Hitler

despite Hitler’s ban, under pressure from industrialists, on any backing of the strike by the party.
    On 21 May Hitler invited Otto Strasser to his hotel for lengthy discussions. According to Strasser’s published account – the only one that exists, though it rings true and was not denied by Hitler – the key points were leadership and socialism. ‘A Leader must serve the Idea. To this alone can we devote ourselves entirely, since it is eternal whereas the Leader passes and can make mistakes,’ claimed Strasser. ‘What you are saying is outrageous nonsense,’ retorted Hitler. ‘That’s the most revolting democracy that we want nothing more to do with. For us, the Leader is the Idea, and each party member has to obey only the Leader.’ Strasser accused Hitler of trying to destroy the Kampfverlag because he wanted ‘to strangle’ the ‘social revolution’ through a strategy of legality and collaboration with the bourgeois Right. Hitler angrily denounced Strasser’s socialism as ‘nothing but Marxism’. The mass of the working class, he went on, wanted only bread and circuses, and would never understand the meaning of an ideal. ‘There is only one possible kind of revolution, and it is not economic or political or social, but racial,’ he avowed. Pushed on his attitude towards big business, Hitler made plain that there could be no question for him of socialization or worker control. The only priority was for a strong state to ensure that production was carried out in the national interest.
    The meeting broke up. Hitler’s mood was black. ‘An intellectual white Jew, totally incapable of organization, a Marxist of the purest ilk,’ was his withering assessment of Otto Strasser. On 4 July, anticipating their expulsion, Strasser and twenty-five supporters publicly announced that ‘the socialists are leaving the NSDAP’. The rebels had in effect purged themselves.
    The Strasser crisis showed, above all, the strength of Hitler’s position. With the elimination of the Strasser clique, any lingering ideological dispute in the party was over. Things had changed drastically since 1925 and the days of the ‘Working Community’. Now it was clear: Leader and Idea were one and the same.
    III
    During the summer of 1930, the election campaign built up to fever pitch. The campaign was centrally organized by Goebbels, under broad guidelines laid down by Hitler. Two years earlier, the press had largely ignored the NSDAP. Now, the Brownshirts forced themselves on to the front pages. It was impossible to ignore them. The high level of agitation – spiced with street violence – put them on the political map in a big way. The energy and drive of the National Socialist agitation were truly astonishing. As many as 34,000 meetings were planned throughout Germany for the last four weeks of the campaign. No other party remotely matched the scale of the NSDAP’s effort.
    Hitler himself held twenty big speeches in the six weeks running up to polling-day. The attendances were massive. At least 16,000 came to listen to him in the Sportpalast in Berlin on 10 September. Two days later, in Breslau, as many as 20–25,000 thronged into the Jahrhunderthalle, while a further 5–6,000 were forced to listen to the speech on loudspeakers outside. In the early 1920s, Hitler’s speeches had been dominated by vicious attacks on the Jews. In the later 1920s, the question of ‘living space’ became the central theme. In the election campaign of 1930, Hitler seldom spoke explicitly of the Jews. The crude tirades of the early 1920s were missing altogether. ‘Living space’ figured more prominently, posed against the alternative international competition for markets. But it was not omnipresent as it had been in 1927–8. The key theme now was the collapse of Germany under parliamentary democracy and party government into a divided people with separate and conflicting interests, which only the NSDAP could overcome by creating a new unity of the nation, transcending class, estate, and profession. Where the Weimar parties represented only specific interest groups, asserted Hitler, the National Socialist Movement stood for the nation as a whole. In speech after speech, Hitler hammered this message home. Again and again he pilloried the Weimar system, not now crudely and simply as the regime of the ‘November Criminals’, but for its failed promises on tax reductions, financial management, and employment. All parties were blamed.