internal party organization. He aimed at a coherent, centralized command structure under a single charismatic leader. The hierarchic chain of authority, the strict tone with which all orders and instructions came down from the top, and the growing practice of wearing uniforms underlined the paramilitary character of a party whose leadership had been molded by the war. That leadership, as Goebbels once phrased it, had to be ready to obey “the slightest pressure with all its limbs at the decisive moment.” The restrictions and governmental controls to which the party was subject merely furthered these aims—as in general the awareness of the outside world’s hostility tautened the apparatus and furthered Hitler’s drive for total leadership. It was easy now for Munich headquarters to impose its will on even the lowest branches of the party. In the first editions of
Along with the party organization there now grew up a full-fledged bureaucracy, divided into numerous departments. The Nazi party was rapidly sloughing off its small-town club aspect—which it had retained even during its stormy early phase as a putschist party. Though Hitler’s personal life and working habits were anything but organized, he was childishly proud of the triple registration system for party members and reported with fervor on the acquisition of modern office equipment, filing cabinets, and the like. In place of the primitive master- sergeant bureaucracy of the early years, an extensive network of new bureaus and subdivisions was established; in one year, 1926, the space in the Munich central party office was expanded three times. Before long, this apparatus surpassed even the fabulous bureaucracy of the Social Democratic Party. Its size was altogether disproportionate to the small number of the NSDAP’s membership, which increased quite slowly. For Hitler himself seemed to want to build up the party in the form of a small, tough kernel of specialists in propaganda and violence. He repeatedly stressed that an organization of 10 million people was necessarily peaceable and could not be set in motion of its own accord; only fanatical minorities would be able, to move it. Of the 55,000 members the party had had in 1923, it had won back only half by the end of 1925. A year later the membership amounted to somewhat more than 108,000. But the seemingly swollen bureaucracy would be useful for the future mass party in which Hitler continued to believe with absolute confidence. What is more, the great number of party offices provided him with varied possibilities for patronage and for dividing the power of others, thus extending and securing his own.
To this period belong the first efforts toward formation of a shadow government. Soon Gregor Strasser, who had been appointed Reich organization leader, took charge of this operation and pushed it vigorously. In
From 1926 on, moreover, a host of auxiliary party organizations were set up: National Socialist Leagues of doctors, lawyers, students, teachers, and civil servants. Even gardening and poultry raising had their place in the network of bureaus and subdivisions. In 1927 the creation of a women’s SA was briefly considered but then rejected. The following year, however, the Red Swastika, which later became the Nazi women’s organization, was formed to receive the growing hordes of sharply politicized women and assign them a place—largely limited to practical works of mercy—in the men’s party, which at this time was still heavily homosexual.
Later, in a secret statement made in 1940, Goebbels boasted that when Nazism came to power in 1933, “it had only to transfer its organization, its intellectual and spiritual principles, to the State,” for it had already been “a state within the State,” which had “prepared everything and considered everything.” That was a gross exaggeration. Nevertheless, it is true that the Nazi party was better prepared for its claim to power than any other totalitarian party. The Reichsleiters and the gauleiters put on the airs of cabinet ministers long before 1933. On public occasions the SA usurped the functions of the police without asking anyone’s leave. Quite often, Hitler, as leader of the “opposition government” contrived to be represented by a personal observer at international conferences. The same polemical principle underlay the wide display of the party symbols. The swastika was represented as the insignia of the true, honorable Germany. The Horst Wessel song became the anthem of the shadow government, while brown shirts, medals, and badges, as well as the party’s memorial days, promoted a sense of togetherness in those irreconcilably opposed to the existing government.
In spite of its mania for bureaucracy, the National Socialist government was highly personal. At crucial moments, administrative rulings and bureaucratic channels had little bearing; subjective factors decided the issue. Positions within the party hierarchy were defined less by actual rank than by the signs of favor the holders enjoyed. Similarly, all standards were subject to arbitrary change, at the mercy of whim. High above all else stood the “will of the Fuhrer”—the basic fact of the constitution, supreme and unassailable. He impulsively followed his inspirations. He installed and dismissed the party’s lesser leaders and employees, determined candidatures and electoral lists, regulated the income of underlings and even supervised their private lives.
In principle, there were no restrictions whatsoever upon the absolute power of the Fuhrer. Early in 1928 Albert Krebs, gauleiter of Hamburg, having had differences with others in the district, submitted his resignation. Hitler initially refused to accept the resignation. In a magnificently circumstantial report he made the point that the confidence of the membership could neither grant nor rescind positions of power within the party. These depended solely on the confidence of the Fuhrer. He alone praised merit, reproved failure, mediated, thanked, or forgave. Only after this elaborate exposition did Hitler accept the resignation of Krebs.
By such means Hitler’s personality increasingly dominated and determined the structures of the party. In fact, the bureaucracy itself mirrored aspects of his personal history. The bureaucratic passion that expressed itself in the proliferation of departments, the craze for titles, and the meaningless departmental functions hearkened back to the complicated officialdom of Imperial Austria, to which Hitler’s father, albeit humbly, belonged. The prevalence of arbitrary subjectivity pointed to Hitler’s past in the lawless and freebooting veterans’ associations. The megalomaniac tendencies of his youth came to the surface again in the fantastically exaggerated scale of the bureaucracy. So did his craving for inflated display; he invented high-sounding labels for offices that scarcely existed except in his imagination.
Yet this shadow government and swollen party bureaucracy were a form of impatient snatching at the future, efforts to anticipate reality. Endless meetings were held. In 1925 alone, according to a count of Hitler’s, the party could boast of almost 2,400 demonstrations. But the public showed only sluggish interest. All the noise, the brawls, the battle for headlines yielded only meager results. During those years of the Weimar Republic’s gradual consolidation, when in Goebbels’s phrase the Nazi party could not claim even its opponents’ hatred, Hitler himself sometimes seemed to doubt ultimate success. At such times he would escape from reality into one of his grand, breathtaking prospects and transfer his faith to the distant future: “Perhaps another twenty or a hundred years may pass before our idea is victorious. Those who believe in the idea today may die—what does any one person amount to in the evolution of the race, of humanity?” In different moods he saw himself leading the great war of the future. Sitting before a plate of pastries in the Cafe Heck he said to Captain Stennes in a loud voice: “And then, Stennes, after we have won the victory, we’ll build a Victory Boulevard, from Doberitz to the Brandenburg Gate, sixty meters wide, lined on the right and the left by trophies and war booty.”34
The central office, however, complained that some thirty local party groups (there were about 200) had failed to order posters for the August, 1927, party rally, and generally deplored the difficulties it encountered in organizing mass meetings. This contributed to Hitler’s decision to hold the 1927 annual party rally for the first time against the backdrop of the ancient imperial city of Nuremberg, where, as in Bamberg, Julius Streicher provided a further attraction. By now Hitler’s staging had improved immensely; his touch could be felt in all the proceedings that dramatized with such eclat the movement’s coherence and belligerency. After it, one of his followers called him a “wizard in leadership of the masses.” With benefit of hindsight we can in fact see in this rally first elements of what later developed into a pompous ritual. The storm troopers and the party units from all the regions of Germany arrived in special trains, with their flags, pennants, and bands. Included, too, were many delegations
