Hitler

the National Socialist Movement.
    Goebbels was appalled. ‘I feel devastated. What sort of Hitler? A reactionary? Amazingly clumsy and uncertain … Probably one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I no longer believe fully in Hitler. That’s the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away.’
    Hitler had reasserted his authority. The potential threat from the Working Community had evaporated. Despite some initial signs of defiance, the fate of the Community had been sealed at Bamberg. Gregor Strasser promised Hitler to collect all copies of the draft programme he had distributed, and wrote to members of the Community on 5 March asking for them to be returned. The Community now petered out into non-existence. On 1 July 1926, Hitler signed a directive stating that ‘since the NSDAP represents a large working community, there is no justification for smaller working communities as a combination of individual
Gaue
’. By that time, Strasser’s Working Community of northern and western Gauleiter was finished. With it went the last obstacle to the complete establishment of Hitler’s supreme mastery over the party.
    Hitler was shrewd enough to be generous after his Bamberg triumph. By September, Strasser himself had been called to the Reich Leadership as Propaganda Leader of the party, while Franz Pfeffer von Salomon (Gauleiter of Westphalia, a former army officer who had subsequently joined the Freikorps, participated in the Kapp Putsch, and been active in opposition to the French in the Ruhr) was appointed head of the SA. Most important of all, the impressionable Goebbels was openly courted by Hitler and completely won over.
    To bring about what has often been called Goebbels’s ‘Damascus’ in fact took little doing. Goebbels had idolized Hitler from the beginning. ‘Who is this man? Half plebian, half God! Actually Christ, or only John [the Baptist]?’ he had written in his diary in October 1925 on finishing reading the first volume of
Mein Kamp
f. ‘This man has everything to be a king. The born tribune of the people. The coming dictator,’ he added a few weeks later. ‘How I love him.’ Like others in the Working Community, he had wanted only to liberate Hitler from the clutches of the Esser clique. Bamberg was a bitter blow. But his belief in Hitler was dented, not destroyed. It needed only a sign from Hitler to restore it. And the sign was not long in coming.
    In mid-March Goebbels made his peace with Streicher after a longtalk in Nuremberg. At the end of the month he received a letter from Hitler inviting him to speak in Munich on 8 April. Hitler’s car was there to meet him at the station to take him to his hotel. ‘What a noble reception,’ noted Goebbels in his diary. Hitler’s car was again provided the next day to take Goebbels to visit Lake Starnberg, a few miles outside Munich. In the evening, after Goebbels’s speech in the Bürgerbräukeller, in which he evidently retreated from his more radical version of socialism, Hitler embraced him, tears in his eyes. Next afternoon Hitler spent three hours going over the same ground he had covered at Bamberg. Then, Goebbels had been sorely disappointed. Now, he thought it was ‘brilliant’. ‘I love him … He has thought through everything,’ Goebbels continued. ‘He’s a man, taking it all round. Such a sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater one, the political genius.’ Goebbels’s conversion was complete. A few days later, he met Hitler again, this time in Stuttgart. ‘I believe he has taken me to his heart like no one else,’ he wrote. ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius.’ Towards the end of the year, Hitler appointed Goebbels as Gauleiter of Berlin – a key position if the party were to advance in the capital. Goebbels was Hitler’s man. He would remain so, adoring and subservient alike to the man he said he loved ‘like a father’, down to the last days in the bunker.
    The Bamberg meeting had been a milestone in the development of the NSDAP. The Working Community had neither wanted nor attempted a rebellion against Hitler’s leadership. But once Strasser had composed his draft programme, a clash was inevitable. Was the party to be subordinated to a programme, or to its leader? The Bamberg meeting decided what National Socialism was to mean. It was not to mean a party torn, as the
völkisch
movement had been in 1924, over