basis. The Right fears a Communist revolution.
By the curious development of German politics, Hitler has become ‘The Lesser Evil Incarnate’. The balance is precarious, but it is maintained, and probably will be maintained, until the second World War comes.
1. Putsch is an untranslatable German word which has become a technical term of international politics. It describes an attempt to seize power which is half-way between a coup d'état and a popular revolution.