Hitler

posed by his frequent trips to try to establish important contacts and drum up funding for a party with chronic financial problems. Not surprisingly, for a party in the political doldrums, his efforts met with little success. Though (not to the liking of the ‘social-revolutionaries’ in the NSDAP) he courted Ruhr industrialists and businessmen in a number of speeches in 1926 and 1927, which went down well, they showed little interest in a party that seemed to be going nowhere. The Bechsteins and Bruckmanns, long-standing patrons, continued to give generously. But the aged Emil Kirdorf, whom Frau Bruckmann had brought into personal contact with Hitler, was almost alone among leading Ruhr industrialists in sympathizing with him to the extent of joining the NSDAP, and in making a sizeable donation of 100,000 Marks that went a long way towards overcoming the party’s immediate financial plight. As would remain the case, the party was heavily dependent for its income on the contributions of ordinary members. So the stagnation, or at best slow growth, in party membership meant continued headaches for the party treasurer.
    As earlier, Hitler paid little attention to administration and organization. Party bosses were resigned to his lengthy absences and inaccessibility on even important concerns. He left financial matters to his trusted business manager Max Amann, and the party treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz. Behind the scenes in Munich, Hitler could rely in the party’s secretariat upon the indefatigable and subservient Philipp Bouhler, the retiring but inwardly ambitious individual who was later to play a central role in the emergence of the ‘euthanasia action’. Above all, it was Gregor Strasser, as Propaganda Leader between September 1926 and the end of 1927 (during which time he streamlined and coordinatedpropaganda activities throughout the Reich) and especially after he was made Organizational Leader on 2 January 1928, who built up, from the faction-ridden and incoherently structured movement, the nationwide organization that from 1929 onwards was in a position to exploit the new crisis conditions. Hitler’s part in this development was minimal, though placing Strasser in charge of organizational matters was one of his more inspired appointments.
    Hitler’s instinct, as ever, was for propaganda, not organization. His ‘feel’, when it came to matters of mobilizing the masses, seldom let him down. As director of party propaganda, Gregor Strasser had been given a great deal of scope – Hitler’s usual style – to shape the character and pattern of agitation. Following his own leanings, Strasser had made a strong push to win over, especially, the urban proletariat. Even to outside observers, it was plain by autumn 1927 that this strategy was not paying worthwhile dividends, and was at the same time in danger of alienating the lower-middle-class support of the NSDAP. Reports came in from Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and other areas indicating that growing unrest in rural areas offered promising terrain for the NSDAP. Hitler was evidently well-informed. And at a meeting of Gau leaders on 27 November 1927 in the ‘Hotel Elefant’ in Weimar, he announced a change of course. He made plain that significant gains could not be expected at the coming election from ‘the Marxists’. Small-shopkeepers, threatened by department stores, and white-collar workers, many of them already antisemites, were singled out as better targets. In December 1927, Hitler addressed for the first time a rally of several thousand peasants from Lower Saxony and Schles-wig-Holstein. In the New Year, he himself took over the position of party Propaganda Leader. His deputy, Heinrich Himmler, undertook the routine tasks. The future overlord of the SS empire was at this time still in his twenties, a well-educated and intelligent former agricultural student who had briefly worked for a fertilizer firm and reared chickens. With his short-back-and-sides haircut, small moustache, round glasses, and unathletic build, he resembled a small-town bank clerk or pedantic schoolmaster. Whatever appearances might have suggested, he had, however, few peers in ideological fanaticism and, as time would prove, cold ruthlessness. The young nationalist idealist, already imagining dire conspiracies involving ‘the red International’, Jews, Jesuits, and freemasons ranged against Germany, had joined the NSDAP in the summerof 1923,