The Days of Struggle

The Rebirth of the NSDAP (1925 - 1930)

With the failed Putsch from 1923, the Führer was sent to prison and the NSDAP got disbanded.

After his release from prison on 20th December 1924, the Führer was allowed to stay in Germany even though he was an Austrian.

The 16th February 1925 the Führer convinced Bavarian authorities to lift the ban and the NSDAP was founded anew on the 26th February 1925.

The NSDAP was divided into the "Leadership Corps" (Korps der politischen Leiter) appointed by the Führer and the general membership (Parteimitglieder). The party and the SA were kept separate and the legal aspect of the party's work was emphasised. In a sign of this, the party began to admit women. The SA and the SS members (the latter founded in 1925 as the Führer's bodyguard, and known originally as the Schutzkommando) had to all be regular party members. They established their headquarters in the Schellingstraße 50 in Münich. This building at one time housed the photographic studio of Heinrich Hoffmann, official photographer of the Führer. The entrance to the Party offices was in the rear courtyard.

Hitler, who had no administrative ability, left the party organisation to the head of the secretariat, Philipp Bouhler, the party treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz and business manager Max Amann. The party had a capable propaganda head in Gregor Strasser, who was promoted to national organizational leader in January 1928. These men gave the party efficient recruitment and organizational structures.

In July 1925 the first volume of Mein Kampf and in December 1926 the second volume were released.

Hitler released the NSDAP from its alliance with the Völkische and began reorganizing it into a leader party with the aim of a legal takeover of power. Decisive steps towards this were taken at the Bamberg Führer Conference on February 14, 1926, in which Hitler was able to prevail against a group around Gregor Strasser with his ideas. This was completed with the resolution on the party statutes of May 22, 1926, which corresponded entirely to Hitler's ideas.

After the Austrian “sister party” DNSAP split up several times over the question of whether to subordinate themselves to the German NSDAP or to remain organizationally independent, the Viennese high school professor Richard Suchewirth founded the National Socialist German Workers' Association in May 1926. Soon afterwards it renamed itself the NSDAP - Hitler movement and functioned more or less like a regional association of the German NSDAP. In addition, there was also an Austrian branch of the SA, the Vaterländischer Schutzbund, which was led by Hermann Reschny. The leader of the Austrian NSDAP was the retired Colonel Friedrich Jankovic. In Austria's elections, the NSDAP remained insignificant: in the 1927 National Council election it received 0.76%, in 1930 it was 3%.

In 1927, the first annual party gathering in Nuremberg took place.

In the German Reich, the NSDAP was only one of several anti-Semitic and ethnic parties until the Reichstag elections in 1928, but showed its outstanding position in this spectrum at the latest by the Reichstag elections. In 1929, through joint agitation with the DNVP (Deutschnationale Volkspartei) and the Stahlhelm, as part of the campaign against the Young Plan, the party gained nationwide attention.

The widely read newspapers of the major German publisher Alfred Hugenberg made the NSDAP and especially Adolf Hitler known throughout the Reich, although the campaign itself failed in December 1929 with only 15 percent approval. This and the following agitations and election campaigns were financed less by donations from large-scale industry, which was deterred by “socialism” in the party name and preferred to support the DVP and DNVP (individual National Socialist heavy industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen and Emil Kirdorf were exceptions). More important were grants from medium-sized industry, but above all the comparatively high membership fees (a financing instrument that the National Socialists had taken over from the SPD) and the entrance fees to events with the Führer or Dr. Goebbels, for which between 50 pfennigs and two marks were required. The average monthly wage of a worker was 180 marks, a student or an unemployed person with a family had to get by on around 80 marks.

Between 1925 and 1930, the party's membership rose from 27,000 to 130,000. The NSDAP took advantage of the global economic crisis and the resulting mass impoverishment, which supported its anti-capitalist, anti-liberal and, above all, antisemitic program against international financial jewry in the population. The Roman salute was introduced within the party as early as 1926. After the death of Horst Wessel in 1930, the Horst Wessel song also became the official party anthem of the NSDAP.

After the devastatingly poor result in the Reichstag elections in 1928, when the NSDAP had to be content with 2.6 percent of the vote, all party branches were instructed to reduce antisemitism in their propaganda, which was a deterrent to bourgeois circles in particular. From now on, the NSDAP focused on other issues such as foreign policy, whereupon its share of the votes in the state elections in 1929 and 1930 rose to over 10 percent (for example in Saxony with 14.4 percent). This was also due to the presidential cabinets, which were not legitimized by elections. Young people and young men in particular joined the Hitler Youth and the SA. The National Socialist politicians gave up trying to win over the working class in particular, which led to the splitting off of a “left” wing, including Otto Strasser. The NSDAP received more and more support from peasants (the agricultural prices had fallen noticeably from 1928), craftsmen and retailers as well as from the ranks of students and civil servants.

In this way, the NSDAP was able to use the global economic crisis, the effects of which were particularly noticeable in the German Reich, to gain a mass base in those voters who had previously voted for the DNVP or one of the other small national parties or who had been disappointed by the bourgeois parties (DVP and DDP).

The Battle at the polls (1930 - 1932)

On May 26, 1930, the NSDAP bought the "Braunes Haus" for 805,864 Reichsmarks after the rooms at Schellingstraße 50, where the party headquarters had been since 1925, had become too small.

The party's nominal Deputy Leader was Rudolf Hess, but he had no real power in the party. By the early 1930s, the senior leaders of the party after Hitler were Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring. Beneath the Leadership Corps were the party's regional leaders, the Gauleiters, each of whom commanded the party in his Gau ("region"). Goebbels began his ascent through the party hierarchy as Gauleiter of Berlin-Brandenburg in 1926. Streicher was Gauleiter of Franconia, where he published his antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer. Beneath the Gauleiter were lower-level officials, the Kreisleiter ("county leaders"), Zellenleiter ("cell leaders") and Blockleiter ("block leaders"). This was a strictly hierarchical structure in which orders flowed from the top and unquestioning loyalty was given to superiors. Only the SA retained some autonomy.

The dissolution of the Reichstag by President Paul von Hindenburg in accordance with Article 25 of the Constitution was therefore very convenient for the National Socialists. In the Reichstag elections on September 14, 1930, the NSDAP was the second largest party behind the SPD with 18.3 percent of the votes cast. As early as January 1930, the NSDAP entered coalition governments in Thuringia ("Baum-Frick government") and later in the year in Braunschweig (Küchenthal cabinet). Despite the government participation, it was still perceived as an opposition to the "system". The propaganda of the NSDAP primarily focused on foreign policy and social issues. In her polemics against the Versailles Treaty and especially against the Young Plan, which were portrayed as the cause of impoverishment in the Great Depression, she summarized both topics. According to an instruction from Dr. Goebbels in 1928, party propaganda clearly held back with anti-Semitic polemics.

Since she had expanded her party-political apparatus organizationally, she was able to offer organizations and propaganda specially tailored to her for each social group. For the industrial workers, for example, there was the National Socialist factory cell organization and the Hib-Aktion (“Into the companies”). For smaller shopkeepers there was the National Socialist Fighting League for the commercial middle class, which fought against the department stores and uniform price stores that were economically superior to the small specialty shops. In the country, the NSDAP took over the themes of the rural people's movement and concentrated on its blood-and-soil ideology and its goal of decoupling the German economy from the world market.

Thanks to its broadly differentiated propaganda, the NSDAP succeeded in winning over voters from all social groups and classes. Although the traditional Catholic milieu and that of the organized industrial workers proved to be less susceptible than the other milieus, they did not remain immune to the temptation either. It was able to gain a disproportionately large number of supporters among the old medium-sized businesses, among small tradespeople, shopkeepers and owners of handicraft businesses. From this finding, party researcher Jürgen W. Falter draws the conclusion that the NSDAP was a "people's party with a middle class belly" that was able to integrate the sometimes diametrically divergent values ​​and interests of all sections of the electorate.

In October 1931, at the insistence of Hitler and Alfred Hugenberg, the NSDAP and DNVP joined forces with other nationalist associations on the Harzburg Front as opponents of the Weimar Republic, but the alliance did not last long: just a few months later they were fighting each other in the election campaign for the 1932 presidential election. Nevertheless, Hindenburg was not re-elected as Reich President until the second ballot - Hitler came in second; In the state elections in Prussia, Bavaria, Wuerttemberg and other states of the Reich, the party achieved significant success and in the Reichstag elections on July 31, 1932, it was also the strongest party in the Reichstag. Although the party went through a serious crisis in 1932, which culminated in the failures in the Reichstag election on November 6th, it was able to recover. The trend reversal was achieved in the state elections in Lippe on January 15, 1933: the membership of the NSDAP increased to around 850,000. The electoral successes can also be traced back to the successful mobilization of non-voters, who no longer trusted the parties in power to overcome the global economic crisis.

Both Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and his sccessors von Papen and von Schleicher each thought at least temporarily of a right-wing coalition of the center, DNVP and NSDAP in order to bring about a reform of the Reich without the participation of the SPD. This failed because of Hitler's insistence on the chancellorship.