voted into the Reichstag.130 Völkisch nationalism became an ideological crossover point between neoconservatives and fascists involving detailed discussions on the intricacies of national policy, corporatism, and national dictatorship. With the refounding of the Nazi Party in 1925, most of the national socialist part of the völkisch movement abandoned the cultural approach and returned to Hitler’s political leadership.
Rejoining as a “colleague” rather than a “follower” of Hitler, Strasser firmed up his “socialist” doctrine in a draft program for a projected Arbeitsgemeinschaft of the NSDAP (AG), a workers’ movement within the Party. The draft relied on a basic völkisch national socialism, proposing a national dictatorship over a hierarchical corporatist state that catered to the petite bourgeoisie over landless farmers and industrial workers.131 According to the draft’s proposals, Jews who immigrated to Germany after 1919 were to be deported, and all who remained were to be deprived of citizenship. For Germans, the party would break up large landholdings to better the share of small farmers and would set up a fascist-corporative state with corporate bosses embedded in guilds and syndicates that remained beholden to “national solidarity.” It was similar to the “social monarchism” of Drumont and Barrès or Maurras’s “national integralism.” The traditional sovereign had been replaced by the figure of the modern dictator, a man of action and the people, but he remained the sovereign nevertheless.
Hitler Regains Control
For his part, Hitler condemned the völkisch movement as a half-measure. After a conference in Bamberg in which he asserted his leadership, the party was brought into line and a Führer cult was implemented. The Strassers maintained popularity, but membership in their urban, working-class areas was small compared to rural areas like Schleswig-Holstein where Hitler’s Bavarian pseudo-conservatism found an important radical base. To ease the transition, Hitler brought Gregor Strasser into the position of second in command and escalated the party’s propaganda onslaught through massive rituals and ceremonies that built a sense of collective emotional unity. The Nazi Party built an electoral strategy ostensibly to gain power but motivated more by a destructive opposition to the Republic itself. In Strasser’s words, “we are pursuing a policy of catastrophe because only catastrophe, that is, the collapse of the liberal system, will clear the way for those new tasks which we National Socialists name…every strike, every governmental crisis, every erosion of state power, every weakening of the System…is good, very good for us, in order to expedite the death of this System.”132
To defend their meetings and control the streets, Joseph Goebbels and Strasser launched a massive propaganda campaign in support of the brutality of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the party’s “Storm Troopers” paramilitary outfit. Organized by World War I veteran Ernst Röhm, who had joined the Nazi Party before Hitler and achieved the status of major power broker within the larger Patriotic Movement, the SA was perhaps the most visible and controversial aspect of the Nazi Party. The Nazis’ militancy was aided in no small part by the German army: their newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, was purchased in part with the financial assistance of the army; key army figures like Ludendorff supported the Nazis; and the army gave the SA arms as volunteer corps. Although the army officially banned Nazis from enlisting and participating in military exercises, the Nazis continued to infiltrate it and played an increasingly important role in the radical-right Patriotic Movement’s rallies. Nevertheless, the Nazis remained a relatively fringe, extremist branch of the radical right, with the army’s main support firmly behind the traditional conservative Hindenburg.
This changed as the Great Depression swept the world in 1929. NSDAP membership rolls swelled with the new unemployed—now some 40 percent of the population. The SA’s working-class rhetoric and camaraderie brought in new recruits, who were also attracted by the numerous “Storm Centers,” bunkhouses for young men without a home. Providing free room and board, Storm Centers also lent recruits a goal, an ideology inspired by strength, and an outlet for their violent sense of indignation and disenfranchisement. To young militants eager to smash somebody’s face or belt out a boisterous song over tall masskrugs of lager, Storm Centers became the sites of an ongoing party atmosphere, not unlike neo-Nazi skinhead “rat holes” that would develop fifty years later. Violence against Jews, socialists, and communists deemed responsible for the financial chaos escalated severely as the SA became a hub for a young generation that had not experienced war but looked up to the war veterans of the Patriotic Movement.133
Rumors swirled around the SA and their leader Röhm—it was widely known that he was gay and stacked the group’s all-male hierarchy with his sexual favorites. Calling himself the Hochverräter, or “high traitor,” Röhm built up a kind of brutal celebrity that Adorno describes as “characterized, above all, by a penchant for ‘tolerated excesses’ of all kinds,” namely demonstrating masculine toughness.134 A stocky, confident man scarred by the war (the bridge of his nose had been blasted off), Röhm struck an imposing figure of martial invincibility and power. To maintain this toughness, introspection wasn’t allowed, and human concern, if it was permitted at all, was held in utter contempt. The inner horror that such repression and humiliation fostered could only be projected onto out-groups—in particular, women, communists, and other people who “couldn’t take it,” and therefore could not be tolerated. To be part of the SA, one need only believe that man and truth found their sacred union in Nazism. Little else was needed because, as Hitler put it, “One can die only for an idea which one does not understand.”
As the Nazi Party’s membership soared, the Social Democrats lost power in the Reichstag, and the new conservative government banned the Communist Party’s Roter Frontkämpferbundes. While members of the RFB continued to fight illegally, establishing the Kampfbund Gegen den Faschismus (Fighting-Alliance Against Fascism) the next year, their role in the antifascist struggle dwindled significantly. After the banning of the RFB, the Social Democrats’ Reichsbanner continued along with the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK), which had been created by a Jewish philosopher named Leonard Nelson and included dissidents expelled by the KPD and SPD. Although the ISK received the support of intellectuals like Albert Einstein and remained a bold effort, its relative isolation from the broader institutions of the left hindered its broader antifascist goals, and its awkward mix of libertarian and authoritarian ideas ensured its relegation to the margins.135 Hence, numerous Germans on the heels of the failed Spartacist uprising in 1919 and the Red Army of the Ruhr in 1920 engaged in the struggle against fascism following the shock of the Beer Hall Putsch—perhaps enough to produce a viable revolutionary movement. But the conflicts within and between the parties themselves reversed their potential at precisely the moment when the Nazis came to dominate the Patriotic Movement.
Power Struggle
As the financial meltdown persisted, the votes for the Nazi Party jumped from 2.6 to 18.3 percent, but the Communist Party gained votes as well.136 Seen as radicals who would also work with business, the Nazis could gain ground by winning the allegiance of liberal politicians and the networks they brought with them. One of these was Hjalmar Schacht, who resigned as head of the Reichsbank in 1930 and within the year was meeting with Hitler. He would later be described in the Nazi press as “the man who made the reconstruction of the Wehrmacht [German army] economically possible.”137 Other financial interests—Deutsche Bank, Dresdener Bank, Deutsche Kredit Gesellschaft, and the insurance giant, Allianz—invested in the Nazis, while Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of Hitler’s personal secret service, the Schutzstaffel (SS), organized a group of peculiar businessmen into the Circle of Friends of the Economy to promote business support for the Nazi Party. As the Nazis’ financial clout grew, so did their sway with the military.
Otto Strasser opposed this corporate advance and was expelled from the party in 1930 for supporting workers’ strikes. He created a new group called the Union of Revolutionary National Socialists, also called the Black Front and the Freedom Front, to subvert the Hitlerite faction, but the organization stagnated compared to the successes of the Nazi Party. Although infiltrated and inconsequential in its day, the Black Front would go on to become an important facet of the Nazi mystique for those searching for a redeeming history of Nazism after the war. In the meantime, the KPD altered its position on fascism to be increasingly
