Nazi Plans for Addressing the Jewish Problem: from “Fringe Irritant” (1929) to the “Machtergreifung” (1933)

Chapter 9 Nazi Plans for Addressing the Jewish Problem: From “Fringe Irritant” (1929) to the “Machtergreifung” (1933) Karl A. Schleunes In 1945, with the world struggling with the enormity of what the Nazis had called their “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem,” scholars set out in search of what they assumed to be the document outlining Hitler’s master plan for mur- dering the Jews. Their search would be in vain. No such document was found then, nor has any such been found subsequently. In its absence scholarly at- tention shifted toward identifying when Hitler knew that he wanted to destroy European Jewry. Was it as early as 1919 with his letter explaining antisemitism to his soldier-colleague Adolf Gemlich? Or 1924 when he was working on Mein Kampf? Or as late as 1939 in his Reichstag threat to Jews that their instigation of another world war (sic) would assure their annihilation. Again, no decisive answer to this question was found, though the search itself has contributed im- mensely to our understanding of what came to be called the Holocaust. A scholarly refocus in the 1970s opened up the question of how the Nazi system functioned. The result was a controversy between so-called functionalists and intentionalists. The functionalists argued that the focus on a Hitlerian master plan had been misleading. Rather than the unfolding of such a plan, they argued, it was ideological fervour (racism) and power conflicts within the Nazi system that propelled the radicalization of terror against the Jews. In short, Nazi anti-Jewish policy had evolved over time and in reaction to specific political and military circumstances. Since the 1978 publication of his first book, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, Christopher R. Browning has been at the forefront of showing how Nazi Jewish policy evolved. In 2004 his magisterial The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 to March 1942 (with Jürgen Matthäus) filled a gap in our understanding of the development during the critical first years of World War II. The first formal steps in the progression of Nazi Jewish policy were taken in early September 1929 when Gregor Strasser, head of the party’s Leadership Corps (Reichsleitung) in Munich, announced in the Völkischer Beobachter his intention to establish at his headquarters an office to plan for a future Nazi © Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783657792665_011 122 Chapter 9: Nazi Plans takeover of the government in Berlin. The decision to take such a step had been approved by Hitler a few weeks earlier at the party’s annual rally in Nuremberg. To head this new, as-yet-nameless office, Strasser decided upon fifty-four year- old retired Colonel Konstantin Hierl, a veteran of the Great War and a leader in the postwar Free Corps movement. Although a newcomer to the Nazi Party, Hierl, who had been politically active in the rival Ludendorff camp, reputedly had a passion for organizational matters.1 Hierl’s assignment, as he recalled in a memoir, was to collect “qualified experts who would act as a general staff in making preparations for a future takeover of power.” In effect this structure would resemble a shadow cabinet.2 Even in retrospect the notion that as early as September 1929 Nazi leaders might be harbouring thoughts of taking over the reins of government seems naïve, even risibly hubristic. At that point fortunes appeared to have descend- ed to a stultifying low ebb. In the most recent nation-wide Reichstag elections in 1928 they had garnered a paltry 2.6 percent of the vote. Fewer than a mil- lion voters cast ballots in their favour. Even worse had been their showing in the simultaneous elections to Prussia’s state legislature. Here they failed to reach the two percent bar. Along with the Reichstag elections, such a poor showing, especially in Prussia, did not augur well for the Nazi future. Given that the state of Prussia covered roughly two-thirds of German territory, as well as containing two-thirds of its population, elections in Prussia rivalled in importance those that were nation-wide. In fact the Nazis had fared better in the two almost back-to-back Reichstag elections four years earlier, in 1924, when Hitler was ensconced in Landsberg prison for his attempt to overthrow the German government in his ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch. Although the Nazi Party itself was outlawed at the time, its temporary surrogates managed to win 6.5 percent of the vote in the May 1924 elections. That percentage was cut to 3 percent a few months later in December, but was still better than the party’s showing in 1928. After the 1928 elections the Prussian government felt so little intimidated by a Nazi threat that it cancelled its ban on Hitler’s speaking at public ral- lies. Prussia, along with most of the other German states, had imposed such a ban in 1925, shortly after the Nazi Party’s legal status was restored. Most of the other state governments already had preceded Prussia in revoking their own speaker bans. In 1928/29 the Nazis were, according to Hitler’s biographer 1 Dietrich Orlow, The History of the Nazi Party, 1919-1933 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969), 139-41. 2 Konstantin Hierl, Im Dienst für Deutschland, 1918-1945 (Heidelberg: Kurt Vowinckel Verlag, 1954), 64..

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