Hitler

the grave danger that the Soviet campaign against European civilization might reach into Germany.⁸

The Nazi party’s victory was to a large extent due to its mobilization of the youth and of the nonpolitical elements who ordinarily did not go to the polls. Compared with 1928 the votes cast had increased by more than 4.5 million, to 80.2 per cent of the electorate. The Communists, too, had picked up votes—though considerably fewer—from among the same group; remarkably enough, they had waged their campaign with outspokenly nationalistic slogans. The Nazis were so little ready for their sweep that they had not even put up the required 107 candidates and did not have people immediately available. Hitler himself had not run for office since he still did not hold German citizenship.

The results of this election have often been described as a landslide; its consequences were in fact even more fateful. In the consternation of election night wild rumors arose of Nazi plans for a putsch; the result was massive withdrawal of foreign funds from Germany, which worsened the already catastrophic credit crisis. All at once, everyone was interested in this new party. The adventurers, the fearful, and the opportunists made a quick adjustment to the new situation. This was especially true of the horde of eternally alert journalists who now hastily attempted to ride “the wave of the future,” and by their extensive reporting made up for the traditional weakness of the Nazi press. In many quarters it became chic to join the Nazi party. In the spring one of the Kaiser’s sons, Prince August Wilhelm (“Auwi”), had become a member, remarking that where a Hitler led anyone could find a place. Now came Hjalmar Schacht, then president of the German Federal Bank (Reichsbank), one of the co- authors of the Young Plan which the Nazis had so viciously attacked. Many others followed. “Nobody likes being a failed politician,” Hitler sneered as he watched the flurry. During the two and a half months to the end of the year the membership of the NSDAP rose by almost 100,000, to 389,000. Special interest groups also tried to adjust to the shift in power and to the obvious trend. “Almost automatically the NSDAP now acquired those cross- connections and positions necessary for the further extension and consolidation of the ‘movement.’ ”

“Once the great masses swing over to us shouting hurrah, we are lost,” Hitler had declared two years earlier, at the 1928 meeting of the leaders in Munich. And Goebbels now spoke contemptuously of the “September-lings.” Often, he remarked, he thought back “with nostalgia to the good old days when we were only a small sect throughout the Reich, and National Socialism in the capital had hardly a baker’s dozen followers.”

What worried them was that the unprincipled masses would swamp the party and corrupt its revolutionary will, only to desert it again at the first setbacks, like the unforgotten “inflation recruits” of 1923. “We must not allow ourselves to be weighted down with the corpses of a ruined bourgeoisie,” a memorandum stated five days after the election. But contrary to such fears, the party had little trouble bringing the new members—as Gregor Strasser wrote—“into the great pot of the National Socialist idea” and melting them down. While the adversaries of the movement were still looking for soothing explanations, the party continued its tempestuous advance. Faithful to his maxim that the best time to attack is right after the victory, Hitler staged a wave of party actions after September 14 and garnered new successes for the party. In the Bremen mayoralty election of November 30 the party’s percentage of the vote was almost double what it had been in the recent Reichstag election. It won more than 25 per cent of the seats in the city council; all the other parties suffered losses. The results were similar in Danzig, Baden, and Mecklenburg. In the intoxication of such triumphs Hitler at times seemed to believe that the regime could now be “voted to death,” without any external aid.

On October 13 the session of the Reichstag began amidst tumultuous scenes. In protest against the persisting Prussian ban on uniforms, the Nazi party deputies had marched through the Reichstag building and entered the chamber in brown shirts, howling and making unmistakable gestures of protest. In a passionate speech Gregor Strasser declared war on “the system of shamelessness, corruption and crime.” His party would not cringe from even the ultimate step of civil war, he announced; the Reichstag was not going to frustrate the party’s goals. The people were the decisive factor and the people were on his party’s side: Outside, meanwhile, brawls with the Communists were being staged, as well as the first pogrom—organized by Goebbels—against Jewish businesses and passers-by. Questioned on this matter, Hitler replied that the excesses were the work of rowdies, looters, and Communist provocateurs. The Volkische Beobachter proclaimed that in the Third Reich the windows of Jewish stores would be better protected than they were now under the reign of the Marxist police. Simultaneously, more than 100,000 metal workers went on strike, supported by both the Communists and the Nazis. Civil order was visibly disintegrating.

Hitler himself appeared not to waver for a moment in his tactical conduct. What he had learned back in 1923 and not forgotten was that even the shakiest system remained impervious to attacks by street mobs. There were plenty of romantic hotheads in the party who could not imagine a revolution without powder smoke and who immediately after the triumph of September 14 began to rant about marching on Berlin and waging the final struggle. Hitler, however, would not be budged from his policy of legality, although he made no secret of his reasons for it: “We are not in principle a parliamentary party,” he declared in Munich, “for that would be a contradiction of our whole outlook; we are a parliamentary party by compulsion, and that compulsion is the Constitution…. The victory we have just won is nothing but the winning of a new weapon for our struggle.” Goring stated the matter even more cynically: “We are fighting against this State and the present system because we wish to destroy it utterly, but in a legal manner. Before we had the Law for the Protection of the Republie, we said we hated this State; under this law, we say we love it—and still everyone knows what we mean.”⁹

Hitler’s caution was partly guided by the one eye he kept cocked in the direction of the army. It was on the Reichwehr’s account, he later admitted, that he had renounced the idea of a coup d’etat. For the more patently public order was disintegrating, the more decisive the power and influence of the Reichswehr became. The 1923 putsch, and the subsequent ban on contact between the army and the newly founded SA, had considerably clouded mutual relationships. As early as March, 1929, however, Hitler had made tentative overtures to the representatives of the state’s armed might. In a pointed speech he had questioned the concept of the “unpolitical soldier,” formulated by General von Seeckt. He drew a picture of a leftist victory, after which the army officers would find themselves serving as “executioners and political commissars.” Then he contrasted this dreadful prospect with the radiant aims of his own movement, concerned as it was for the greatness and the military honor of the nation. The speech was a piece of skillful psychology and impressed in particular the younger members of the officer corps.

A few days after the September election three officers of the army garrison at Ulm were placed on trial at the federal high court in Leipzig. They were charged with violating a decree of the Reich Defense Ministry by establishing connections with the NSDAP and proselytizing for the Nazis inside the Reichswehr. At the request of his lawyer, Hans Frank, Hitler was invited to testify. The sensational trial gave him an opportunity for publicly wooing the army and a platform for presenting his political aims effectively. On the third day of the trial, September 25, 1930, Hitler stepped forward to testify with the self-assurance of a recently victorious party leader, confident more than ever of ultimate victory.

Under cross-examination he explained that his convictions were a response to three challenges: the peril of foreign racial influences, or internationalism; the devaluation of personality and the rise of the democratic idea; and the poisoning of the German people with the spirit of pacifism. In 1918, he said, he had entered public life in order to oppose to these disturbing tendencies a party of fanatical Germanism, of absolute authority for the leader, and of uncompromising struggle. But he was by no means an antagonist of the armed power of the state. Whoever sowed sedition in the army was an enemy of the people; the SA was not intended to attack the state or to compete with the army.

He was then questioned about his position on legality and boldly assured the court that the National Socialist Party had no need of violence: “Another two or three elections and the National Socialist movement will have the majority in the Reichstag, and then we will make the national revolution.” Asked what he meant by that, Hitler replied:

The concept of National Revolution has generally been considered in terms of purely domestic politics, but to National Socialists it means simply a German patriotic uprising. Germany was tied hand and foot by the peace treaties. All German legislation today is nothing but an attempt to impose the terms of the peace treaties on the German people. The National Socialists regard these treaties not as binding law, but as something forced upon us. We do not acknowledge our war guilt, nor will we burden future generations who are entirely guiltless with these fictitious debts. We will proceed against these treaties both on the diplomatic front and by circumventing every one