1014 Ch. 25 • Economic Depression and DictatorshipIn 1925, Hitler published Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which he had writ
ten in his comfortable jail quarters. Here he reiterated the claim, originally
that of General Paul von Hindenburg and believed by many Germans, that
Germany had been stabbed in the back by Jews and Communists during
the war. It was easy to forget that the military front had collapsed before
the home front, a convenient collective amnesia, ‘if, at the beginning and
during the war,” Hitler wrote, “someone had only subjected about twelve or
fifteen thousand of these Hebrew destroyers of the people to poison gas—
as was suffered on the battlefield by hundreds of thousands of our best
workers from all social classes and all walks of life—then the sacrifice of
millions at the front would not have been in vain.” His identification of
communism with Jews intensified his obsessive anti-Semitism. Hitler never
strayed from the most salient themes of his appeal, believing that people
could only absorb a few ideas, which must be hammered in over and over
again. Germany would rearm and then conquer “living space” at the expense
of the “inferior” Slavic peoples. Many Germans now believed that the
problem was not that Germany had fought the war, but only that victory
had been stolen from them.
In these early days, the Nazis, like Mussolini’s fascists, drew much of
their support from the middle class, which had been devastated by the
hyperinflation of the early 1920s and turned against the Weimar Republic
itself. Pensioners struggled to make ends meet; many small businessmen,
shopkeepers, craftsmen, and clerks had to sell or pawn silver or other items
of value that had been passed down in their families for generations. Many
big businessmen were at first suspicious of Nazism’s mass appeal. They
preferred more traditional kinds of authoritarian ideas that appealed to
their sense of social exclusiveness, such as a monarchy backed by the
armed forces in the Prussian tradition. Middle-class businessmen of more
modest means early on were more likely to back the Nazis. They looked to
Hitler to protect them from “Bolsheviks” and did not care how he did so.
Slowly the Nazis built their party. They won less than 3 percent of the
vote in the 1928 elections. But German political life was moving to the
right, led by the powerful National People’s Party, most of whose members
were increasingly anti-republican but not yet necessarily attracted to the
Nazis. They preferred a monarchy or military dictatorship. The death in
October 1929 of Gustav Stresemann, Germany’s able and respected for
eign minister, removed a powerful voice of support for the republic, gravely
weakening the Weimar coalition in the Reichstag. Socialists, too, were
divided, despite considerable popularity—indeed the largest veterans’ or
ganization was that of the Socialist (SPD) Party. The political center disap
peared as support for Weimar crumbled. The American Wall Street Crash
in October 1929 compounded social and political instability. The eco
nomic hardship of the Great Depression swelled the ranks of parties com
mitted to overthrowing parliamentary rule in Germany and other states.