dislodging Hitler from the star position he had won during the trial and forcing him back into the role of “drummer.”
Hitler, however, was not discouraged by the situation. Rather, he saw it as rich in promise. Rosenberg later admitted that he had been greatly surprised at being appointed interim leader of the movement and suspected that Hitler had chosen him for some secret reason of his own. Perhaps Hitler was quite ready to let the movement fall apart, if that would reinforce his own claim to leadership. Nor was this reprehensible, in view of the sort of claim Hitler was by now making. For the summons he had received from fate could not be delegated. In religion, too, there is no such person as the vice-savior.
With curious dispassion, Hitler had watched the squabbles among Rosenberg, Streicher, Esser, Pohner, Rohm, Amann, Strasser, and Ludendorff, and, as one of his followers commented, “did not even lift his little finger.” While still in prison, he had tried as far as possible to keep any decision from being taken, any power center formed or claim to leadership established. For similar reasons he opposed nationalist participation in the parliamentary elections, although such participation was in keeping with the new strategy of seeking the legal conquest of power. The point was that every party member who acquired parliamentary immunity and a legislator’s salary thereby gained some independence of his authority. He was not at all pleased to learn that the National Socialist Freedom Party had won 32 of 472 seats in the Reichstag elections of May, 1924. Shortly afterward, in an open letter, Hitler resigned the leadership of the NSDAP, withdrew the appointments he had made to various offices, and refused to receive politically motivated visits. With a touch of smugness Rudolf Hess, writing from Landsberg, commented on the “stupidity” of the party followers. As for Hitler’s gamble, it proved to be a clever one. When he came out of prison, he found nothing but the ruins of the party; but on the other hand he no longer had any serious rival. He appeared on the scene as the longed-for rescuer of a nationalist-racist movement that had been, with some assistance from him, sinking into the swamp. On this basis, Hitler was able to assert an authority that soon could no longer be challenged. He later frankly admitted: “Otherwise it would not have been possible. At that time [after his release from prison] I was able to say to everyone in the party: Now we are going to fight the way I want to and no differently.”
Nevertheless, upon his release he found himself confronting soaring hopes and the most contradictory expectations and demands from his disunited followers. His political future would be dependent upon whether he succeeded in freeing himself from all the splinter groups and, within the densely inhabited sphere of the Right, giving his party an unmistakable profile—which, however, had also to be vague enough to hold the divergent aspirations together. Many rightists were expecting him to join Ludendorff in organizing a racist-nationalist unity movement. But he realized that only a towering leader, a supreme personality standing alone upon a kind of supernatural pinnacle, could serve as the cohesive force his concept required. At the moment, therefore, he was not interested in concluding hasty alliances but in marking out dividing lines and in establishing his personal claim to absolutism. His behavior during the following weeks was determined by these considerations.
Only a few days after his release, Hitler, on Pohner’s advice, asked Held, the new Bavarian Prime Minister, for an interview. Held, chairman of the Bavarian People’s Party, was strictly Catholic and resolutely federalistic; Hitler and his associates had been violently hostile to him. To play down the significance of the meeting, Hitler pretended that his sole purpose was to ask for the release of those of his comrades still imprisoned in Landsberg. Critics within the
His personal fate as well as the future of the movement depended on the success of this maneuver. His ambition was unchanged: to seize power. For this he must build up an autocratic, military party; but he must also regain the lost trust of powerful groups and institutions. That is, he had to appear simultaneously as revolutionary and as defender of existing conditions, radical and moderate at once. He must both threaten the system and play the part of its preserver; he must violate the law and establish credibility as its defender. It is not certain whether Hitler ever consciously spelled out this paradoxical strategy; but almost everything he did in practice aimed at the tactical realization of these paradoxes. In his talk with Held he assured the Prime Minister of his loyalty. In the future, he promised, he would work only by legal means; the putsch of November 9 had been a mistake. He had since recognized, he continued, that the authority of the state must be respected; he himself, as a bourgeois patriot, was ready to contribute to the best of his ability to that end. Above all, he was at the disposal of the government in the struggle against the seditious forces of Marxism. But, of course, if he were to be effective, he needed his party and the
Held listened to this tommyrot with a reserved air. He was glad to hear, he said, that Hitler was at last inclined to respect government authority, but it was a matter of indifference whether he did or did not respect it. As Prime Minister, he, Held, would maintain this authority against anyone. He would not stand for conditions such as had prevailed in Bavaria before November 9.
Nevertheless, at the suasion of his personal friend, Dr. Gurtner, who was one of Hitler’s patrons, Held finally agreed to lift the ban on the National Socialist Party and its newspaper. For, as he summed up his impression of the talk with Hitler, “the beast has been tamed.”
A few days later, Hitler turned up at a meeting of the nationalist faction in the Landtag, the Bavarian state legislature. And, as if the nationalist movement were not in bad enough shape, he opened a new breach in its ranks. Sporting the leather whip that was by now one of his regular props, he entered the Landtag building, where the deputies, in a solemn mood, had gathered to welcome him. But after only the briefest of preliminaries, he began assailing them for their lack of leadership and ideas. He was particularly angry at their having refused participation in the government, which Prime Minister Held had offered. Totally dismayed, the group protested that there were principles an honorable man could not abandon; one could not first come out against a rival party for betraying the German people and then go ahead and form a government in collaboration with it. As the wrangle went on, one of the faction members suggested that Hitler’s one reason for wanting the coalition had been to buy his release from prison on parole. Hitler answered witheringly that his release was a thousand times more important to the movement than all the principles of two dozen nationalist deputies.
His idea seems to have been to make so bold a claim to leadership that those who were not willing to submit to him would be driven out of his camp. He had spoken ironically of the “inflationary gains” of the party in 1923, seeing its too rapid growth as the reason for its lack of fiber during the crisis. He was now separating the chaff from the wheat. The leaders of the other nationalist groups were soon complaining bitterly that Hitler would not co-operate with them. They kept referring to the blood that all had shed together at the Feldherrnhalle. But mystical sentimentalities of this sort had little effect on Hitler. Instead, he remembered how dependent he had been in 1923, how he had had to defer to all these fellow nationalists. He had learned a lesson from that: every partnership was a form of imprisonment. So now he would pretend to be pliable as far as the government and the power holders were concerned. But within the movement he imperiously enforced his will. He was quite willing to accept the consequences: that of the twenty-four conservative deputies, only six stood the test. The remainder went over to other parties.
Nor was this battle the last. Impatiently, he started fresh quarrels and blasted more pieces away from the margins of the shrinking movement. He made much of the differences between himself and the flock of other racist, nationalist, and radical rightist groups, and refused to collaborate with any of them. By now he had alienated all but four of the deputies in the Reichstag. Even those showed resistance and wanted him to break with such ambiguous and unsavory followers as Hermann Esser and Julius Streicher. The wrangles went on for months. But since Hitler realized far more clearly than his opponents that what was at stake was not the purity of the party, but control of it, he did not yield an inch.
Meanwhile, he was preparing for the break with Ludendorff. The general had become something of a burden, especially in South Germany, where he had involved himself in endless bickerings. He feuded with the Catholic Church; he provoked an unnecessary tiff with the Bavarian crown prince over questions of honor; he quarreled with the officers’ corps. Ludendorff was growing more and more unreasonable, under the influence of his second wife, Dr. Mathilde von Kemnitz. He was increasingly preoccupied with the pseudoreligious obscurities of a sectarian ideology, a melange of psychotic fears, Germanic religion and anticivilizational pessimism. Such
