Many leading officers claimed that while they supported the German nation, they could not support the democratic state: thus, in the early years, in different ways, Generals Groener, Seeckt and others cooperated with right-wing groups and paramilitary organizations, such as the ex-servicemen’s association the Stahlhelm. German military schools were opened in Russia (under the Treaty of Rapallo) to train officers, and secret rearmament programmes were initiated in contravention of the Versailles Treaty. From 1926 onwards, General Kurt von Schleicher played a leading role in supporting and influencing President Hindenburg’s plans for a more authoritarian form of government that would reinstate the pre-1918 elites in what they deemed to be their rightful positions of power. Schleicher’s role was to become particularly important in the closing stages of the Republic’s brief history.
Meanwhile, in the civilian arena, towards the end of the 1920s, increasing disaffection with democracy was reflected in the right-wards shift of a number of ‘bourgeois’ parties. Most notable among these was the DNVP, which was taken over by the right-wing nationalist press baron Hugenberg in 1928. After the death of Stresemann in 1929 the DVP also moved towards the Right. But even as they shifted, so they were being outstripped – and their support sapped away from them – by the emergence and dramatic growth of an infinitely more radical party: the NSDAP. And, unlike the traditional conservative and nationalist parties, the NSDAP was able, in the new era of plebiscitary democracy and economic crisis, to attract a wide popular following. Ultimately, elites disaffected with democracy were to feel they must ally with the Nazis to gain a mass base from which to bring the shaky edifice down.
The Rise of the NSDAP
The Nazi Party was, in the early 1920s, but one among many nationalist and völkisch radical political groups. It was catapulted to prominence with the onset of economic recession in the late 1920s: having secured only 2.6% of the national vote in the 1928 general election, the NSDAP became the second largest party in the Reichstag with 18.3% of the vote in September 1930. The Nazis owed their spectacular success to a combination of two discrete sets of factors: first, their distinctive organization and strategy: and second, the wider socioeconomic conditions that created climates of opinion and sets of grievances on which the Nazis could prey.
Following Hitler’s release from imprisonment at the end of 1924, the NSDAP was formally refounded in February 1925. Over the course of the next few years, Hitler rose from his pre-1923 role of ‘drummer’ to become the undisputed leader or ‘Führer’, standing to some extent above the organizational fray and exerting his powers of charismatic leadership through his gifts of oratory and control of mass audiences.2 The eventual semblance of a well-organized, united party – symbolized by the brown-shirt uniforms of the SA, the serried ranks of units marching past the Führer with arms raised in Hitler salute, the visual and emotional effects of the mass rallies with the leader as the focal point – partially disguised more complex realities.
The paramilitary SA – founded in 1920, one of the many paramilitary groups to spring up in the aftermath of the First World War – was at first organized only at the local level. After the return of the war veteran Ernst Röhm from Bolivia to head the organization in 1930, the SA remained somewhat unruly and, in conventional political terms, more radical than Hitler’s conception of Nazi ideology was to be. Nor were all Nazi leaders united on a clearly definable ‘ideology’ in any case. An important figure with ideas somewhat different from those of Hitler was Gregor Strasser, whose role in Nazi party organization was strengthened in 1925 when Hitler was banned from making speeches in public. Strasser, who had considerable organizational skills, played a key role in spreading the Nazi party organization across broad areas of Germany, beyond the original Nazi heartland in Bavaria. In some areas, particularly in northwest Germany, the NSDAP had a more ‘revolutionary’ or radical flavour.
During 1925–6 the NSDAP suffered much infighting. Hitler, on returning to the public rostrum, was able to transcend this factionalism and unite the party under his unique form of leadership. The Berlin party chief Joseph Goebbels was persuaded of Hitler’s merits and made it his task to promote and strengthen the ‘Führer myth’ through propaganda. At the same time, the ‘putschist’ strategy of the early years was rejected in favour of following a legal, parliamentary road to the overthrow of parliamentary democracy. New party organizations were founded to penetrate a range of social and professional groups. In 1926 the National Socialist League of German Students and the Hitler Youth were founded. The League of Nazi Lawyers, the League of Nazi Doctors, the League of Nazi School-teachers and the Fighting League for German Culture were all established by 1929. In 1928 the National Socialist Factory Cell Organisation (NSBO) was created in an attempt to infiltrate the heartland of left-wing politics, the working class. From 1930 onwards, concerted efforts were made to infiltrate existing agrarian and white-collar worker pressure groups, such as the Reichslandbund and the Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfenverband. Attempts were also made to win over – or at least neutralize and allay the suspicions of – important industrialists.
The Nazis propagated, not a coherent doctrine or body of systematically interrelated ideas, but rather a vaguer world-view made up of a number of prejudices with varied appeals to different audiences, which could scarcely be dignified with the term ‘ideology’. As far as Hitler himself was concerned, two major elements were of decisive importance. One was his radical anti-Semitism; the other was his ambitious set of foreign policy aims – his desire for mastery of Europe, the creation of ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for the ‘Aryan’ Germans and eventually for mastery of the world. Linked to these was Hitler’s anti-communism: ‘Jews and Bolsheviks’ were often pejoratively associated, even indissolubly equated, as in their alleged responsibility for the debacle of 1918. The fight against the perceived evils of modern capitalism was to be a simultaneous fight against ‘international Jewry’ and against the threat of communism. Anti-Semitism was far from unique to Germany at this time, but Hitler’s ‘racial’ interpretation gave it a particular virulence. It certainly fell on fertile ground as far as wider anti-Semitic prejudices were concerned; however, while anti-Semitism was undoubtedly a major theme for Hitler and for Nazi activists, it was less important as an element in the Nazi Party’s appeal to the wider population.3 At this broader level, Nazi ‘ideology’ was a somewhat ragbag collection of largely negative views combined with a utopian vision of a grandiose future coloured by nostalgic appeals to aspects of a mythical past. Thus, Nazism opposed what they saw as pernicious, potentially threatening tendencies of ‘modern’ capitalist society: the evils of big business (large department stores, supposedly often owned by Jews), international finance (‘Jewish’) and revolutionary communism. Nazis promoted a vision of a harmonious national community (Volksgemeinschaft) that would be racially pure (cleansed of the ‘pollution’ of Jews, hereditary degenerates and other supposedly racially or biologically inferior types), and that would overcome the class divisions that beset Imperial and Weimar Germany. Nazism claimed to be able to transcend the divisions and heal the wounds of capitalist society and to present a new way forwards to a great future, presenting a genuine alternative to both the discredited authoritarianism of the Imperial past and the ‘despicable’ democracy of the Weimar present. How this transcendence would look in detail and in reality was never fully spelled out: Hitler was able to appeal to a wide range of groups harbouring different resentments – and to allay suspicions on a number of fronts – precisely because he was never very specific on the details of the proposed new order. In addition to particular social grievances and fears, there was very widespread nationalist resentment about the Treaty of Versailles from which Hitler was able to benefit. But most important for the expanding appeal of Nazism were the economic developments in the closing years of the Weimar Republic.
Economic Crises and the Collapse of Democracy
The Weimar Republic had suffered since its inception from major economic problems. The means of financing the First World War – through loans and bonds rather than taxes – had laid the foundations for postwar inflation, which had been fuelled and exacerbated by government policies in connection with reparations in 1922–3. Even
