Hitler and the Rise of the Nazi Party

Frank McDonough

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317860839
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Historia
• Categoria: Historia alemana

Now fully revised and reformatted, Hitler and the Rise of the Nazi Party is an indispensible guide to the history of the Nazi party between its initial electoral breakthrough in 1930 and its victory in 1933. Arguing that the Nazis owed their success as much to Hitler's charismatic leadership and their own effective propaganda and organisation as to the weakness of the Weimar regime, Frank McDonough provides an original perspective on the subject as well as a concise, readable introduction to key events and debates. This new edition includes:

A new introduction on the broad context of Weimar Germany

Two new chapters on the reasons for the Nazi breakthrough in 1930 and on the crucial 1930-1933 period

New clearer student-friendly format

Supported by an expanded documents section and fully revised bibliography, a chronology of key events and a who's who of leading figures, Hitler and the Rise of the Nazi Party will provide an invaluable introduction for any student of this fascinating period.

Part 1 Background

1 The Vulnerabilities of Weimar Democracy, 1918–1933

DOI: 10.4324/9781315833095-1

Introduction

On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler was placed in the position to lead Germany by a truly remarkable surge of popular support in democratic elections. In July 1932, the Nazi Party became the nation’s largest political party, supported by 13.7 million voters representing 37.2 per cent of the electorate. Hitler made no secret of his bitter hatred of parliamentary democracy, vowed to sweep it away, crush communism, remove Jews from society and embark on a vast programme of rearmament. It was clear such policies could only be achieved through a one-party dictatorship. By 1945 Hitler’s regime had led directly and indirectly to the deaths of 55 million people in the Second World War. No other comparable example of such a destructive, violent and inhumane regime coming to power by democratic and constitutional means exists.

There is a very familiar interpretation of the rise of Hitler to power, which is constantly repeated in many studies of the subject. It suggests the Weimar Republic was deeply unpopular and associated with: the fall of the Kaiser; the crushing burden of the Versailles Treaty; and the trauma of the ‘great inflation’. It only survived between 1918 and 1923 with the help of the army. Between 1924 and 1928 US loans gave a fragile mirage of economic stability. This was shattered after the 1929 Wall Street Crash which cut off vital loans and led to an unprecedented economic collapse, mass unemployment and deep political instability. Between 1930 and 1933 Hindenburg dispensed with parliamentary coalitions and ruled arbitrarily instead using Article 48 of the constitution, which gave him unlimited ‘emergency powers’. In the same period, Nazi support grew spectacularly on the extreme right, while support for the communists rose markedly on the extreme left leading to unprecedented street violence. By 1933, after trying out Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher, as German Chancellors – all of whom were deeply unpopular, Hindenburg was finally and reluctantly persuaded to appoint Hitler Chancellor at the head of a ‘National Coalition’ – containing only three Nazis. He hoped the Conservative right could manipulate and control Hitler to do its bidding. As Alan Bullock put it: ‘Hitler was jobbed into office by the old reactionary conservative old guard precisely at a time when his electoral popularity had peaked.’ This interpretation places strong emphasis on the weaknesses of the Weimar democratic system that became subverted to serve the needs of reactionary forces of the right. The old conservative right – so this argument continues – could have gone on ignoring Hitler’s claim to power and found an alternative leader. Detlev Peukert has argued Hitler’s appeal to those who brought him in to office lay in the fact he promised a ‘return to the past’ using the power of a modern state. If we accept this interpretation Hitler’s rise to power was a monumental political miscalculation made possible by a flawed political system.

It would be wrong to completely dismiss this long-standing explanation completely, but it is deeply flawed. One pressing question it ignores is: why did over 13 million people, of their own free will, support Hitler and the Nazi Party? Something clearly monumental was going on in Germany after 1929 that changed the psychology of voters in a seismic fashion. No democratic party has ever risen from such relative obscurity to such mass support in so short a period of time. It was not economic misfortune alone that explains this upsurge in Nazi voters. The unemployed, who were most deeply affected by the ‘Great Depression’, still voted predominantly for the parties of the left – the SPD and the communist KPD.

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD): The Social Democratic Party. The SPD was the biggest supporter of Weimar democracy, but after 1928, it ceased to be involved in government, lost support from voters and was ultimately powerless to prevent the collapse of democracy.

KPD: The German Communist Party. The German Communist Party took its ideas from Marx, but its orders from the leaders of the Soviet Union. The Party refused to cooperate with the SPD, branding its members ‘social fascists’. Many of its leaders thought that if Hitler was given power his incompetence could herald the end of the capitalist system in Germany and pave the way for the outbreak of a communist revolution.

So Hitler’s deeply emotional appeal to regenerate Germany clearly struck a chord with millions of voters. Hitler was not so much jobbed into office, as blown into office by a wind of change, affecting a very large portion of German society. The rise of Hitler and Nazism was not – as we shall see – the inevitable consequence of a flawed political system, brought to its knees by economic problems, but rather a unique revolution, with a genuine appeal to millions of voters. Hitler promised a new collective national identity, which would bring a return to stability, restore optimism and provide a forward-looking momentum. Millions of Germans saw Hitler’s promise as the best way out of a crisis that democracy seemed incapable of solving. Hitler’s appeal, therefore, embodied a strong desire to bring order out of chaos by establishing a united, patriotic and supposedly classless ‘National Community’. Nazi propaganda spread this message – by creating the image of Hitler as a strong leader and giving the Nazi Party a clear brand identity through the use of mass rallies, torchlight parades, flags, posters, and symbols. Above all, the Nazis offered supporters a chance of deep personal and emotional belonging to a ‘Movement’.

So the real answer as to why Hitler came to power lies in the personality and ideology of Adolf Hitler; in the sources left behind by those who decided to support the Nazi Party; through close analysis of the voting patterns of Nazi voters in the crucial period after 1930 when Nazi support surged; the way Hitler as a clever and instinctive politician profited from chronic economic problems and the miscalculations of his opponents; and finally by examining the fatal miscalculations and clandestine intrigues surrounding the ageing President Hindenburg, who was finally persuaded by his close advisers to appoint the Nazi leader as Chancellor. Yet it was the German voters who voted for Hitler in the first place who had placed Hitler in the prime position to lead Germany to disaster.

The Impact of War

In Germany, there had been enthusiasm bordering on hysteria when the First World War began in August 1914. Germans were supremely confident that their armed force would triumph in the struggle for mastery of Europe. The army high command had planned – as was the Prussian way of war – a rapid war of movement. But after the initial Battle of the Marne, the conflict lapsed into a long war of attrition, in the trenches of the western front. Even so, the German army of 1914–1918 was unquestionably the most fearsome fighting unit yet assembled. In 1917, the war on the eastern front ended in a German victory. Not even Napoleon or Hitler could match that. In 1918, the Germans came close to a decisive breakthrough on the western front via the Ludendorff offensive, but the western Allies attritional tactics, enriched by thousands of fresh US troops and a crippling naval blockade finally gave them the edge. By the autumn of 1918, the German army was completely worn out and in disarray. The unthinkable was about to happen. Germany was about to lose the First World War, without enemy troops ever setting foot on German soil. This was shocking and incomprehensible. The returning soldiers felt they had not been defeated in battle by superior military opponents, but rather, ‘stabbed in the back’ by ‘liberals’, ‘socialists’, and ‘Jewish profiteers’ on the Home Front. These soldiers never realised the entire war effort had been financed by vast government borrowing that was supposed to be repaid by Germany’s defeated opponents. Instead, the losing power now had to pay. The psychological trauma of defeat in the First World War had profound military, political and economic consequences.

Once it became apparent that the final German offensive had failed, Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg, the two leading army commanders, recommended a new government be formed, with the primary aim of brokering an armistice. This was a cynical ploy designed to deflect blame for the defeat away from the Kaiser’s regime and the army on to a newly formed democratic government. The Generals thought a democratic administration – which the Allies were demanding anyway – might ward off a communist revolution and broker favourable peace terms. The Armistice came into effect on 11 November 1918. All German troops were forced to withdraw east of the Rhine, the punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which Germany imposed on the Soviet Union, was declared null and void. The German fleet was to surrender to the Allies, but this was avoided when naval chiefs scuttled their own vessels. This act of defiance was a portent of things to come. Kaiser Wilhelm, the German monarch, claimed – like most soldiers – that the German armed forces had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by what he called a ‘secret, planned campaign of opponents at home’ (Evans, 2003: 61).

The German Revolution of 1918

The democratic Weimar Republic was thus born in the smouldering ashes of Germany’s catastrophic military defeat. A ‘revolution’ soon swept the old regime from power in November 1918. Prince Max of Baden was appointed interim Chancellor, but all he did was announce that the Kaiser had abdicated and promptly resigned on 9 November at a time when Berlin was paralysed by a general strike. Here ended the ‘Second Reich’ established by Bismarck in 1871. The Hohenzollern dynasty, which had ruled Prussia for centuries, was also consigned to history. Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democrats, was now appointed the Chancellor of the new democratic German Republic – but the German ‘revolution’ was not over yet. A fight now raged within the parties on the left over who would lead the ‘new’ Germany. The three parties that vied for power were the Social Democratic Party (SPD) – a democratic socialist party, made up mostly of trade unionists; the Marxist-orientated Independent Socialists (USDP); and an even more extreme communist grouping called ‘The Spartacists’ – who later coalesced with other left-wing groups to form the Communist Party (KPD).

In December 1918, the USDP withdrew from the coalition ‘provisional government’ and the ‘Spartacists’ demanded a ‘Soviet’-style communist revolution. Many communist councils had already established themselves in big cities, most notably in Munich, the capital of Bavaria. In January 1919, the SPD government brutally suppressed a left-wing Spartacist revolt, with the support of the German army and the Free Corps, a 400,000 strong group of trigger happy ex-soldiers incapable of fitting back into civilian society, who could be relied on to support the army in any counter-revolutionary conflict. Two leading communist figures, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were murdered by Free Corps officers on 15 January 1918. Only with the assistance of the army and the Free Corps was communist revolution avoided. The consequences of this battle on the left of German politics was deeply significant. The SPD and the communists now became sworn enemies of each other and would no longer co-operate in any way whatsoever. The communists labelled Ebert and the SPD as ‘social fascists’. The next threat to Weimar’s fragile democracy was an attempted coup by renegade elements in the Germany army in March 1920, led by Dr Wolfgang Kapp (the ‘Kapp Putsch’). This was supported by the Free Corps. The aim was to set up a right-wing military dictatorship that would restore the monarchy. In the early stages, leaders of the army refused to intervene to aid the democratic government. Only after a general strike, organised by the trade unions, did the army consent to put down the revolt and arrest the conspirators. Twice in the first eighteen months, democratic politicians needed the assistance of the army to save democracy.

Freikorps: Free Corps: The paramilitary units composed of ex-soldiers that sprang up throughout Germany after 1918. This group of former soldiers helped the nationalist right to deal with the communist threat in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.

The Impact of Versailles

The terms of the Versailles Treaty, which were made public on 7 May 1919, dealt the new democratic German government another staggering economic and psychological blow. Angry protests took place throughout the country. Versailles was viewed on all sides as a vindictive treaty, designed to reduce Germany to a third-rate power. Germany had been defeated, but this seemed like international humiliation. Ebert described the terms as ‘unrealisable and unbearable’, but the agreement was signed on 28 June 1919 (Shirer, 1961: 81). Germany lost 13 per cent of its territory. The Rhineland was made a de-militarised zone and occupied. Alsace Lorraine returned to France. The newly created Polish state incorporated much of West Prussia and Upper Silesia within its borders. Danzig became a ‘free city’ under the nominal control of the newly created League of Nations. In order to give Poland access to the sea – a ‘corridor’ of land which separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany was created. All overseas colonies under German rule were redistributed under mandates issued by the League. Union between Austria and Germany was strictly forbidden. Other German-speaking minorities in central Europe were incorporated into Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Under punitive military clauses, the German army was reduced to just 100,000 and conscription banned. Naval staff were slimmed down to 15,000. Germany was prohibited from having battleships, destroyers, tanks, aircraft, heavy artillery guns and submarines. Germany now ranked as a military power alongside Greece and Argentina. Under Article 231 Germany was apportioned sole ‘guilt’ for starting the war. Finally, and even more controversially, Germany was obligated to pay financial compensation (reparations). The payments were supposed to continue in yearly instalments until 1983. An immediate down payment of five billion marks in gold was to be deposited between 1919 and 1921, along with deliveries of coal, cattle, ships and other goods to be paid in lieu of later cash payments. Any German government forced to sign such a treaty would have been deeply unpopular, so it was extremely unfortunate this grim task fell to the incoming SPD coalition government. It was like the owner of a new house being told on the first day of ownership that the roof had caved in and all the windows smashed. The tag of ‘November criminals’ hung around the necks of those democratic politicians who instigated the fall of the Kaiser and then signed the hated Versailles Treaty. It was a tag they never really shook off.

The Culture of Violence

Not surprisingly, the announcement of the Versailles terms led to a surge of support for right-wing nationalism and a period of deep political and economic unrest between 1918 and 1923. A powerful role here was played by soldiers returning from the war – the so-called ‘Front Generation’. The bonds these men had forged in the self-sacrificing climate of the trenches survived the war. Most subscribed to the ‘stab in the back myth’, and resented the growth of socialism, democracy and communism that accompanied the 1918 revolution. This antagonism by the right towards the left was not new. During the era of the Anti-Socialist Law (1878–1890) there was government harassment, deportation and imprisonment of left-wing agitators and strike bans. But violence never went beyond limited street fighting. What happened in the Weimar era was very different. Ex-soldiers joined numerous paramilitary groups who confronted communists in street battles that led to hundreds of deaths and serious woundings. Several socialist politicians were also attacked or assassinated by right-wing extremists. Former SPD Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann had prussic acid thrown in his face in 1921, and Walter Rathenau, the Foreign Minister, was assassinated in 1922 en route to his office. There were more than 350 politically motivated murders by right-wing extremists during the Weimar era. Right-wing assassins often fled, sometimes aided by the police. When apprehended they were given ridiculously light sentences by anti-Republican judges. To put it bluntly, killing rather than just arguing with political opponents became part of the political culture of Weimar society.

Ex-soldiers roaming around the streets dressed up in various militaristic uniforms became another worrying feature of street life in the Weimar Republic. The most numerically strong of these Veterans Associations was the ‘Steel Helmets League of Front Line Soldiers’, founded on 13 November 1918 by Franz Seldte, the owner of a soda water factory in Magdeburg. By the mid-1920s it had 300,000 members and could offer a violent and intimidating militaristic presence on the streets. The manifesto of this group included a familiar litany of right-wing demands: destruction of the Versailles Treaty, the gaining of new ‘living space’, the restoration of the national flag of the Second Reich and the need for a ‘strong patriotic leader’. In 1927, during a period when the Nazi Party was still a fringe party, and when there was a fragile economic recovery underway, 132,000 members of the Steel Helmets, dressed in military uniforms, organised a massive march past in Berlin as a demonstration of their continuing loyalty to the moribund ‘Second Reich’ of Kaiser Wilhelm, who was, by now, living in exile in Switzerland. Interestingly, the Steel Helmets, like many other Combat Leagues, and the Nazi Party, banned Jews from membership. To counteract these right-wing leagues, the Social Democrats set up their own uniformed group called ‘The Reichsbanner’ whose members pledged allegiance to the new democratic Republic. The Communists too established the ‘Red Front Fighters’ League’ whose members increasingly confronted the Steel Helmets, the Free Corps and the Nazi Party’s own violent uniformed paramilitary wing, the Stormtroopers (SA), in numerous demonstrations. It is...