Undoubtedly, anyone observing his immediate entourage would have had to concede that he was right. After the deliberate clashes and schisms of the preceding months, it was in the nature of things that most of the followers who remained with him were the mediocrities. His retinue had shrunk again to that cohort of cattle dealers, chauffeurs, bouncers, and onetime professional soldiers with whom he had formed, ever since the murky beginnings of the party, a curiously sentimental and almost human relationship. The unsavory reputation of most of these satellites bothered him no more than did their rowdy manners. His keeping such company above all showed how far he had come from the bourgeois aesthete he had once been. In answer to occasional reprimands, he would say, with a trace of embarrassment, that he too could make a wrong choice; it was human nature to be “not infallible.” And yet, right on into his years as Chancellor such types remained his preferred associates; they were always on hand in these long, empty evenings when Hitler, watching movies or engaging in trivial chitchat in the rooms that had once been Bismarck’s, unbuttoned his jacket and slumped in the big armchair with his legs stretched out before him. These men without background, without families or professions, all of them with some crack in their characters or their careers, aroused familiar associations in the former inmate of the home for men. Admiration and sincere devotion were all they could offer him, and these they gave without reserve. They listened raptly when he sat with them in the Italian restaurant Osteria Bavaria or the Cafe Neumaier and embarked on one of his tirades. Perhaps their uncritical devotion served him as a substitute for that mass enthusiasm he needed like a drug and which for the time being he had to do without.
Among the few successes Hitler could tote up during this period of paralysis was the winning over of Gregor Strasser. Until the failure of the November putsch Strasser, a pharmacist from Landshut and the gauleiter of Lower Bavaria, whom “experience at the front” had brought to politics, could hardly have been considered prominent. But he had profited by the absence of Hitler to push forward and had won a considerable following for Nazism in North Germany and the Ruhr. The National Socialist Freedom Movement was his personal vehicle. This hulking but sensitive man who brawled in taverns and read Homer in Greek was of impressive appearance. He was an excellent speaker and had an important ally in his brother Otto, a skillful journalist. It was hard for him to work with the cold, slippery, neurasthenic Hitler; for a man like Gregor Strasser there was something repellent about Hitler’s personality. Nor could he stomach Hitler’s entourage. Ail that the two men had in common was allegiance to an as yet shifting, ill-defined concept of “National Socialism.” Nevertheless, Strasser admired Hitler’s magnetism and his grip over his followers.
Strasser had not taken part in the meeting aimed at refounding the party. In March, 1925, to compensate Strasser for his resignation from the National Socialist Freedom Movement, Hitler offered him the largely independent post of leader of the Nazi party in the entire North German area. Strasser accepted with the proud proviso that he was joining Hitler not as a follower but as a fellow warrior. He still had his moral scruples and his doubts, but felt that the essential cause, the idea promising the birth of the future, must stand above all else. “That is why I have offered Herr Hitler my co-operation.”
But this addition to the ranks was balanced out by a major loss. While Strasser applied his vast energy to building up a party organization in North Germany, within a short time establishing seven new gaus between Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania, and Lower Saxony, Hitler showed how bent he was on imposing his own authority, no matter what the cost. For now he broke with Ernst Rohm. After Rohm’s brush with the Munich People’s Court (he was pronounced guilty but given no sentence), the former army captain had promptly begun to unite his old comrades of the Free Corps and Kampfbund days in a new association, the
Even while he was still in Landsberg, Hitler had looked askance at Rohm’s activities, since everything Rohm was doing was a threat to his parole, his power within the nationalist movement, and his new tactics. One of the lessons of November had been to have done, once and for all, with the swaggering ways and conspiratorial games of the military leagues. What the NSDAP needed, Hitler had decided, was a party force organized on paramilitary lines and totally subordinate to the political leadership, hence to himself personally. Rohm, on the other hand, was still clinging to the idea of an underground auxiliary army that would enable the Reichswehr to evade the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. He even thought of making the SA completely independent of the party and turning it into a subordinate unit of his Frontbann.
Fundamentally, this was a renewal of the old dispute over the SA’s function and command status. In contrast to the slower-minded Rohm, Hitler had in the interval acquired new insights and resentments. He had not forgiven Lossow and the officers of his staff for their betrayal on November 8 and 9. But at the same time he had learned from the events of that night that the majority of army officers were morally fettered by their oath and their respect for legality.
During the first half of April the quarrel erupted into the open. Rohm had a strong sentimental attachment to Hitler; he was forthright, easygoing, and as doggedly faithful to his friends as he was to his views. Presumably Hitler had not forgotten all he had owed to Rohm since the beginnings of his political career. But he also realized that times had changed. This once-influential person who in the past could be counted on to round up money, machine guns or members at the drop of a hat, had by now turned into a stubborn, difficult friend awkward to fit into the more solid establishment Hitler was trying to create.
Nevertheless, for some time Hitler said neither yes nor no to Rohm’s urging. But at last he decided to take a stand. During a conversation in mid-April Rohm once more demanded strict separation between the National Socialist Party and the SA. Moreover, he wanted to lead his units as a nonpolitical private army that would be above all partisan strife and the issues of the day. A heated quarrel ensued. Hitler was particularly incensed, because Rohm’s idea would once again degrade him to the “drummer” of the movement. What is more, it would return him to the subordinate role forced on him in the summer of 1923, that of adjunct to aims set by others. Full of hurt feelings, he charged Rohm with betraying their friendship. Rohm thereupon cut the conversation short. The following day he formally resigned in writing his leadership of the SA. Hitler did not answer. At the end of April, after Rohm had also resigned the leadership of the Frontbann, he wrote Hitler once again, closing his letter on the significant note: “I take this opportunity, in memory of the great and the trying times we have been through together, to thank you warmly for your comradeship and to ask you not to deprive me of your personal friendship.” But that, too, was not answered. The following day, when he sent a note on his resignation to the nationalist newspapers, the
During this same period an event occurred that showed Hitler how bleak his prospects had become and how wise he had been to separate his political fortunes from those of Ludendorff, though his reasons for the break had been largely personal. At the end of February, 1925, Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democratic President of Germany, died. The nationalist-racist groups put up Ludendorff, while the candidate of the bourgeois rightist parties was a competent but totally unknown person named Dr. Jarres. Despite his fame, the general suffered an annihilating defeat, receiving little more than 1 per cent of the national vote. Hitler noted the result with a measure of grim satisfaction.
A few days after the election, Dr. Pohner, the only trustworthy and important associate Hitler had left, was killed in an accident. Hitler truly seemed to have reached the end of his political career. In Munich the party had no more than 700 members left. Anton Drexler seceded and despondently founded a party more congenial to his quieter tendencies. But Hitler’s bullies made a point of tracking down their erstwhile comrades and beating them up. In this way they smashed the rival enterprise. Other kindred groups suffered a similar fate. Quite often Hitler himself, leather whip in hand, stormed the meetings. Since he was not allowed to speak, he showed himself to the crowds from the platform, merely smiling and waving. Before the second round in the elections for the presidency, he called upon his followers to vote for Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who had meanwhile been nominated. Some writers have seen this choice as a farsighted political speculation. But he really had no ground for such speculation, as things stood; moreover, the few votes he controlled could not change anything. It was important, however, that he was ostentatiously aligning himself with the parties of order and that he was moving closer to the man of legend, the secret “ersatz kaiser” who had or some day would have a key to virtually all the powerful institutions in the country.
The continuing setbacks inevitably sapped Hitler’s position within the party. In Thuringia, Saxony, and Wurttemberg he had to fight for his challenged leadership; in North Germany Gregor Strasser went on building up the party. Strasser was forever on the move. He spent most of his nights on trains or in waiting rooms; by day he visited followers, founded branches, saw functionaries, conferred, or appeared at meetings. During 1925 and 1926 he appeared as principal speaker at nearly one hundred meetings, while Hitler was condemned to silence. This
