LITMIR.BIZ

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Hitler served his time in prison, the Nazi Party faced a temporary ban, and Nazi organizer Gregor Strasser joined with his brother Otto Strasser and ideologue Artur Dinter to produce a renewed völkisch movement. At the same time, the Communist Party and the Social Democrats recognized at last the threat of fascism controlling the streets through paramilitary force and organized to stop them. The descendants of the Red Army of the Ruhr were the Red Front Fighters’ Alliance, or Roter Frontkämpferbundes (RFB). Established in 1924, the year after the Beer Hall Putsch, the RFB provided among the most effective defensive presences against fascist attacks on leftist meetings and marches, as well as an aggressive paramilitary force to break up fascist meetings. The Social Democrats also developed a paramilitary group along similar lines called the Reichsbanner, which grew to around a million members. These antifascist groups would prove difficult obstacles for the maneuvers of the fascist völkisch movement; as in Italy, they shared similar traits with the fascist movement, like ecological considerations, but with Hitler out of the way and with the Nazi Party banned, its ideological solidity faded away. It became easier for other parties to effectively attract people who might otherwise look to the Nazis.

Although the Strasser brothers organized the industrial workers of the north, rather than the agrarian conservatives of the south, their movement advocated neither capitalism nor Marxism, but something else—a society organized “without masters,” in a natur­al hierarchy based on merit and an organic integration of syndicates and corporations bringing the nations of Europe into a new United States of Europe. The imagined “natural hierarchy” took the form of a necessary meritocracy and work ethic, which rejected bureaucratic and administrative “masters” in exchange for solidarity between workers and leaders. Joining ecology and peasant movements to proletarian revolution, the Strassers’ work “flew the black flag of the postmedieval Peasants’ Wars.” Here, they mirrored the 1923 book Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich) written by revolutionary conservative Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.123 In Moeller’s book, originally titled The Third Way, the insurgent völkisch ideology manifested the same “Third Force” of spiritual authenticity present within the German Protestant tradition, which stood as the solution for the problems of the modern world.124 Like many other members of the völkisch and “conservative revolutionary” movement that helped foster an amenable environment for the rise of National Socialism, Moeller also called for a Nietzschean superman to unite Germans in a spiritual collective that would overcome political divisions of right and left through a social revolution.

One example of the intellectual milieu in which the left and right could strangely coexist was “National Bolshevism.” After the Russian Civil War, “émigrés from the White Army” moved to Germany, forging an ultranationalist sense of anticommunist unity between the countries. Some sought to unite with the Nazis to “liberate” their homeland. At the same time, some of the former top brass in the White Army adopted a semblance of socialism in the belief that state communism would eventually turn toward nationalism. Nikolai Ustryalov, for example, recognized the positive national contributions of the Bolsheviks and hoped that they would abandon internationalism in favor of a strong nationalist political economy—a kind of “national-bolshevism.”125

In turn, German fascists created the Association for the Study of Russian Planned Economy (ARPLAN), a sort of think tank devoted to understanding the Soviet Five-Year Plan and its possible relevance for Germany. The ARPLAN National Bolshevik group boasted a right-left ideology and network inclusive of communists like Hungarian revolutionary Georg Lukács. It was also joined by Jünger, Ernst Niekisch, and conservative revolutionary Friedrich Hielscher, all of whom envisioned a Eurasian cooperation stretching from Russia’s frigid Pacific coast to the windswept beaches of Portugal. To some in the Soviet Union, their commitment to revolution seemed deeper than the revisionist Social Democrats—in spite of a nationalistic fervor that contrasted with the Communist Party’s avowed internationalism.126 The year after Hitler was incarcerated for the Beer Hall Putsch, several top Bolsheviks initiated a movement toward a kind of völkisch fascism that they thought could transcend politics. Nikolai Bukharin told the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party that the NSDAP had “inherited Bolshevik political culture exactly as Italian Fascism had done.”127 Later that year, on June 20, Karl Radek advised the Comintern Executive Committee to scout out common ground between the rank and file in Communist and Nazi groups.

However, the National Bolsheviks were in the minority. The Comintern officially declared that fascism represented “the old game of the bourgeois left parties, i.e. it appeals to the proletariat for civil peace…by forming trade unions of industrial and agricultural workers, which it then leads into practical collaboration with the employers’ organizations.”128 Reeling from their failure to carry out a revolution, the KPD organized to confront the rise of fascism through parliamentary means. Yet Trotsky warned the KPD not to take fascism too seriously and to organize instead against the specter of social democratic collaboration with the bourgeoisie.129 If Trotsky’s stance was understandable given the role of the Freikorps, it mistakenly saw fascism as a servant of the ruling class, rather than a uniquely revolutionary and oppositional collaboration between right and left with an astonishing capacity to exploit conditions of despair, anxiety, and disenfranchisement. It was fascism, not social democracy, that represented a new stage of political crisis for the KPD, anarchists, and social democrats alike. Although Trotsky would later amend his analysis to a more reasonable claim that fascism represented a form of populist, cross-class alliance that served the interests of capital but was not beholden to it, the KPD would continue to attempt to exploit the rise of fascism to their ends against the social democrats, rather than organizing to stifle it. Their equivocal estimation of the Nazi threat, along with the Social Democrats’ role in aiding the Freikorps, would sabotage their own militant antifascist campaigns in the streets.

As ideological splits and confusion over how to deal with fascism emerged, the Nazis attempted to build a mass base through other völkisch, national socialist parties like the National Socialist Pan-German Freedom Movement and the National Socialist Freedom Party. At this point, Gregor Strasser and General Ludendorff were elected to local office, and the former was voted into the Reichstag.130 Völkisch nationalism became an ideological crossover point between neoconservatives and fascists involving detailed discussions on the intricacies of national policy, corporatism, and national dictatorship. With the refounding of the Nazi Party in 1925, most of the national socialist part of the völkisch movement abandoned the cultural approach and returned to Hitler’s political leadership.

Rejoining as a “colleague” rather than a “follower” of Hitler, Strasser firmed up his “socialist” doctrine in a draft program for a projected Arbeitsgemeinschaft of the NSDAP (AG), a workers’ movement within the Party. The draft relied on a basic völkisch national socialism, proposing a national dictatorship over a hierarchical corporatist state that catered to the petite bourgeoisie over landless farmers and industrial workers.131 According to the draft’s proposals, Jews who immigrated to Germany after 1919 were to be deported, and all who remained were to be deprived of citizenship. For Germans, the party would break up large landholdings to better the share of small farmers and would set up a fascist-corporative state with corporate bosses embedded in guilds and syndicates that remained beholden to “national solidarity.” It was similar to the “social monarchism” of Drumont and Barrès or Maurras’s “national integralism.” The traditional sovereign had been replaced by the figure of the modern dictator, a man of action and the people, but he remained the sovereign nevertheless.

      Hitler Regains Control

For his part, Hitler condemned the völkisch movement as a half-measure. After a conference in Bamberg in which he asserted his leadership, the party was brought into line and a Führer cult was implemented. The Strassers maintained popularity, but membership in their urban, working-class areas was small compared to rural areas like Schleswig-Holstein where Hitler’s Bavarian ­pseudo-conservatism found an important radical base. To ease the transition, Hitler brought Gregor Strasser into the position of second in command and escalated the party’s propaganda onslaught through massive rituals and ceremonies that built a sense of collective emotional unity. The Nazi Party built an electoral strategy ostensibly to gain power but motivated more by a destructive opposition to the Republic itself.

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