From The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William Shirer, 1960) pp118-21
The membership of the National Socialist Party in that anniversary year—1928—was 108,000. Small as the figure was, it was slowly growing. A fortnight after leaving prison at the end of 1924, Hitler had hurried to see Dr. Heinrich Held, the Prime Minister of Bavaria and the head of the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party. On the strength of his promise of good behavior (Hitler was still on parole) Held had lifted the ban on the Nazi Party and its newspaper. “The wild beast is checked,” Held told his Minister of Justice, Guertner. “We can afford to loosen the chain.” The Bavarian Premier was one of the first, but by no means the last, of Germany’s politicians to fall into this fatal error of judgment.
The Voelkischer Beobachter reappeared on February 26, 1925, with a long editorial written by Hitler, entitled “A New Beginning.” The next day he spoke at the first mass meeting of the resurrected Nazi Party in the Buergerbraukeller, which he and his faithful followers had last seen on the morning of November 9, a year and a half before, when they set out on their ill-fated march. Many of the faithful were absent. Eckart and Scheubner-Richter were dead. Goering was in exile. Ludendorff and Roehm had broken with the leader. Rosenberg, feuding with Streicher and Esser, was sulking and stayed away. So did Gregor Strasser, who with Ludendorff had led the National Socialist German Freedom movement while Hitler was behind bars and the Nazi Party itself banned. When Hitler asked Anton Drexler to preside at the meeting the old locksmith and founder of the party told him to go to the devil. Nevertheless some four thousand followers gathered in the beer hall to hear Hitler once again and he did not disappoint them. His eloquence was as moving as ever, At the end of a two-hour harangue, the crowd roared with applause, Despite the many desertions and the bleak prospects, Hitler made it clear that he still considered himself the dictatorial leader of the party. “I alone lead the movement, and no one can impose conditions on me so long as I personally bear the responsibility,” he declared, and added, “Once more I bear the whole responsibility for everything that occurs in the movement.”
Hitler had gone to the meeting with his mind made up on two objectives which he intended henceforth to pursue. One was to concentrate all power in his own hands. The other was to re-establish the Nazi Party as a political organization which would seek power exclusively through constitutional means. He had explained the new tactics to one of his henchmen, Karl Ludecke, while still in prison: “When I resume active work it will be necessary to pursue a new policy. Instead of working to achieve power by armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies. If outvoting them takes longer than outshooting them, at least the result will be guaranteed by their own constitution. Any lawful process is slow . . . Sooner or later we shall have a majority—and after that, Germany.”? On his release from Landsberg, he had assured the Bavarian Premier that the Nazi Party would henceforth act within the framework of the constitution.
But he allowed himself to be carried away by the enthusiasm of the crowd in his reappearance at the Buergerbraukeller on February 27. His threats against the State were scarcely veiled. The republican regime, as well as the Marxists and the Jews, was “the enemy.” And in his peroration he had shouted, “To this struggle of ours there are only two possible issues: either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass over theirs!”
The “wild beast,” in this, his first public appearance after his imprisonment, did not seem “checked” at all. He was again threatening the State with violence, despite his promise of good behavior. The government of Bavaria promptly forbade him to speak again in public—a ban that was to last two years. The other states followed suit. This was a heavy blow to a man whose oratory had brought him so far. A silenced Hitler was a defeated Hitler, as ineffective as a handcuffed pugilist in a ring. Or so most people thought.
But again they were wrong. They forgot that Hitler was an organizer as Well as a spellbinder. Curbing his ire at being forbidden to speak in public, he set to work with furious intent to rebuild the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and to make of it an organization such as Germany had never seen before. He meant to make it like the Army—a state within astate. The first job was to attract dues-paying members. By the end of 1925 they numbered just 27,000. The going was slow, but each year some progress was made: 49,000 members in 1926; 72,000 in 1927; 108,000 in 1928; 178,000 in 1929,
More important was the building up of an intricate party structure which corresponded to the organization of the German government and indeed of German society. The country was divided into districts, or Gaue, which corresponded roughly with the thirty-four Reichstag electoral districts and at the head of which was a gauleiter appointed by Hitler. There were an additional seven Gaue for Austria, Danzig, the Saar and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. A Gau was divided into Kreise—circles —and presided over by a Kreisleiter. The next smallest party unit was an Ortsgruppe—a local group—and in the cities these were further subdivided into street cells and blocks.
The political organization of the Nazi Party was divided into two groups: P.O. I, as it was known, designed to attack and undermine the government, and P.O. II to establish a state within a state. Thus the second group had departments of agriculture, justice, national economy, interior and labor—and, with an eye to the future, of race and culture, and of engineering. P.O. I had departments of foreign affairs and of labor unions and a Reich Press Office. The Propaganda Division was a separate and elaborate office.
Though some of the party roughnecks, veterans of street fighting and beerhouse brawls, opposed bringing women and children into the Nazi Party, Hitler soon provided organizations for them too. The Hitler Youth took in youngsters from fifteen to eighteen who had their own departments of culture, schools, press, propaganda, “defense sports,” etc., and those from ten to fifteen were enrolled in the Deutsches Jungvolk. For the girls there was the Bund Deutscher Maedel and for the women the N. S. Frauenschaften. Students, teachers, civil servants, doctors, lawyers, jurists—all had their separate organizations, and there was a Nazi Kuturbund to attract the intellectuals and artists.
After considerable difficulties the S.A. was reorganized into an armed band of several hundred thousand men to protect Nazi meetings, to break up the meetings of others and to generally terrorize those who opposed Hitler. Some of its leaders also hoped to see the S.A. supplant the Regular Army when Hitler came to power. To prepare for this a special office under General Franz Ritter von Epp was set up, called the Wehr politische Amt. Its five divisions concerned themselves with such problems as external and internal defense policy, defense forces, popular defense potential, and so on. But the brown-shirted S.A. never became much more than a motley mob of brawlers. Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S-A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can.
To have at hand a more dependable band Hitler created the SS~ Schutzstaffel—put their members in black uniforms similar to those worn by the Italian Fascisti and made them swear a special oath of loyalty to him personally. At first the S.S. was little more than a bodyguard for the Fuehrer. Its first leader was a newspaperman named Berchtold. As he preferred the relative quiet of the newsroom of the Voelkischer Beobachter to playing at cop and soldier, he was replaced by one Erhard Heiden, a former police stool pigeon of unsavory reputation. It was not until 1929 that Hitler found the man he was looking for as the ideal leader of the S.S., in the person of a chicken farmer in the village of Waldtrudering, near Munich, a mild-mannered fellow whom people mistook (as did this author when he first met him) for a small-town schoolmaster and whose name was Heinrich Himmler. When Himmler took over the SS. it numbered some two hundred men. By the time he finished his job with it, the S.S. dominated Germany and was a name that struck terror throughout occupied Europe.
At the top of the pyramid of the intricate party organization stood Adolf Hitler with the highfalutin title of Partei-und-Oberster-S.A.Fuehrer, Vorsitzender der N.S.D.A.V.—which may be translated as “Supreme Leader of the Party and the S.A., Chairman of the National Socialist German Labor Organization.” Directly attached to his office was the Reich Directorate (Reichsleitung) which was made up of the top bosses of the party and such useful officials as the “Reich Treasurer” and the “Reich Business Manager.” Visiting the palatial Brown House in Munich, the national headquarters of the party, during the last years of the Republic, one got the impression that here indeed were the offices of a state within a state. That, no doubt, was the impression Hitler wished to convey, for it helped to undermine confidence, both domestic and foreign, in the actual German State, which he was trying to overthrow.
But Hitler was intent on something more important than making an impression. Three years after he came to power, in a speech to the “old fighters” at the Buergerbrau on the anniversary evening of November 9, 1936, he explained one of the objectives he had had in building the party up into such a formidable and all-embracing organization. “We recognized,” he said, in recalling the days when the party was being reformed after the putsch, “‘that it is not enough to overthrow the old State, but that the new State must previously have been built up and be practically ready to one’s hand. . . . In 1933 it was no longer a question of overthrowing a state by an act of violence; meanwhile the new State had been built up and all that there remained to do was to destroy the last temnants of the old State—and that took but a few hours.”
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