🚀 go-pugleaf

The past is our guide to current events, especially when one of the players
in the past is still around today.

(Continuing our documentation of  interwar Germany, of Gottfried Feder's
"interest slavery" doctrines, of grass-roots German populism and of how the
German financial elites and military took over a left-populist movement
using thier agent Adolf Hitler, the anti-populist, who captured control and
created for them his Nazism for the aristocracy, for Big Business and Big
Finance, soon murdering murdering the populists who were tricked into bring
him to power.
Otto Strasser was the German populist who tried to stop Hitler from doing
all this.
------------

   In addition to Gottfried Feder, another NSDAP populist was Otto Strasser
(Otto StraBer*)--an activist's activist, strongly anti-Hitler  throughout a
career that ended in his murder in Hitler's 1934  purge of populism.   I am
including information about Strasser here as well as about Otto Wagener
(early leader of the  NSBO labor movement)and Ernst R�hm (the homosexual
fist-fighting leader who beat the communists on the streets with the
not-surprisingly independent and "left"- minded Sturmabteilung) --  all
three of the latter viewed by Hitler as a mortal danger to his clandestine
cooperation with finance capitalism against grass-roots populism.

    Dick Eastman
    Every man is responsible to every other man.
-----------

       "...it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
         it was the epoch of belief,  it was the epoch of incredulity,
         it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
         it was the spring of hope,  it was the winter of despair,
         we had everything before us, we had nothing before us ...
         -- in short, the perior was  so far like the present period,
         that some of the noisiest authorities insisted on its being
         received, for good or for evil, in the supurlative degree
         of comparison only."
                       --Charles Dickens, Tale of Two CIties

(*Note: The original text uses a German letter not found in the English
alphabet (or my choice of fonts), for which I have substituted  "s"  as in
the names "Strasser" and"Hess.")

Note:  The term "populism:"  I do not know if the word "populist" has any
meaning outside the United States.  Here it means, roughly, anti-capitalist,
anti-conservative, anti-elite, pro-government, pro-limited centralized power
that is locally and regionally actuated, pro-small business,
pro-protectionism (i.e., looking at  all dimensions of  foreign trade that
affect the general welfare, not just profitability for the powerful few),
anti-interventionist (pro-"Isolationist" only in the sense of politics,
alliances, war, and finance -- but not against  trade of goods and services,
aside from moderate
tariffs of a kind that would defend against slave economies driving local
middle-class-sustaining small business out of existence).  Of course
populism is always opposed to the special privilege accorded large
corporations and investment banks and sometimes favors exappropriation
(redistributio)  of wealth to break up the inordinate power that  monopoly
riches always end up using to control politicans, shaping of law,  write
treaties,dictate policy, and impose the conditioning (education and news)
that will make the masses docilely their own economic suppression.
Historically, in the United States, populism has always focused its
opposition on the "establishment" banking interests, i.e., the money lords.
Populism is not skinheadism -- its ideas are all about economics and
economic class, not at all about race, religion, or culture.  (WIlliam
Jennings Bryan and Huey Long are two leading examples.)  I suppose I have
described what Marx would call the ideology of the "petit bourgeois" -- and,
if I may say so,  a mighty fine ideology it is too.
DE

------------------

Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, trans. by Elborg and
Forster and Larry Jones (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1989)

   "In Hitler's mind, his own claim to absolute leadership and ideological
unity were simply two sides of the same coin.  As he countered Strasser's
efforts by summoning the leaders of the party to a conferene in Bamberg in
February 1926, he was acting out of a twofold motive.  The external occasion
for his intervention was the decision of the party's leaders in the north to
side with the Left and against national conservatives in supporting the
referendum for the expropriation of the German ruling houses.  Hitler's
appeal to the principle of law to block this initiative was no more
convincing than the anti-Semitic campaign he launched shortly thereafter.
Strasser felt abandoned by his partisans, above all by Goebbels, who
experienced his 'conversion on the road to Damascus' in Bamberg and defected
to Hitler; obliged to withdraw his draft program, Strasser gave in on one
point after another in order to avoid an open break with Hitler.

 "...By calling for unity, eschewing personal attacks, and showering his
opponents with signs of his personal trust while at the same time demanding
their unconditional loyalty, Hitler was able to disarm the emerging
opposition and enhance his own personal prestige by restoring the outward
unity of the movement (in 1926 --DE).  It was equally characteristic  of
Hitler's leadership  style that he refrained from  taking a position on the
merits of the conflict itself, invested the controversial Gottfried Feder
with responsibility for the party program, and appointed Gregor Strasser to
the central committee, where he was  given the task of coordinating the
party's propaganda effort.  Shortly after the conference Hitler also
appointed Franz Pfeffer von Salomon chief of the SA and Goebbels, by now an
unabashed Hitler zealot, district leader in Berlin." (P. 328)

   "The group of district leaders who were most intimately involved in the
everyday work of the party realized full well that Hitler was indispensable
as a symbol of the party's unity and as a purveyor of ideas.  Privately the
Strasser brothers, Kaufmann, Pfeffer von Salomon, and initially Goebbles as
well harbored misgivings about Hitler's leadership style and his tactical
acumen.  They criticized his poor understanding of human nature, his
excessively ambitious plans, and his tendency to avoid conflicts and
decisions.  Even though Gregor Strasser went along with the cult of the
leader, which was reflected in the obligatory 'Heil Hitler' greeting in
1926, he felt a strong sense of personal distance from the party leader at
the same time he recognized his undisputed powers of intuition and his
visonary gifts.  Strasser viewed Hitler more as an artist than as a
practitioner of Realpolitic and felt that as such he was incapable of 'well
thought-out systematic work' and did not have 'both feet on the ground.'
Such people, he said, can sometimes achieve unprecedented effects, if they
can do it at a single stroke and if others are ready to draw the necessary
conclusions before a reaction has time to materialize.'  Strasser was fully
aware that Hitler's propensity for autosuggestion, and his belief, fostered
by partial success, in his 'personal infallibility' made it impossible to
counter his intuitions with logical arguments.  Though deeply impressed by
Hitler's dilettantish pronunciamentos about the nature of the world, Pfeffer
von Salomon was concerned that the Fuhrer would lose all sense of
proportion.  It was therefore important, as he confided to Otto Wagener,
the deputy commander of the SA and one of the party's future specialists on
economic affairs, 'that those around him keep a clear perspective regarding
the true measure of things' (das Mass* der Dinge nicht aus den Augen
verlieren).  Strasser shared this view and conducted his policy accordingly.

   "The draft of Strasser's program that Hitler had dismissed so cavalierly
contained the strategic elements of what has come to be known as the NSDAP's
'urban plan.'  This strategy was based on the premise that the only way in
which the NSDAP could hope to tap the socialist parties' electoral reserve
was to stress the socialist elements of its own program and to formulate a
program of constructive  social policies.  At the same time, the draft
represented an attempt to commit Hitler to some kind of program.  Aside from
the fact that the Strasser draft replaced Gottfried Feder's appeal for an
end to the bondage of interest slavery with a more realistic assessment of
the existing economic system, differences between it and the
Twenty-Five-Point Program were slight.  A number of counterdrafts were
submitted, among them a much more radical proposal by Goebbles that has not
survived as well as an expos�  by Pfeffer von Salomon, whose radically
determined social Darwinism anticipated the future policy of racial
extermination.  The ideas contained in Strasser's proposal can be traced
back to his brother Otto, who in most respects was his intellectual
superior.  (It was Otto who was murdered in the purge of the populist
leadership in 1934. --DE)

   "Gregor Strasser's proposal had been prompted not so much by any single
issue as by the need to advance a reasonably binding program to help the
NSDAP in its confrontation with the political Left.  In this respect,
Strasser realized that racially anti-Semitic fantasies in themselves did not
add up to a program that could effectively counteract Communist agitation.
As a result his draft program addressed the future economic order in
considerable  detail.  Calling for 'far-reaching transfer of the means of
production to public ownership,' he also wanted to preserve the 'private
management of individual firms.'    That his special proposals as to how
this was to be accomplished were rather vague suggests that his program,
which opposed big industry and the large-scale concentration of capital,
harkened back to preindustrial modes of production and in many respects
represented a relapse into the utopian socialism that was so popular in
certain artisan circles.

   "By the same token, the Strasser draft called for breaking up large
agrarian estates in an attempt to create new peasant holdings.  (In the
U.S., "peasants" are called "small farmers;" Strasser's draft was therefore
"anti-agribusiness" and  "Jeffersonian."  --DE)  These ideas were poorly
suited to bridge thegap  between the proletarian Left and the bourgeois
nationalist Right that had become such a  prominent  feature of German
society.  >From a tactical perspective, proposals like this placed the NSDAP
squarely between the existing party fronts without addressing the needs of
the industrial working class even if profit sharing and co-ownership of
stock represented sensible demands.  Within the framework of an extreme
anti-Semitism that reduced captialist exploitation tothe alleged Jewish
takeover of German economic life as a whole, these ideas amounted to little
more than rhetoric." (Pp.  330-332)

   "The party's leader made extremely disparaging comments time and time
again about the masses of manual workers. Yet there were two reasons why the
NSDAP could not dispense with the industrial workforce in its entirety.  The
first was that without the potential mass support of the industrial
proletariat the party remained  essentially  dependent on bourgeois forces
who Hitler considered -- and this was the extent of his socialism -- utterly
incapable of shaping a political movement. The second was that the NSDAP
could command the respect of the ruling elites, especially in the Reichswehr
and in big industry, only as long as it was able to live up to its claim
that it would free the German working  class from the influence of 'Marxism'
and neutralize it as a factor  in the political class struggle.  It was
precisely this expectation that not only Accounted for Hitler's toleration
after 1923 but also led to the alliance with the conservatives that
culminated in his appointment as chancellor.

   "Communist and Social Democratic charges that Hitler was nothing more
than the lackey of high finance and big business held true only for the
idealized  image of the NSDAP that Hugenberg and right-wing industrialists
had created.  Only by means of an elaborate propaganda effort and
considerable deception on its part was the NSDAP able to keep this image
alive.  In this respect there can be no doubt that Hitler knew how to create
such expectations and how to use them without scruple for his own political
purposes.  For all the energy he spent on trying to win the favor of big
business, Hitler retained the pseudo-socialist vocabulary he had used since
the earliest days of the movement.  In internal party deliberations,
however, Hitler assiduously avoided any remark that would reveal the
respective weight he gave to the words "Nationalist Socialism" in charting
the party's political course.  In public statements he would avoid having to
commit himself by stressing that he was neither a bourgeois nor a Marxist
politician.

     "On the level of practical politics, Hitler supported the strategic
reorientation the party undertook in the early summer of 1928, which
entailed the abandonment of the NSDAP's urban plan  ..."   (P. 334)

   "In sharp contrast to its success with specific sectors of the middle
class, the NSDAP had a hard time gaining a foothold within the camp of
organized labor. Since 1928 there had been considerable interest on the
party's left wing in the establishment of a National Socialist trade-union
movement.  This, however, encountered strenuous oppostion from Hitler, who
feared -- not without reason -- that such organizations would be in a
hopeless minority vis-�-vis the socialist and Christian unions and that this
situation could not but have a negative effect on his propaganda campaign.
More important, it would have been tactically unwise for him to alienate the
business leaders whose support he was seeking by becoming involved in labor
initiatives.  These reservations notwithstanding, Hitler eventaully
permitted the creation of the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization
(Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganization or NSBO).    First
limited to greater Berlin, this organization was established throughout
Germany in 1931.  Headed by Walter Schumann and Reinhard Muchow, it copied
the system of in-plant organization  that had been developed by the KPD.
The NSBO was particularly  popular in smalland middle-sized firms and in
public enterprises like the German Railway Corporation (Deutsche Reichsbahn)
and only occasionally successful  in large enterprises such as Siemans
Electrical Works. ..."

   "...

   "Despite Hitler's overatures to big business, the NSDAP preserved the
anti-capitalist rhetoric of its earliest days, which carried a distinctly
anti-Semitic flavor with its polemics against big capital and stock-market
speculation.  As late as the fall of 1931, the NSDAP Reichstag delegation
ressurrected the pseudo-socialistic ideas of Gottfried Feder and demanded,
among other things,  nationalization of major banks, a ban on trading on the
stock market, a 5 percent limit on interest (including a 1 percent
liquidation fee), and the confiscation of profits derived from war,
inflation, and unjustifiable stock market transactions.  Industrial circles
were extremely alarmed by the NSDAP's periodic fits of state-socialistic
weakness, which in their eyes moved the party dangerously close to Communist
views.  This formed the background ofsubsequent efforts by Hjalmar Schact
and other representatives of heavy industry to exercise a constructive
influence on Nazi economic programs.

   "Organized labor was not taken in by the NSDAP's anticapitalist rhetoric.
This was particularly true since it went hand in hand with the
uncompromising rejection of the SPD and KPD, which the NSDAP regarded as its
principle opponents."  (Pp. 345-346)

   "Strasser had numerous followers, particularly in the various
administrative agencies that he had created within the party.  By contrast,
he could not count on the support of the NSDAP district leaders, a group
that regarded his efforts to streamline the Nazi party  organization with
great scepticism.  Within the party's inner leadership clique, only William
Frick, Gottfried Feder, and Aurthor Rosenberg rose to Strasser's defense.
But their voices did not carry much weight with Hitler.   Strasser's
declared enemies, on the other hand, included Goebbles, Goring, and Rohm,
who otherwise had very little in common.  Gobbles, who committed himself
early on to Hitler's 'all-or-nothing' strategy, had been Strasser's main
antagonist since 1926.  ... Ernst Rohm, on the other hand, would have had to
resign his position in the party if Strasser , who felt that his homosexual
tendencies were a serious liability for the party, had had anything to say
about it.  In view of this constellation of personnel around Hitler, there
was never much of a chance that Strasser wold succeed in winning Hitler's
support for his ideas.

   "Although Strasser made no attempt to coerce his supporters into
supporting his political strategy, Hitler responded to the resignation of
his offices (sic) within the Nazi party organization by issuing
comprehensive organizational directives that confirmed the fundamental
conflict of strategies  that the former Reich oranization leader had
outlined in his letter to Hitler from 8 december 1932. With the appointment
of Robert Ley, until then a high-ranking inspector within the reich
organization leadership of the NSDAP, as Hitler's special deputy in charge
of the party's national organization, Hitler effectively decoupled this
office from the party's central leadership organs.  At the same time, Hitler
decreed the abolition of the national inspectors, while the state inspectors
lost their character as an intermediary agency within the party organization
insofar as they henceforth functioned with the rank of NSDAP district leader
and could deal with other direct leaders  only with special authorization
from the party's national headquarters.  With one stroke of a pen, Hitler
effectively dismantled the hierarchical organizational structure that
Strasser had worked so diligently to build up, in favor of the party's
district leaders, who now reported directly to Hitler himself."  (P. 508)

                          *                *                *

Alan Bullock,  Hitler and Stalin; Parallel Lives.  (New York:  Alfred A.
Knopf, 1992)

   "The twin tenents of Hitler's worldview, his determination to 'root out'
the Jews (whatever he meant to suggest by that) and to conquer Lebensraum
in Eastern Europe, not ony remained unchanged but were repeatedly stated,
years before he came to power, in Mein Kampf  and in many speeches and
interviews.

   "It is misleading, however, to see in his personal ideology the key to
Hitler's power to attract supporters to join the Nazi party in thousands in
the 1920's and later, in the early 1930's, to vote for it in millions.  On
the contrary,the evidence suggests that while anti-Semitism was part of the
common currency of the german right and was taken for granted as part of the
Nazi package, the prominence Hitler gave to it -- and this was much less in
the second half of the 1920's than in the first -- did not prove a
particular attraction  except for a minority of initiates in the party
(Himmler, for example) who took it with  the same seriousness as Hitler did
himself.  This corresponds to Hitler's own distinction in Mein Kampf between
followers of a movement, the majority for whom 'the simple effort of
believing the political doctrine is enough," and the minority 'who represent
the idea and fight for it. ...

   "In this formative period before the party came to power, many other
sources besides Hitler contributed to National Socialism: for example, such
neoconservative thinkers as Moeller van der Bruck and other Nazi leaders
such as Gottfried Feder, the Strasser brothers, Gregor and Otto, and Walter
Darr�. ...

   "Throughout the whole period of Kampfzeit (the 'time of struggle' before
he came to power), however, audiences came to listen to Hitler, less for the
contents of his speeches, which for the most part were the commonplaces of
nationalists and right-wing propaganda, than for the gift he had of
presenting these with an effect that none of his rivals could equal.  As
Otto Strasser, no admirer, said of him:

        If he tried to bolster his argument with
        theories or quotations from books he has
        only imperfectly understood, he scarcely
        rises above mediocrity.  But let him throw
        away his crutches, speaking as the spirit
        moves him, and he is promptly transformed
        into one of the greatest speakers of the century
       ....Adolf Hitler enters a hall.  He sniffs the air,
       feels his way, senses the atmosphere.  Suddenly
       he bursts forth.  His words go like an arrow to
       their target, he touches each private wound on
       the raw liberating the unconscious, exposing its
       innermost aspirations and telling it what it most
        wants to hear.
                                    (P.147-8)

   "The first of May, the day of the international worker's movment, was
resdesignated (in 1933) the Day of National Labor and made an official
holiday.  A giant meeting at the Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin brought
together up to a million workers and their families, honored the "production
workers of all classes," and celebrated National Socialism as a movement
that would level outdated social distinctions, end snobbery and the class
war, and establish mutual respect among the different groups that made up
the nation.  Hitler reproved those who looked down on and underestimated
manual labor, praised the industry of its people as the nation's greatest
asset, and declared measures to end unemployment as the regimes highest
priority.

   "The following morning the regime showed its other face:  At 10;00 a.m.
the SA and auxiliary police occupied all the premises of the trade unions
and seized their property and assets.  A week later, the first COngress of
the German Labor Front inaugurated a new organization that soon included all
German workers and employees.

   "The NSBO (the NS Factory Cell Organization), which Gregor Strasser had
built up to develop a radical anticapitalist policy in industrial relations,
and which had a million members by August 1933, saw this as an opportunity
to take over the trade unions' functions and capture the German Labor Front
for the representation of the workers' interests vis-�-vis the employers.
But Hitler had not closed down the trade unions to see collective bargaining
continue in another guise.  The NSBO was brought under the control of the
party's Political Organization in Munich and the leading radicals in it
purged.

   "By a law of May 19,1933, the state removed the responsibility for
regulating wages from both workers and employers by appointing Reich
Trustees of Labor, twelve in all, each covering a seperate district, and in
practice consisting of a mixture of officials with lawyers from employers'
organizations.

   "Whatever the opinion of it, Nazi labor policy was reassuring to the
employers.  ...Summoned by G�ring on February 20 to meet Hitler before what
he promised would be "the last election," twenty-five leading
industrialists...put up an electoral fund of three million marks. ...

[However, on April 1] a Nazi vigilante squad led by Otto Wagener invaded the
Berlin headquarters [of the principle association of German big business,
the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie (RDI), chairman, GUstav Krupp von
Bohlen] and staged a forcible takeover.  ...in May the Reichsverband
'volunarily' dissolved itself and merged with other industrial associations
in a new Nazi-sponsored organization.

   "But fears that radicals like Wagener or the activists of the NSBO  would
dictate economic policy were soon proved groundless.  With the dissolution
of the trade unions and the works councils, the industrialists were once
again, to their great satisfaction, masters of their own house.  Even more
important, for the attitude of both employers and workers, was the dramatic
upturn in economic activity that between 1933 and 1936, turned unemployment
figures of six million into a labor shortage.

   "Hostility to big business in the Nazi party was to be found not only in
the NSBO, but also among the members of the middle-class interest groups
representing small businessmen, craftsmen, and retail traders.  These had
been absorbed into the party and expected its coming into power to be
followed by the realization of their demands, such as the closing down of
the big department stores [I think of Wal-Mart in the U.S. --DE]  These had
beenmajor themes in the party's electoral campaigns as well as in its
original program, and it was not easy for Hitler to ignore them.

   "This accounts for the appointment, as Reich commissioner for the
economy, of Otto Wagener, with his corporatist plans for breaking up large
impersonal concentrations of ownership and his attempt to take over the
citadel of big business, the RDI.  Without waiting for decisions at the top,
many local actions were launched by the party and the SA in the early days
of the new regime, culminating in a national boycott of Jewish firms,
launched on April 1, the same day Wagener stormed the RDI headquarters in
Berlin.  [  I think of China's "Red Guards" in the "Cultural Revolution" of
in Red China, except that in this case the  top leadership and a much harder
time steering the juggernaut. --DE ]

   "These aggressive tactics, however,  met strong resistance from big
business and from those Nazi leaders who took their side, particularly
G�ring.  To block Wagener from becoming economics minister, G�ring persuaded
Hitler to appoint in his place Kurt Schmitt, the managing director  of the
Munich Allianz insurance group, and to create an additional state
secretary --  Hans Posse, a former Weimar civil servant -- to work in the
economics ministry alongside Gottfried Feder, that figure from the Nazi past
who had once impressed Hitler so much and committed the party in the 1920
program to "breaking the servitude of interest."  The test case was the
appeal of a Jewish business, the big Hermann Tietz department-store chain,
for help rescheduling its debts.  Hitler himself was strongly opposed but
had to yield to the argument that, if help was not given, the bankruptcy of
Tietz and other department stores would lead to the loss of tens of
thousands of jobs as well as a wave of price rises.

   "In the summer of 1933 the Nazi Combat League of Middle-Class
Tradespeople was disolved, and Otto Wagener finally disappeared into
obscurity.  A new body for small businessmen, the Nazi HAGO, was created
under much tighter control by Hess and the party bureaucracy.  In his
important speech to the Reich governors on July 6, Hitler made it clear that
the revolution had ended and could not be allowed to extend to the economic
field:   'More revolutions have succeeded in their first assault than, once
successful, have been stabilized and held there.  Revolution is not a
permanent state.'"  (Pp. 327-328)

----

More to come.

Dick Eastman
Yakima, Washington
United States
Every man is responsible to every other man.