The Coming of the Third Reich (35 page)

A very different kind of backing was provided in October 1922 by the arrival in the Nazi Party, with his followers in Nuremberg, of Julius Streicher, another ex-soldier, sporting, like Hitler, the Iron Cross, and a founder-member of the German-Socialist Party after the war. Impressed by Hitler’s progress, Streicher brought so many supporters into the Nazi Party that it virtually doubled in size overnight. Protestant Franconia was an ideal recruiting-ground for Nazism, with its resentful peasantry, its susceptibility to the appeal of antisemitism and the absence of any dominant established political party. Streicher’s accession extended the Party’s influence significantly further northwards. But in acquiring Streicher, the Party also acquired a vicious antisemite whose extreme hatred of the Jews matched even Hitler’s, and a man of violence who carried a heavy whip in public and personally beat up his helpless opponents once he had achieved a position of power. In 1923 Streicher founded a sensational popular newspaper,
The Stormer (Der Stürmer),
which rapidly established itself as the place where screaming headlines introduced the most rabid attacks on Jews, full of sexual innuendo, racist caricatures, made-up accusations of ritual murder and titillating, semi-pornographic stories of Jewish men seducing innocent German girls. So extreme was the paper, and so obviously obsessive was its brutish-looking, shaven-headed editor, that Streicher never acquired a great deal of influence within the movement, whose leaders regarded him with some distaste, and the paper was even banned for a period under the Third Reich.

Yet Streicher was not just a thug. A former schoolteacher, he was also a poet whose lyrics have been described as ‘quite attractive’, and, like Hitler, he painted watercolours, though in his case only as a hobby. Streicher, too, fancied himself as an artist; he was not without education, he was a professional journalist and was also, therefore, in a sense, a bohemian like Hitler. His ideas, though expressed in an extreme form, were not particularly unusual in the right-wing circles of the day, and owed a lot, as he himself acknowledged, to the influence of prewar German antisemitism, particularly Theodor Fritsch. And Streicher’s antisemitism was in no sense on the outer fringe of the Nazi movement. Hitler, indeed, later commented that Streicher, in a way,
‘idealised
the Jew. The Jew is baser, fiercer, more diabolical than Streicher depicted him.’ He may not have been an effective administrator, Hitler conceded, and his sexual appetite led him into all kinds of trouble, but Hitler always remained loyal to him. At times, when it was important for Nazism to present a respectable face,
The Stormer
could be an embarrassment; but only as a matter of tactics, never as an issue of principle or belief.
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III

In 1923, Hitler and the Nazi Party felt no particular need to look respectable. Violence seemed the obvious way to power. The far-right Bavarian government of Gustav Ritter von Kahr, sympathetic to the paramilitaries, had fallen in September 1921. Since then, Kahr and his friends had been embroiled in intrigues against the government led by Eugen von Knilling and his Bavarian People’s Party. As many moderate conservatives were to do later on, Knilling and his allies felt that the Nazis were a threat, and disliked their violence, but considered that their heart was in the right place and their idealism only needed to be used in a more productive and healthy way. So they, too, were relatively tolerant of the Nazis’ activities. Moreover, on the one occasion on which they tried to crack down by banning a Nazi Party rally at the end of January 1923, fearing it would become violent, the army commander in Bavaria, General Hermann von Lossow, was contacted by Röhm and agreed to support Hitler’s right to hold the rally providing he gave a guarantee that it would be peaceful. Kahr, at this time regional governor of Upper Bavaria, supported him, and the Bavarian government backed down.
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Events now moved rapidly towards a climax. Much of the time they were beyond Hitler’s control. In particular, Ernst Röhm, quite independently from him, succeeded in getting the main paramilitary organizations in Bavaria together in a Working Community of Patriotic Fighting Leagues, which included some much larger groups than the Nazi brownshirts. These groups surrendered their weapons to the regular army, whose Bavarian units under General von Lossow were clearly readying themselves for the much-bruited march on Berlin and an armed confrontation with the French in the Ruhr, and they enrolled the paramilitaries as auxiliaries and started to train them. Into this witches’ brew of paramilitary conspiracy there now came General Ludendorff. An attempt by Hitler to seize the initiative by demanding the return of the brownshirts’ weapons from the army met with a cool rebuff. He was forced to yield to Ludendorff as the figurehead of the conspiracy when the paramilitaries staged a huge parade in Nuremberg at the beginning of September, with as many as 100,000 uniformed men taking part. Hitler was named political leader of the paramilitaries, but, far from being in control of the situation, he was being swept along by events.
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Röhm’s role in the reorganized paramilitary movement was crucial, and he now resigned as head of the small Nazi stormtrooper organization in order to concentrate on it. He was succeeded by a man who was to play a key role in the subsequent development of the Nazi movement and the Third Reich: Hermann Goring. Born in 1893 in Rosenheim, Bavaria, Goring was another man of action, but of a very different stamp from Röhm. He came from an upper-middle-class Bavarian background; his father had played a key role in the German colonization of Namibia before the war and was a convinced German imperialist. From 1905 to 1911 Göring attended military college, latterly in Berlin, and ever afterwards regarded himself as a Prussian soldier rather than a Bavarian. During the war, he became a well-known flying ace, ending it in command of the fighter squadron founded by the ‘Red Baron’ von Richthofen. His exploits as a pilot had earned him Germany’s highest military decoration, the
Pour le mérite,
and a popular reputation as a swashbuckling daredevil. Fighter pilots were widely regarded as a kind of modern knight in armour, whose derring-do contrasted dramatically with the dull, mechanized slaughter of the trenches, and Goring was lionized in aristocratic circles, strengthening his upper-crust social contacts by marrying in February 1922 a Swedish Baroness, Karin von Kantzow. Like many other wartime fighters, he continued to search for a life of action after the conflict was over, briefly belonging to a Free Corps, then becoming a show flier in Scandinavia, and finally, through the influence of his wife, finding his way into Hitler’s movement towards the end of 1922. At this time, therefore, Goring was a dashing, handsome, romantic figure, whose exploits were celebrated in numerous adulatory popular books and magazine articles.

Goring’s longing for action found its fulfilment in the Nazi movement. Ruthless, energetic and extremely egotistical, Goring nevertheless fell completely under Hitler’s spell from the very start. Loyalty and faithfulness were for him the highest virtues. Like Röhm, Goring too regarded politics as warfare, a form of armed combat in which neither justice nor morality had a part to play; the strong won, the weak perished, the law was a mass of ‘legalistic’ rules that were there to be broken if the need arose. For Goring, the end always justified the means, and the end was always what he conceived of as the national interest of Germany, which he considered had been betrayed by Jews, democrats and revolutionaries in 1918. Goring’s aristocratic connections, his chiselled good looks, his cosmopolitan mastery of French, Italian and Swedish, and his reputation as a chivalrous fighter-pilot persuaded many that he was a moderate, a diplomatist even; Hindenburg and many like him thought of Goring as the acceptable face of Nazism, an authoritarian conservative like themselves. The appearance was deceptive; he was as ruthless, as violent and as extreme as any of the leading Nazis. These varying qualities, allied to the rapidly growing abnegation of his will before Hitler’s, made him the ideal choice as the new leader of the stormtroopers in place of Röhm early in 1923.
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With Goring in charge, the stormtroopers could now be expected to toe the Nazi line again. Preparations went ahead, in conjunction with the wider paramilitary movement, which Röhm steered as far as he was able, for a rising throughout the spring and early summer of 1923. The crisis finally came when the Reich government in Berlin was forced to resign on 13 August. Its successor, a broad coalition that included the Social Democrats, was led by Gustav Stresemann, a right-wing liberal nationalist who over the coming years was to prove himself the Republic’s most skilled, most subtle and most realistic politician. Stresemann realized that the campaign of passive resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr had to be ended, and the galloping hyperinflation brought under control. He instituted a policy of ‘fulfilment’, in which Germany would fulfil the terms of the Peace Settlement, including the payment of reparations, while lobbying behind the scenes for them to be changed. His policy met with notable success during the next six years, during which he held the position of Reich Foreign Minister. But to the extreme nationalists it was nothing more than national betrayal. Realizing that they were now likely to stage an uprising, the Bavarian government appointed Kahr as a General State Commissioner with full powers to maintain order. Backed by Lossow and the police chief, Hans Ritter von Seisser, Kahr banned a series of meetings planned by the Nazis for 27 September while they pursued their own plans for the overthrow of the government in Berlin: Pressure mounted on all sides for action; amongst the rank-and-file of the paramilitaries, as Hitler was repeatedly warned, it was becoming almost irresistible.
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In Berlin, the army leader General Hans von Seeckt refused to go along with the plans of Lossow, Seisser and Kahr. He preferred to remove Stresemann’s government by backstairs intrigue, which indeed he eventually did, though it was succeeded by another coalition in which Stresemann remained Foreign Minister. Feverish negotiations in Munich failed to produce any unity between the Bavarian army under Lossow, the police under Seisser, and the paramilitaries, whose political representative was of course Hitler. Aware that he would lose the support of the paramilitaries if he dithered any longer, and worried that Kahr was himself considering action, Hitler, now backed by Ludendorff, decided on a putsch. The Bavarian government would be arrested, and Kahr and his allies would be forced to join with the paramilitaries in a march on Berlin. The date for the putsch was set, more under the pressure of events than by any search for a symbolic date, for 9 November, the anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolution of 1918 that had overthrown the Kaiser’s regime. On the evening of 8 November, Hitler and a body of heavily armed stormtroopers broke into a meeting addressed by Kahr in the
Bürgerbräukeller,
a beer-cellar just outside the centre of Munich. Hitler ordered one of his men to fire a pistol-shot into the ceiling to silence the crowd, then announced that the hall was surrounded. The Bavarian government, he declared, was deposed. While Goring calmed the audience, Hitler took Kahr, Lossow and Seisser into an adjoining room and explained that he would march on Berlin, installing himself at the head of a new Reich government; Ludendorff would take over the national army. They would be rewarded for their support with important positions themselves. Returning to speak to the crowd, Hitler won them over with a dramatic plea for backing in what he called his action against ‘the November criminals of 1918’. Kahr and his companions had no option but to return to the podium and, joined now by Ludendorff, declare their support.
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But translating histrionic demonstrations into political power was not so easy. The Nazis’ plans for a putsch were half-baked. Röhm occupied the army headquarters in Munich, and Nazi units also took over the police headquarters, but other buildings including, crucially, the army barracks, remained in government hands, and while Hitler went into the city to try and sort things out, Ludendorff released Kahr and the other prisoners, who promptly backtracked on their enforced compliance with the plot and immediately got in touch with the army, the police and the media to repudiate Hitler’s actions. Back in the beer-cellar, Hitler and Ludendorff decided to march on the city centre. They gathered about two thousand armed supporters, each of whom had been paid 2 billion marks (worth just over three dollars on this particular day) from a hoard of more than 14,000 billion marks ‘confiscated’ from two supposedly Jewish banknote printers in raids carried out by brownshirt squads on Hitler’s orders. The column set off at midday on
₉
November and, encouraged by the cheers of their supporters, they marched through the centre of the city in the direction of the Ministry of War. At the end of the street they were met by an armed cordon of police. According to the official report, they pressed pistols with their safety catches off against the policemen’s chests, spat on them and pointed fixed bayonets in their direction. Then someone on one side or the other - there were conflicting claims - fired a shot. For half a minute the air was filled with whizzing bullets as both sides let fly. Goring fell, shot in the leg; Hitler dropped, or was pushed, to the ground, dislocating his shoulder. Scheubner-Richter, Hitler’s diplomat friend and connection to patrons in high places, was killed outright. Altogether, fourteen marchers were shot dead, and four policemen. As the police moved in to arrest Ludendorff, Streicher, Röhm and many others, Goring managed to get away, fleeing first to Austria, then Italy, before settling in Sweden, becoming addicted in the process to the morphine he took to relieve the pain of his wound. Hitler was taken off, his arm in a sling, to Hanfstaengl’s country house, where he was arrested on 11 November. The putsch had come to an ignominious end.
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