Hitler

They were all part of the same party system that had ruined Germany. All had had their part in the policies that had led from Versailles through the reparations terms agreed under the Dawes Planto their settlement under the Young Plan. Lack of leadership had led to the misery felt by all sections of society. Democracy, pacifism, and internationalism had produced powerlessness and weakness – a great nation brought to its knees. It was time to clear out the rot.
    But his speeches were not simply negative, not just an attack on the existing system. He presented a vision, a utopia, an ideal: national liberation through strength and unity. He did not propose alternative policies, built into specific election promises. He offered ‘a programme, a gigantic new programme behind which must stand not the new government, but a new German people that has ceased to be a mixture of classes, professions, estates’. It would be, he declared, with his usual stress on stark alternatives (and, as it turned out, prophetically) ‘a community of a people which, beyond all differences, will rescue the common strength of the nation, or will take it to ruin’. Only a ‘high ideal’ could overcome the social divisions, he stated. In place of the decayed, the old, a new Reich had to be built on racial values, selection of the best on the basis of achievement, strength, will, struggle, freeing the genius of the individual personality, and re-establishing Germany’s power and strength as a nation. Only National Socialism could bring this about. It was not a conventional political programme. It was a political crusade. It was not about a change of government. It was a message of national redemption. In a climate of deepening economic gloom and social misery, anxiety, and division, amid perceptions of the failure and ineptitude of seemingly puny parliamentary politicians, the appeal was a powerful one.
    The message appealed not least to the idealism of a younger generation, not old enough to have fought in the war, but not too young to have experienced at first hand little but crisis, conflict, and national decline. Many from this generation, born between about 1900 and 1910, coming from middle-class families, no longer rooted in the monarchical tradition of the pre-war years, outrightly rejecting Socialism and Communism, but alienated by the political, economic, social, and ideological strife of the Weimar era, were on the search for something new. Laden with all the emotive baggage that belonged to the German notions of ‘
Volk
’ (ethnic people) and ‘
Gemeinschaft
’ (community), the aim of a ‘national community’ which would overcome class divisions seemed a highly positive one. That the notion of ‘national community’ gained its definition by those it excluded from it, and that social harmony was tobe established through racial purity and homogeneity, were taken for granted if not explicitly lauded.
    The rhetoric of the ‘national community’ and the Führer cult stood for a rebirth for Germany in which all the various sectional interests would have a new deal. As the economic and political situation deteriorated, the rationality of voting for a small and weak interest party rather than a massive and strong
national
party – upholding interests but transcending them – was less and less compelling. A vote for the Nazis could easily seem like common sense. In this way, the NSDAP started to penetrate and destroy the support of interest-parties such as the Bayerischer Bauernbund (Bavarian Peasants’ League) and seriously to erode the hold of the traditional parties such as the national-conservative DNVP in rural areas. This process was only in its early stages in summer 1930. But it would make rapid advances following the Nazi triumph of 14 September 1930.
    IV
    What happened on that day was a political earthquake. In the most remarkable result in German parliamentary history, the NSDAP advanced at one stroke from the twelve seats and mere 2.6 per cent of the vote gained in the 1928 Reichstag election, to 107 seats and 18.3 per cent, making it the second largest party in the Reichstag. Almost 6½ million Germans now voted for Hitler’s party – eight times as many as two years earlier. The Nazi bandwagon was rolling.
    The party leadership had expected big gains. The run of successes in the regional elections, the last of them the 14.4 per cent won in Saxony as recently as June, pointed to that conclusion. Goebbels had