From day one Hitler was the party’s most active and authentic leader, delivering speeches at crowded meetings, some in rural areas, and various panel discussions. His central concern at this stage was to attract public attention. “Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?” Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf describing his mind in the initial years, “the point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.” The police and military bosses on their part were quite appreciative of the “beneficial patriotic effect” of the NSDAP activities.

The NSDAP leader was always absolutely focused on his own political agenda. In January 1923, French and Belgian troops entered the Ruhr Valley, the country’s industrial hub, for exacting delayed reparation payments as decided in the Versailles Treaty. A huge protest arose across the country, united demonstrations against the intruders were organised, but the militant nationalist party led by Hitler – much to the surprise of others -- stayed away. It tried to redirect the general hostility at the enemies within -- the “November criminals.” By “stabbing the army in the back,” Hitler said in a public meeting, political leaders at the end of the First World War had left Germany defenceless and exposed to “total enslavement.” He was alluding to the leaders who signed the Versailles Treaty and those responsible for the foundation of the Weimar Republic. The task, he insisted, was to see that those criminals (social democrats and communists in the main) were punished and a new and strong Germany was built up. So, he argued, the “babble about a united front” would only distract the German people from their main task.

But in hot pursuance of this “main task”, and emboldened by the indulgence shown him by the Bavarian police and the Central military leadership, Hitler committed a couple of costly mistakes.

Punished for Adventurism and Putschism

Hitler felt that the situation was rapidly hotting up and mere propaganda was not enough. So he ventured into a direct clash with his most organised political enemy number one – the working class parties – on the occasion of May Day. He tactfully demanded that the Bavarian government must ban the traditional May Day celebrations because it was also the anniversary of Munich’s conservative “liberation” from the revolutionary councils set up in 1919. Predictably, the government refused to take this harsh, provocative step. Hitler then decided to stop the May Day parade himself. On his call, some 2000 armed freikorps (armed paramilitaries) assembled to forcibly block the parade. Hitler himself, in full military attire complete with the steel helmet and the Iron Cross, was proudly in command. But the authorities this time decided that the upstart should not be allowed to take them for granted andthe  army was called in. While some hotheads among his followers were willing to fight, Hitler backed away from a hopeless armed confrontation with the state rather than risking his entire political career. In the meantime, the massive May Day celebrations had ended peacefully.

The fiasco meant a huge loss of prestige for Hitler. His comrades and followers, particularly members of the SA (the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, also known as the Stormtroopers or Brownshirts), were highly disappointed. Many political observers felt the Nazis were on the wane. But the objective situation was developing in their favour. Since the summer of 1920, inflation was going through the ceiling and in August the incumbent Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno had to step down in the face of strikes and demonstrations, mainly organised by the SPD-led trade unions. Speculation of a right-wing coup d’etat was rife and there were  wild expectations in  broad right-wing circles that the brightest young leader would come up with some drastic action – like Mussolini’s “March on Rome” just a year earlier – to oust the liberal-left federal government and install a hard-core right-nationalist one.

This latter goal was cherished by other rightist forces as well, including the “triumvirate” virtually ruling Bavaria in intense animosity with the Republican government in Berlin -- Kahr (state commissar of Bavaria), Lossow (head of Reichswehr troops in Bavaria) and Seisser (head of the Bavarian police). Hitler publicly demanded that the Bavarian rulers must take immediate action: “It’s high time. Economic misery is so pushing our people that we have to act or risk our supporters going over to the Communists.” He thus tried to force their hands, but they kept dilly-dallying. The Nazi leader then plunged into his second adventurist act of the year.

The Abortive Beer Hall Putsch

Crowd outside Rathaus
Crowd outside Rathaus during Beer hall Putsch - US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Kahr had called a meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller (one of the largest beer halls in Munich) on 8 November inviting all ministers, officials and political VVIPs. Hitler reckoned that if his supporters succeeded in seizing the Bürgerbräukeller, they would have a unique opportunity to bring the entire political class of Munich under their control. The plan was to leave the triumvirate with no other option but to rebel against Berlin (the Berlin-Munich acrimony was already very intense in any case) by presenting them with a fait accompli.

With truckloads of armed SA men on guard and accompanied by his elite bodyguards, Hitler stormed into the beer hall, fired a shot to quiet the crowd, and proclaimed excitably: “National revolution is under way. The hall is under the control of 600 heavily armed men. No one is allowed to leave. If things don’t immediately quieten down, I will have a machine gun posted on the gallery. The Bavarian government has been deposed. The Reich government has been deposed. A provisional government has been formed.”

Hitler then asked Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, at gun-point, to accompany him into an adjoining room, guaranteeing their safety. There he both threatened and apologized to them, exacted their word of honour, and then came back to the hall. Everybody was angry and disgusted. But, in a short speech Hitler completely turned the mood in the beer hall around.

Hitler then persuaded the triumvirate to return with him to the hall to publicly seal the agreement. Before the crowd dispersed, an SA commando arrested all the members of the cabinet in the audience. Hitler left Kahr, Lossow and Seisser under ex-General Ludendorff’s supervision and went out to help the uprising in other parts of the city. But the General allowed the triumvirate to leave the beer hall with only a promise that they would stick to the agreement. The latter, once freed, took all necessary initiatives to put down the uprising. The putsch failed. Hitler and his associates were arrested.

But the failed putsch made Hitler a hero for large sections of people who were fed up with the ruling cliques in Munich and Berlin. There were spontaneous demonstrations against the triumvirate – who were now called “clique of traitors” — in Munich and other Bavarian cities. Students in particular tended to sympathise with Hitler and his co-conspirators. At a mass event at the University of Munich on 12 November, speakers were repeatedly interrupted by cries of “Up with Hitler, down with Kahr.” As the university dean called upon those present to sing the German national anthem, the audience sang the freikorps song “Swastika on a Steel Helmet” instead.

Imprisonment and the Second Innings

At the trial Hitler and other leaders of the putsch were found guilty of the “crime of high treason” which carried a minimum sentence of five years’ imprisonment; however, the court declared that the sentences could be suspended for good behaviour after just six months. The court also ruled that Hitler, who “is so German in his thinking and feeling,” was exempt from possible deportation to Austria. The sentences were scandalously mild and the ruling came in for sharp criticism. “Judicial murder has been carried out against the republic in Munich,” wrote the left-wing journal Die Weltbühne. In fact, the court’s verdict praised the defendants as “having acted in a purely patriotic spirit, led by the most noble, selfless will.”

The prison term came as a boon in disguise. As Hitler recollected later, while in prison he “became convinced that violence would not work, since the state is too established and has all the weapons in its possession.” He also claimed that he achieved conceptual clarity about things “he had largely intuited” before and that helped him write the first volume of Mein Kampf. It had been stupid of the government, Hitler commented, to imprison him: “They would have been better off letting me speak and speak again and never find my peace of mind.”

Enamoured of what they saw as the Nazis leader’s heroic nationalism, the Supreme Court of Bavaria cut short the five-year jail term to just one year. Released in late December 1924, he reconstituted the NSDAP to further concentrate all decision-making authority in his own hands. He also resisted a proposal to shift the party headquarters to Berlin because he felt that, being his personal power base, Munich must remain the seat of the party. For public consumption, of course, he argued that Munich, after all, was the birthplace of Nazism “Rome, Mecca, Moscow —every one of these places embodies a world view!” he proclaimed. “We shall remain in the city that saw the first party comrades shed their blood for our movement. It must become the Moscow of our movement!”

Out of prison, Hitler found the situation much less conducive to his kind of politics. From 1925, following the stabilisation of the currency, the German economy recovered quickly. Industrial production, employment, and even real wages in some cases went up. Germany was ceremoniously inducted into the League of Nations and the Weimar Republic was on stronger grounds. The NSDAP’s political activism waned compared to the early 1920s and membership was growing very slowly. Hitler appealed to the Bavarian government to lift the ban on his party, and in view of its shrunken profile and also the goodwill he personally commanded among the public, the authorities relented. “The beast is tamed”, BVP leader and “Minister President” (a position comparable to the Prime Minister) Heinrich Held is said to have remarked, “now we can loosen the shackles”. But Hitler’s first post-imprisonment speech was so inflammatory (“either the enemy will march over our dead bodies”, he fumed, “or we will march over his”) that the government banned him from speaking in public. After about two years, with the party’s popularity waning, even this ban was lifted.

The party fared poorly in the May 1928 Reichstag elections, polling only 2.6 per cent, slightly less than their last election results in December 1924.  The SPD came to power, with Hermann Müller as chancellor, at the head of a so-called “Great Coalition” that included four bourgeois parties: the Centre Party, the BVP, the DDP and the DVP.

Great Depression - Nazi Graph Rises Again

The economic recovery in Germany petered out by late 1928 and next year the worldwide Great Depression brought the country back to severe crisis. In February 1929, the number of people registered as unemployed once more crossed the three-million mark. Prices for agricultural produce were falling. In north Germany, farmers staged demonstrations under black flags. A radical group led by a farmer named Claus Heim even carried out bomb attacks against local tax and government offices. The popularity of the NSDAP was growing rapidly in rural as well as urban areas. The Nazis also achieved spectacular results in the elections to Germany’s student parliaments in 1928 and 1929. In November 1928, Hitler spoke to an audience of 2,500 Munich University students in the Löwenbräukeller and was greeted with rapturous applause.

Thuringia: the Nazi Gujarat?

In Landtag elections in December 1929, the NSDAP got six seats and 11.3 per cent of votes in Thuringia. The conservative and liberal parties wanted to govern without the SPD, but then they needed the support of the National Socialists. Hitler decided that the party would join a governing coalition, but only if it were given two key ministries, those of the interior and of culture and popular education. “He who possesses these two ministries, and uses his power within them unscrupulously and with determination, can achieve the extraordinary,” Hitler wrote in a confidential letter on 2 February. The Interior Ministry gave the NSDAP oversight of the state police force; the Culture Ministry put the party in charge of the entire Thuringian school and educational system. Hitler was not interested in participating in government per se: he was aiming to take over the executive branch from the inside. As his candidate for both ministerial posts, Hitler put forward Wilhelm Frick, his comrade from the Beer Hall Putsch. The DVP initially demanded some other name, but Hitler insisted “that either Dr. Frick would be our minister or there would be fresh elections”. The centre-right parties, aware that new elections would further strengthen the NSDAP’s position, gave in to Hitler’s ultimatum.

During his fourteen-month term in office, even the one-man Nazi army in the coalition government amply demonstrated, in miniature, what a future Nazi rule at national level might look like.  Experienced and efficient civil servants suspected of sympathising with the SPD were fired and replaced with Nazi stooges. Prayers were made mandatory in schools in order, as Frick told the Landtag, to “prevent the people being swindled by Marxism and the Jews.” The University of Jena was given a chair in racial sciences, which was filled by the notorious anti-Semite Hans F.K. Güntherar overruling the vote of the professoriate. The new director of the Weimar Academy of Art and Architecture, the National Socialist true believer Paul Schultze-Naumburg, removed modernist works of art from the city’s Royal Museum. Frick forbade the playing of “Nigger Jazz” (an abusive term for extremely popular jazz music with roots in African-American culture) in pubs and forced Nazi-flavoured prayers in schools. He infiltrated the police department, including the post of police president in Weimar, with Nazi members. In the face of mounting criticism, Frick was ousted on 1 April 1931 by a vote of no confidence in the Landtag.

In a situation like this, the two radical parties at two poles of the political spectrum – the Communists and the Nazis – grew swiftly at the cost of the middle-roaders.

An interesting experience was gained in the State of Thuringia, which would serve as a laboratory for Nazi rule a couple of years before the party came to rule the whole of the country. (See sidebar) Then in March 1930 the SPD Ministry headed by Muller collapsed. In the September elections to the Reichstag, SPD votes tumbled by six percent while the KPD vote share rose by 40 percent compared to May 1928. However, in absolute terms the KPD’s rise did not compensate for the SPD’s loss. So their combined vote share went down, while the Nazi vote share rose by a whopping 700 percent – pushing the NSDAP from the ninth to the second position in the Reichstag.

In utilizing the excellent revolutionary situation, in this case the fascists thus beat the militant left by a long margin. But this was not a general pattern: only two years later, in November 1932, the Nazi vote share would decline compared to July that year, while that of the KPD would rise. In any case, the major contention remained between the far right and the revolutionary left.

The astounding success had three major political fallouts. For one, in a bid to block the Nazis in parliament, the SPD lent support to the minority government led by Centre Party leader Heinrich Brüning, which had just replaced their own government. This enabled the Brüning government to continue in office for another two years – a period of bad governance that proved to be only a pathway for Hitler’s ascendance to power.

Second, the capitalists learned to see the NSDAP as a real claimant to power and began to contribute somewhat freely to its coffers. To facilitate this, Hitler met former chancellor Wilhelm Cuno, the chairman of the Hamburg-America ocean line HAPAG, in the election month itself. He tried to assure Cuno, and through him other business magnates, that the NSDAP would support entrepreneurial initiative and private capital, and only intervene in cases of illicitly acquired wealth. Still the industrialists remained somewhat suspicious about the party’s economic program and their doubts grew stronger the very next month (October 1930) when the NSDAP moved a number of parliamentary motions that were not only anti-Jewish but also against finance capital – such as nationalisation of large banks, restricting interest rates at 5 percent and banning the trading of securities (share market operations).

These motions showed that the NSDAP chairman did not want to alienate the ‘socialist’ wing of the party even as he tried to allay the fears of the capitalists. Referring to the political influence of the latter, he told Otto Wagener, a close confidante who saw such overtures to the capitalists as useless if not harmful, “I have the feeling that we won’t be able to conquer [the Chancellor’s office in] Wilhelmstrasse over their heads.”

Legalism as a Subterfuge

Third and most important, with a veritable membership explosion in both the party (from nearly 3, 89,000 at the end of 1930 to approximately 8,06,000 a year later) and the SA (from 77,000 in January 1931 to 2,90,000 in in January 1932 to 4,45,000 by August 19 1932), the question of “what next” became the hottest talking point in the Nazi fraternity. State power seemed to be in striking distance, and the SA men in particular were restless for action – for a coup to be precise. But Hitler was not prepared to risk another term of imprisonment and a ban on the party, or even a ban on his public appearance, all of which had proved so detrimental to the party’s growth only recently. He warned SA men to be on guard against “spies and provocateurs” trying to tempt them into breaking the law: “Our legality will smash and deflect all measures taken by those currently in possession of state power.” At a meeting of the Munich SA brigade in early March 1931, he had to defend himself against the charge that he was “too cowardly” to fight with illegal means. He did not want to send them out to be cut down by machine guns, Hitler said, because he would need them for more important tasks, namely constructing the Third Reich.

Hitler had good reasons to believe that the SA and perhaps the NSDAP as a whole could be banned in the event of an adventurist step. An emergency decree issued by the President implied that very clearly. So on 30 March he ordered that anyone violating the decree would be summarily expelled from the party. He actually had to fire Walter Stennes, head of the Berlin chapter of the SA, for refusing to provide security to party events and for excessive anarchic activities. Stennes and his supporters staged a revolt in Berlin, but it did not spread to other cities and collapsed in a few days.[1]

This episode, however, did not stop Count Wolf-Heinrich Von Helldorf, the next head of the Berlin SA, fromleading some 500 armed men in vandalising Jewish shops and brutalising people they thought to be Jewish on 12 September 1931, the Jewish New Year’s day. “Germany Awaken, Judah must die”, they shouted. Some of the rioters, including the gang leaders, were tried but let off with minor sentences. Hitler’s response, as expressed within the party, was that the SA leaders must not get provoked; they must understand that “the legal path is the only secure one at the moment.” At the same time he suggested that in large cities, the SA faced the necessity “of undertaking something to satisfy the revolutionary mood of the people.” The party would have to publicly distance itself from the SA leaders who had been involved, but he assured his henchmen: “You can be certain that the party will not forget their services and will restore them to their posts as soon as the time is ripe.”

Vagaries of Electoral Politics

In 1932 the NASDAP contested several major elections, with the performance card showing sharp ups and downs. The first was the presidential elections in March, where Hitler was the main contender against Hindenburg. In an effort to project himself as a future head of government, he accepted an invitation to address the prestigious Industrial Club of Dusseldorf representing, among others, the Ruhr Valley tycoons. As was his wont on such occasions, he avoided openly anti-Semitic comments. But for conquering a “living space in Russia”, he promised, a revitalised Germany under his leadership would live in “peace and friendship” with its neighbours. But the lacklustre speech failed to cut much ice. Top industrialists like Krupp and Duisberg came out in support of Hindenburg and Hitler’s party received comparatively much less in donations.

Belying wild expectations among Nazis including Hitler himself, the incumbent president got 18 million votes compared to Hitler’s 11 million. Nazi ranks and supporters were so demoralised that in many places the swastika flags were flown at half-mast.

A run-off election was announced for April 10 because Hindenburg just stopped short of majority vote share. More resolute after the defeat, Hitler embarked on his first “flying tour of Germany,” one of the first such initiatives in history. The slogan “Hitler over Germany,” which party newspapers published in screaming headlines, suggested not only that Hitler was omnipresent: it also symbolised his claim to be above classes and parties and anticipated the coming “ethnic community.” And the fact that Hitler never cancelled an event, even when the weather made flying risky, solidified the myth that he was a “national saviour” willing to sacrifice himself and unafraid of any danger. Hindenburg was re-elected, but Hitler gained around 2 million additional votes. However this was partly due to the withdrawal of one nationalist candidate in favour of Hitler.

In late April elections were held to Landtags in Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg and Anhalt along with civic body polls in Hamburg. Everywhere the NSDAP performed brilliantly. For example in Prussia, the largest and most important state in Germany, they became the largest party with 36.3 percent vote share, up from 1.8 percent in 1928. But except for Anhalt, the party could not convert this strength into positions of government because it refused to form or join any coalition. It was a peculiar situation indeed. Amidst all the euphoria over the NSDAP’s “phenomenal victory,” Goebbels noted in his diary: “What now? Something has to happen. We have to gain power. Otherwise we will triumph ourselves to death.”

Blows on Parliamentary Democracy

Meanwhile, a way out of this imbroglio seemed to be opening up for the Nazis thanks to a political rift between the centrist chancellor and the hard-core right nationalist president. The latter had the impression that Brüning was taking stern action against the SA rioters (he even persuaded the president to issue an emergency decree dissolving Nazi paramilitary units) but remained blind to “the communist menace”. So he expressed his “urgent wish” to the chancellor that “the Cabinet should be reformed and moved to the right”. The latter, himself largely responsible for undermining parliamentary democracy by considerably distancing the Reichstag from political decision-making and thus bolstering the powers of the president and the military top brass vis-a-vis the Parliament, had to bow down to this autocratic diktat and resigned at the end of May. Franz Von Papen became the new Chancellor.

dimitrov“ … before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory.”

Georgi Dimitrov
Political report to the Seventh World Congress,
The Communist International, August 1935

The banning of the SA did not go down well with many in the government, who viewed the armed gangs as a potential tool for rebuilding Germany’s military prowess. The most influential among these people was defence minister General Kurt Von Schleicher, who, like Hindenburg, strongly believed that a correct approach to the NSDAP must be to try and tie the party to a governing coalition and thus tame it.

Schleicher secretly met with Hitler to discuss the conditions under which the NSDAP chairman would join or at least tolerate a governing coalition. The latter refused to join the government but he agreed to engage in “productive cooperation” (in today’s terms, support from outside the cabinet) with a more right-wing, interim presidential cabinet under Papen, if fresh elections were scheduled and the ban on the SA and SS lifted. On both counts he received assurances. Hitler was very happy: he had not tied himself down and still held all the trump cards. This understanding was duly carried through under the Hindenburg-Papen disposition. The Reichstag was dissolved on 4 June and 31 July was set as the date for new elections. On 16 June, the ban on the SA was lifted. The Brownshirts who were merely operating in semi legal fashion – since there had been no arrests, no crackdowns on them after the ban was imposed two months earlier – now resurfaced in their true colours. Violence escalated to previously unseen levels as fascists now engaged in bloody street battles on a daily basis.

The next blow to parliamentary democracy came in July in the form of deposition of the Social Democratic government and imposition of military emergency in Prussia. The pretext was that the SD government was failing to maintain law and order (a recent bloody clash between armed Nazi gangs and workers was cited as evidence) and had lost its majority in the state legislature. Papen appointed himself Reich Commissioner for Prussia. The SPD was expected to mount  vigorous street protests: after all, their government had been arbitrarily overthrown and it still had the support of powerful trade unions. But it only appealed to the court, for justice, and nothing came out it. The KPD did call for a general strike but with the SPD and the unions remaining passive, it was a non-starter. Thus there was hardly any effective resistance from the Left.

Immediately after the ‘constitutional coup’ the new rulers began to “cleanse” the Prussian civil service of democrats – a process the National Socialists would zealously take over once they came to power. As the historian Karl-Dietrich Bracher rightly pointed out, the “Prussia coup” was a prelude to the Nazi assumption of power six months later.

It is interesting and instructive to note that none of these reactionary autocratic blows to the parliamentary system was dealt by Hitler (he of course played the role of a catalyst or instigator in some cases) yet at the end of the day he alone would reap all the benefits, knocking all his contenders, facilitators and fellow travelers off the road to power as he went.

Note:

1.  But the events of the spring of 1931 had long-term political consequences as they led to the rise of the SS, which at the time was still subordinate to the SA. During the crisis, the SS had proved absolutely loyal to the party leadership, and the resulting political capital left that group able to rival the SA. The SS would play a very crucial part in the history of Nazism by enacting the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934 when Hitler deployed it to kill and disarm rebellious SA leaders and men. SA violence on the other hand was a double-edged sword for the party leadership, for it constantly threatened to get out of hand and give the lie to Hitler’s assurances that the party was acting within the bounds of the law.