Hitler

sessions simply rubber-stamped policy determined from above. Hitler showed little interest in them. His only concern, as always, was with the propaganda display of the rally.
    He had reason to feel satisfied with the way his movement had developed over the four years since its refoundation. The party was now almost three times as large as it had been at the time of the putsch, and growing fast. It was spread throughout the country, and making headway in areas which had never been strongholds. It was now far more tightly organized and structured. There was much less room for dissension. Rivals in the
völkisch
movement had been amalgamated or had faded into insignificance. Not least, Hitler’s own mastery was complete. His recipe for success was unchanged: hammer home the same message, exploit any opportunity for agitation, and hope for external circumstances to favour the party. But although great strides forward had been made since 1925, and though the party was registering modest electoral gains at state elections and acquiring a good deal of publicity, no realist could have reckoned much to its chances of winning power. For that, Hitler’s only hope was a massive and comprehensive crisis of the state.
    He had no notion just how quickly events would turn to the party’s advantage. But on 3 October, Gustav Stresemann, the only statesman of real standing in Germany, who had done most to sustain the shaky Müller government, died following a stroke. Three weeks later, on24 October 1929, the largest stock-market in the world, in Wall Street, New York, crashed. The crisis Hitler needed was about to envelop Germany.

8
Breakthrough
    I
    The Nazi leadership did not immediately recognize the significance of the American stock-market crash in October 1929. The
Völkischer Beobachter
did not even mention Wall Street’s ‘Black Friday’. But Germany was soon reverberating under its shock-waves. Its dependence upon American short-term loans ensured that the impact would be extraordinarily severe. Industrial output, prices, and wages began the steep drop that would reach its calamitous low-point in 1932. The agricultural crisis that had already been radicalizing Germany’s farmers in 1928 and 1929 was sharply intensified. By January 1930, the labour exchanges recorded 3,218,000 unemployed – some 14 per cent of the ‘working-age’ population. The true figure, taking in those on short-time, has been estimated as over 4½ million.
    The protest of ordinary people who took the view that democracy had failed them, that ‘the system’ should be swept away, became shriller on both Left and Right. Nazi advances in regional elections reflected the growing radicalization of the mood of the electorate. The Young Plan plebiscite had given the party much-needed publicity in the widely-read Hugenberg press. Its value, said Hitler, was that it had provided ‘the occasion for a propaganda wave the like of which had never been seen in Germany before’. It had allowed the NSDAP to project itself as the most radical voice of the Right, a protest-movement
par excellence
that had never been tarnished with any involvement in Weimar government. In the Baden state elections on 27 October 1929, the NSDAP won 7 per cent of the vote. In the Lübeck city elections a fortnight or so later, the percentage was 8.1. Even in the Berlin council elections on 17 November, the party almost quadrupled its vote of 1928, though its 5.8 per centwas still marginal, compared with over 50 per cent that went to the two left-wing parties. Most significantly of all, in the Thuringian state elections held on 8 December, the NSDAP trebled its vote of 1928 and broke the 10 per cent barrier for the first time, recording 11.3 per cent of the 90,000 votes cast. Should the Nazi Party exploit the situation by agreeing to enter government for the first time but run the risk of courting unpopularity through its participation in an increasingly discredited system? Hitler decided the NSDAP had to enter government. Had he refused, he said, it would have come to new elections and voters could have turned away from the NSDAP. What happened gives an indication of the way at this time the ‘seizure of power’ in the Reich itself was envisaged.
    Hitler demanded the two posts he saw as most important in the Thuringian government: the Ministry of the Interior, controlling the civil service and police; and the Ministry of Education, overseeing culture as well as policy for school