With the end of the Great War in 1918, Germany had lost a Kaiser and gained a democracy. In 1919 she added a liberal constitution, granting her citizens the rights of free speech and organization. New political clubs and parties exploded on the scene. Superficially, it would seem as though Germans were taking advantage of their new liberties. And yet from the very start many, especially veterans and intellectuals, sought to destroy the freedoms they had just won. Nazism, of course, is the movement that prevailed, but Nazism had numerous forebears and parallels. The most important of these were the post-war militias, “Freikorps,” that organized to fight communism in 1918. Indeed, at the time of the Beerhall Putsch in 1923 the Nazi party was just one star in a whole constellation of radical-conservative political groups. Meanwhile those clubs and organizations devoted to democracy, especially the Social Democrats (SPD), failed to mobilize the same energy as their radical-conservative counterparts.
But that is the common narrative: Hitler destroys democracy. Too often overlooked in discussions of Weimar's fall is the role of the traditional radical-conservatives. Yet in the key years of 1932-34 fascism triumphed not in the streets but in the salon clubs of the radical right.
The communist uprising of 1918 summoned into existence its opposite, the right-wing Freikorps, whose influence would be so crucial to the fate of Weimar. Called to fight the uprising by a reluctant Social Democratic government, acting through the Minister of Defense Gustav Noske, these militias gathered around charismatic NCO’s and officers of the former German army. Some of these militias were moderate and respected the government, at least in principle, like the rifle corps of Ludwig Maercker that defended the constitutional convention in Weimar. They preferred a moderate socialist government to a radical communist one. Closer to the political center as well were the Einwohnerwehren citizen defense groups who, while brutal in crushing the communist uprising in Munich in 1920, ostensibly pledged loyalty to the government, and the Stahlhelm veterans organization of Franz Seldte that attracted hundreds of thousands to its banners in the 20's. Both were lavishly armed by the official military and were more than the political clubs and “fire brigades” they pretended to be, but reserves of manpower for a military limited to 100,000 men by the Versailles Treaty. [1]
Whatever the pretensions of these groups, many of their members did participate in the diseased social life of Bavaria after the bloody suppression of the communist uprising. With communism on the run, and with the Reichswehr stomping out the more radical of the Freikorp movements while absorbing the more moderate, the conservative government of Gustav von Kahr came to shelter many a former freebooter. Here in Munich is where an upstart intellectual named Anton Drexler founded the National Socialist party in hopes of winning a broader base for the forces of reaction and antisemitism, and was introduced to a young fanatic named Adolf Hitler. But the NSDAP was one of seventy-three such racist clubs in Germany, and one of fifteen in Munich alone. [2] It was not the Nazi party by itself, but a coalition of radical right-wing groups that marched on von Kahr's government in 1923.
Even before the Beerhall Putsch, the Organization Consul, organized by Captain Ehrhardt from amongst the most extreme of the Freikorpers, had already struck much more serious blows to the young democracy than anything Hitler was capable of in 1923. In 1921 they assassinated Matthias Erzberger, the Catholic Zentrum politician who had signed the Treaty of Versailles and, in 1922, the Jewish Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau who had just returned Germany to the world stage by negotiating a treaty of friendship with Russia. [3] In other words, before the forces of democracy could even stabilize the young republic the fanatics of the right had succeeded in killing two of its finest statesmen. Such men as the Organization Consul assassins would find a ready home in the Nazi movement as it grew in the 1920’s.
But the triumph of radical conservatism was never a foregone conclusion. In spite of Nazi propaganda to the contrary, and in spite of the splintering off of the communists and Independent Socialists, the Social Democrats were successful in retaining the loyalty of the masses of adult factory workers right up until 1933. Their success stemmed in no small part from a complex and well-established system of social outreach programs dating back to the 1890’s, from theater to aid for alcoholics. [4] Even more convincing to the average worker was a scheme of social insurance benefits paid in case of illness or unemployment. Even if many workers merely collected their benefits without participating actively in the party, the SPD commanded the loyalty of a multitude. Compare the SPD’s 1,000,000 members in 1930 [5] to the 200,000 members (and probably less) in the Nazi Party [6] at the same time.
The SPD had its hands on levers other than its voter base. For one thing, a militia that could go toe-to-toe with the Stahlhelm, but, even more importantly, the power of the general strike. They used it once to save the national SPD government of Frederich Ebert from the right-wing Kapp-Luttwitz putsch in 1920; their unwillingness to deploy it in 1932 when Chancellor Franz von Papen unconstitutionally dissolved an SPD government in the State of Prussia speaks to the sapping of their strength. Though union leadership had been prepared to give the order to strike, Minister of Defense Kurt von Schleicher convinced some of the key players that their positions were secure in the post-Papen order, and the strike never materialized. [7] The episode illustrates the determination and ardor of the radical-conservatives and the comparative weakness of labor.
Though von Papen and von Schleicher deserve a great deal of credit for crushing the forces of democracy, they were not Nazis. Nor were they unaffiliated fanatics of the Captain Ehrhardt variety. What sort of men, therefore, were Papen and Schleicher? The question in crucial, for they were the bridge between traditional radical-conservativism and Hitlerism.
We can trace their brand of politics to 1892, when the Conservative Party adopted an antisemitic agenda in a bid for popular support. [8] From this time, conservatism was increasingly marked by a radical program - that is, paradoxically, a revolutionary program. Radical-conservatism had roots too in the youth movement of the late 19th century in which so many future Nazis participated. These groups spurned capitalism, industrialization, university learning, "reason" and liberalism, yet went on to participate despairingly in the economic and social life of a nation they always believed to be corrupt. Finally, many of these radical conservatives had participated in the Pan-German movement that flourished during the war, when it agitated for impossible annexations. In short, the radical conservatives find their context in a much older racial-imperial and anti-liberal movement.
By 1932, these conservatives were organized into clubs of their own, clubs that often claimed to be above and apart from politics but were really set against liberalism and parliamentary rule. They envisioned a society organized along racial lines, though they were not always openly antisemitic. Papen schemed many of his power plays of 1932 in the Herrenklub, an organization that traced its lineage to the Juni-Klub of conservative intellectual Moeller van den Bruck. The Juni-Klub club had advocated against democracy and the existence of political parties, and had called for putting power in the hands of a disinterested executive committee. Van den Bruck looked forward to a mystical future, a Third Reich after the name of his book, that would bring fuhrer-leadership and Germany’s great destiny. Politicians as diverse as Otto Strasser, a left-wing drop out of the Nazi movement, and Heinrich Bruning, the Zentrum politician that ruled by presidential decree from 1930-1932, frequented the club. [9]
Theirs was not a popular program. It was a program for disaffected intellectuals and aristocrats who loathed liberalism and sought a cure for Bolshevism. In other words, for conservatives like Papen who should have been defending liberal institutions but were instead groping towards a vague destiny of renewed greatness, a dreamworld where the masses would abandon social democracy and return to obedience. Fritz Stern has said movingly of the “Germanic ideology” of these radical conservatives:
But, we must ask, could there have been any other ‘Third Reich’? Was there a safe stopping place in this wild leap from political reality? Can one abjure reason, glorify force, prophesy the age of the imperial dictator, can one condemn all existing institutions, without preparing the triumph of irresponsibility? [10]
Though it is natural to fixate on acts of revolt, the assassinations of Rathenau and Erzberger, the Beerhall Putsch, or Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, the war for Germany’s soul may have been won in the Herrenklub, where a dreaming and misguided coterie put its faith in a mystical future. For it was von Papen, driven on by the dream of a radical-conservative state, who urged Hitler's appointment upon President Hindenburg. Here was a chance, Papen thought, to join the ideology of the Herrenklub to a popular figure that would enchant the masses. It was his political ignorance as much as Hitler’s cunning that created the Third Reich, and much the same may be said of the SPD and labor unions during the crucial days of Hitler’s rise in 1932 and 1933.