Hitler

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 Weltbuhne 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 Oberfuhrer 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 Rohm, 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-Fuhrer (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

Perhaps even more illuminating than these remarks was the reaction to them. There was no sign of astonishment or demur among the party journalists. Here is proof of the effectiveness of Hitler’s policy of subjugating the entire internal life of the Nazi party to himself personally. Many circumstances had aided him. The movement had always viewed itself as a militant community founded upon charismatic leadership and the discipline of faith. This was the source of the dynamic confidence so lacking in the traditional parties with their interests and programs. In addition Hitler had been able to count on the background and experience of the “Old Fighters.” Almost all of them had taken part in the World War. They had grown to manhood in a climate of strict orders and obedience. Many of them, moreover, came from homes whose pedagogical patterns were based on the rigid mores of the cadet schools. Altogether, Hitler profited greatly from the peculiarities of an authoritarian educational system. It is surely more than a matter of chance that of his seventy-three gauleiters, no fewer than twenty were drawn from the teaching profession.

Once the two intraparty crises of the summer of 1930 had been mastered with relative ease, there no longer existed any office or authority within the Nazi party that did not emanate directly from Hitler. However slight a danger Otto Strasser, Stennes, or Pfeffer may have been—their names stood for at least a theoretical alternative which set certain limits to any claim to absolute power. Now the South German SA commander August Schneidhuber issued a memorandum giving full credit for the growing might of the movement not to any of its functionaries but entirely to Hitler. With busy propagandists singing his praises in more and more transcendental terms, “der Fuhrer” was on his way to becoming a legendary figure, immune from all criticism, standing far above any intraparty voting procedures. One observer commented that the party press at this time contained nothing but deifications of Hitler and attacks on the Jews.

Still, the complaint arose that Hitler was putting himself at too great a remove from his followers. The loyal Schneidhuber described the sense of desertion that filled “almost every SA man.” He wrote: “The SA is struggling with the Fuhrer for his soul and does not yet have it. But it must have it.” He spoke of the “clamor for the Fuhrer,” which remained unanswered.

It was at this period, and not by chance, that the greeting “Heil Hitler” became generally established. (It had cropped up occasionally before and had been deliberately introduced into Berlin