100 Years Ago: When Hitler Reinvented the NSDAP

February 27, 1925 was mild, with Munich reporting a spring-like 12 degrees. In the evening, the 36-year-old professional politician Adolf Hitler invited all party members to a closed meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller on Rosenheimer Strasse in the Haidhausen district. The Austrian, who was not due to be naturalized until 1932, was still banned from speaking in public. Shortly before Christmas 1924, the failed putschist, who had been sentenced to five years in prison, was released early from the Landsberg am Lech fortress after just over a year in prison. On posters, he now called for the "re-foundation" of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP).

After the failed coup by Hitler and World War II general Erich Ludendorff, the symbol of all nationalist and militant right-wing extremists, the party had been banned throughout the Reich. The leniency that the Bavarian judiciary showed the putschist Hitler by granting him an early pardon was misunderstood by him as an invitation. An invitation to gather together and reorganize the fragmented nationalist movement. The ban on the NSDAP, which had also been imposed after the coup, had already been lifted by the government in Munich on February 14, 1925.

Compared to today's right-wing parties, the NSDAP of the early 1920s was "an anomaly," says historian Armin Nolzen. The parties of the Weimar Republic were basically "organized according to the model of a registered association, i.e. according to association law, and were thus subject to the Civil Code. There was neither a party law nor a party law, in contrast to today's Federal Republic, where the parties have their own constitutional status as participants in the political will-formation of the people," Nolzen told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND).

Hitler visiting a local NSDAP group in Bavaria in the summer of 1925.

Source: picture alliance / ullstein bild - ullstein bild

And this right of association also applied to the NSDAP, founded in 1919: "It called itself a political party, but it did not initially take part in elections," says Nolzen, who has been researching the history of the Nazi party intensively for years. "The first election in which the NSDAP took part was the state election in Baden in October 1925," says Nolzen. In its first ever vote, the NSDAP only received 1.16 percent of the vote. Before that, the party had pursued the line of working toward the "overcoming of Weimar democracy" as its central goal "by means of putschism," says the historian.

Where this led is well known: On November 8 and 9, 1923, the coup against the Bavarian state government led by Hitler and Ludendorff failed. The model for this was the first militant right-wing movement that had actually successfully seized power in this way: with a "March on Rome" in October 1922, the Italian fascists had succeeded in establishing a fascist dictatorship in the country.

But unlike their leader Benito Mussolini, Hitler's coup failed in the hail of bullets from the Bavarian police. 16 putschists, four police officers and one innocent bystander died. Hitler, although a marginal figure at the beginning of the putsch, managed to portray himself as an upright but betrayed patriot during the trial that followed.

By the time of his early release from prison, he was already known throughout the Reich. He interpreted the amateurish coup attempt as a "baptism of blood" for his movement, the willingness to die became the measure of all things in his movement, the killed putschists were stylized as "victims" for the fatherland and later as "martyrs" of "political belief and will". A grotesque "death cult" accompanied the movement from then on.

"Hitler personally learned that a strategy based exclusively on putschism had failed," said Armin Nolzen. But that also meant "that the NSDAP never gave up on putschism, not until it seized power in 1933. It boiled down to a dual strategy: legality, i.e. the conquest of parliamentary mandates by participating in elections, while at the same time the SA used violence on the streets under civil war-like auspices," said Nolzen. The NSDAP's legal policy "was from then on always flanked by terrorist actions."

Public notice about the re-foundation of the NSDAP in the Munich Hofbräuhaus on February 27, 1925.

Source: Archive

In the very combative speech of February 27, 1925, the first appearance of what had become the most prominent media putschist and anti-republican of the Weimar democracy, Hitler left his party members in the dark about the future strategic approach of his NSDAP. He did explain, "We rejected parliament at the time, why? The young movement did not want to get parliamentarians, but rather to train fighters." And then continued: "The key to the people's hearts is not a request, but strength."

How this power would manifest itself in the future, whether in street fighting or in canvassing for votes, he initially left open. Because in reality, on that February 27, 1925, it was not a NSDAP leader who was bursting with strength, but also not a reformed one who "came back," but rather someone who was cautiously feeling his way, who was not sure, could not be sure, of his excessive claim to leadership in the movement.

Because there had long been wings in the party that had used the one-year absence of the so-called Führer to position themselves with their own positions: There was the newly founded "Greater German People's Community", a "replacement NSDAP" founded by Alfred Rosenberg, but in which a much more radical activist like Julius Streicher made life difficult for the less charismatic Hitler confidant Rosenberg. This group competed with the "National Socialist Freedom Movement of Greater Germany", which was particularly strong in northern Germany and represented by Hitler's co-putschist Ludendorff and the charismatic Reichstag member Gregor Strasser. And there were many who had resigned themselves after the failed putsch.

"Gentlemen, from now on, let me take care of representing the interests of the movement!" Hitler told those present in the Bürgerbräukeller. The 36-year-old was primarily concerned at the time with "establishing himself as the central figure of a nationalist movement that was diverging and paralyzed by factional struggles, and his party as the central unifying movement," according to Armin Nolzen.

Caution was also necessary because the legal options in the Weimar democracy to "ban parties or their sub-organizations for a certain period of time were very low-threshold," as the historian explains, "at least lower than in today's Federal Republic." Since parties, as already mentioned, were organized as registered associations, according to Nolzen, this meant "that they were subject to the supervision of the Reich Ministry of the Interior or the police as the executive branch, which meant that someone was happy to sit in the hall and write down what Hitler was saying up front." By means of a simple police decree, "the activities of a political party could be stopped, meetings and newspapers could be banned, speakers could be deprived of the right to speak," says Armin Nolzen.

And there were numerous examples where the states implemented such temporary, partial bans against the NSDAP, the SA, and against individual speakers. In addition, the "Republic Protection Act" applied at the national level, passed after the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in June 1922. It was first applied after the failed Hitler-Ludendorff putsch in November 1923. Nolzen therefore speaks of "a veritable cascade of legal action against the NSDAP, which largely revises the image often used today of a weak democracy that tended to give up on itself."

In the party spectrum of the Weimar democracy, the NSDAP operated a kind of fundamental opposition, even if it was now running for elections. "For the NSDAP, there was no such thing as THE issue; every issue was political for them. Ex negativo, the NSDAP constituted a fundamental politicization, so to speak, in which all issues could be addressed - in contrast to today's AfD, which focuses primarily on one issue: migration," says Nolzen.

And the historian sees another significant difference to the current situation in Western democracies: "Today's populist, extremist parties in Europe have no military arm, they lack a mobilizable citizen army; in the case of the NSDAP, this was the SA with 500,000 young men under arms."

With its military arm, Hitler's party sought "to fight on the streets against the political opponents and against the Jews," while at the same time it fought for majorities in parliaments, "in order to achieve the abolition of the parliamentary form of government by majority decision, that was the perspective that the NSDAP was concerned with in this phase up to 1933," according to Nolzen. In a nutshell: Hitler's party used its militancy to stage crises, which it then blamed on the Weimar democracy, in order to be elected as a "crisis solver" in the ballot box.

The cynical game finally paid off with the seizure of power in January 1933, the product of "permanent mobilization, a permanent increase in votes, a permanent increase in membership - in order to then eliminate political competition by means of a majority through an 'enabling act'." This strategy never envisaged compromises or constructive participation in democracy.