By 1929 Germany’s financial situation was again becoming tenuous, but the friendlier diplomatic situation gave Stresemann another chance to keep the economic plate of debt and reparations spinning a while longer. Once again an American banker stepped in with an idea and a consortium of capitalists eager to make some interest payments on it. Owen D. Young’s idea was to lower the overall reparations payment, and divide it into thirds, one of which was to be expected every year. The other two thirds could be put off with interest, with an estimated final payment set for some time in the 1980s. While on the whole the deal was a better one for Germany, it was far from popular among the nationalists.

Opposition to the Young Plan was what finally put Adolf Hitler on the road to power. Among the other opponents of the Young Plan was hard right nationalist and media mogul Alfred Hugenburg. The Rupert Murdoch of his day, Hugenburg maintained a longstanding network of media outlets, and had the farsight to get in early on radio broadcasts and programming to complement his newspapers. In the late 1920’s he had even acquired a controlling stake in UFA, an influential role that ensured the film industry would transition swiftly into a propaganda vehicle for the Nazis after 1933. While Hugenburg personally disliked Hitler[1], no one else on the right had the kind of charisma, popular energy, or physical force that Hitler and his brownshirts carried.

The offer of major access to new media outlets was well timed, as Joseph Goebbels had recently risen to an influential role in the Nazi party. Goebbels had been given the thankless task of seizing votes in Red Berlin, and by 1929 he had turned a socialist lemon into a nucleus of fascist lemonade. His style was confrontational and aggressive, finally putting Röhm’s “political soldiers” to work for the “conquest of the street”.[2] Rather than stage a rally, he would march the Nazis into Communist or Social Democrat neighborhoods like Neukölln looking for a fight. Failing that, brawling in the bier halls was a good second. And just in their spare time the Nazis would engage in some terror tactics. White mice were released into screenings of the antiwar film All Quiet on the Western Front, and public spaces and meetings disrupted. In the 1929 municipal elections “bandit-in-chief” Goebbels had secured 5.8 percent of the city council vote, which was significant at a time when the Nazi’s national vote share was even smaller. While more leftist Nazis like Gregor Strasser criticized Goebbels for failing to pull in enough of the urban voters, he was just getting started.

When a punch to the face would not do, Goebbels was also a master at muddying the differences between the Nazis and their opponents on the left. In one famous open letter after a public debate,

“to my friend on the left, Not as captatio benevolentiae [winning goodwill/pandering], but straight out and without reservations, I confess I liked you, you are a fine fellow! …you have clearly realized what it’s all about. We agreed about the causes. No honest thinking person today would want to deny the justification of the worker’s movements…We no longer need to discuss whether the demand of the German employee for social compensation is justified, just as we don’t need to discuss whether or not the disenfranchised fourth estate may or must live. National or international in path and goal, that is the issue…yesterday we both could have written the same thing in this respect in the album of the bourgeois coward of black-red-gold Social Democracy. …I wouldn’t think of singing along with the choir of middle class liars and ignoramuses. Russia, Russian bolshevism, are not about to collapse. But the Russian soviet system does not endure because it is Bolshevik, because it is Marxist, because it is international, but because it is national, because it is Russian.[3] No tsar ever grasped the Russian people in its depths, its passion, in its national instincts as Lenin has. He gave the Russian peasant what Bolshevism always meant to the peasant: freedom and property. …To recapitulate: Lenin sacrificed Marx and instead gave Russia freedom. You want to sacrifice German freedom for Marx….Yesterday you beat about the bush on the Jewish question. I know why. Please don’t object. We don’t want to deceive each other. You are an anti-Semite as I am. You don’t want to admit this to yourself. The Jew can at best exist in communism. The Jew in a national-Bolshevik state is an absurdity.[4]

In full the letter is clever and hints at the potent rhetoric the Nazis used to obfuscate their real objectives and appeal to proletarian voters. It helped that the KPD itself had a strong vein of anti-Semitism at times. Prior to her expulsion in 1926 for being insufficiently pro-Stalin, KPD leader Ruth Fischer would regularly make explicit anti-Semitic attacks on the supposed Jewish domination of capitalist institutions.

While Goebbels’ talent for propaganda was about to be vital, a referendum on the Young Plan itself was a crushing defeat for the Nazis. 86% of voters backed the government’s proposal, and the nationalist alliance was further disgraced. Yet for Hitler personally, he was now in contact with all other conservative wings of the German spectrum. In something of a leadership vacuum this gave him the chance to co-opt and integrate each force in turn over the next few years. In many cases with fatal consequences for his outflanked rivals.

Just as the Nazi virus was spreading in Berlin, their path to national power began to clear. The first major step was the final sundering of relations between the SPD and the KPD. While the two parties had not exactly been on friendly terms since Ebert had unleashed Freikorps bloodhounds on the revolutionaries, there was still some overlap between the groups. Some SPD drifted left, and some KPD had drifted right, and there were a plethora of smaller communist parties in the middle between the two wings at any given time. But the SPD had gotten a little too used to power in some ways. It was fairly easy for Goebbels or KPD press like Rote Fahne to needle them as the party of “poverty, hunger, fat cats and thin workers…no longer the protagonists of a true, purposeful socialism [but] lackeys and beneficiaries of market capitalism.”[5]

But as the dominant force in Prussia, the SPD was stuck in the hapless middle between the SA and the Rotfront. Every time a street fight or public demonstration broke out, the police would try to restore order. Given that the police were under the thumb of the SPD, both Nazis and Communists perceived this as political interference. By late 1928, well aware that the KPD had made gains of their own in the last election, the SPD police chief Karl Friedrich Zörgiebel had banned public demonstrations in Berlin. While he declared this a matter of public safety, this was definitely not how the KPD saw it. Berlin KPD chief and future leader of post war East Germany Walter Ulbricht certainly saw an opportunity in 1929. For the first time a major wave of proletariat workers had come to the KPD, disenchanted with the Social Democrats at a time when their supposed class champions were advocating for bourgeois policies and Catholic presidents. Ulbricht and Thälmann saw a great chance to stage a major public protest, and set their sights on May Day 1929. In response Zörgiebel issued a public warning for the KPD to stand down and abstain from breaking the protest ban.

The irony of the Social Democrats banning May Day protests was lost on no one, especially within the SPD itself where the pronouncement was wildly controversial. But Zörgiebel and the Prussian Minister of the Interior were on the spot, and even condemnations from the national party would not shake them from their course. For their part the KPD relished the confrontation, but anticipated a day of peaceful protest that would push the Berlin police to repeal the ban. They even informed the police in advance of their routes and intended rally spots, hoping that everyone could get away with a nice show of protest, response, and then all go off for a pint at the end of the day.

Instead the SPD’s use of the police poured gasoline on the flame of revolution. At the start of Blutmai [Bloody May] the KPD’s rallies were not off to a great launch. Many of the unions had opted for closed session events. They staged strikes on factory grounds, in some cases with KPD speakers. While the police kept an eye on these, nothing happened. But later in the day as the KPD’s supporters began to trickle out at various sites, police lorries arrived and a vicious crackdown ensued. According to some eyewitnesses the police had showed up for a fight, and began swinging their truncheons at anyone in arm’s distance. By May 2nd some of the KPD’s members had spontaneously erected barricades in a few places, prompting the police to escalate matters still further with armored cars and machine guns. Several running firefights broke out in Berlin, leaving at least 33 civilians dead in the crossfire. By May 3rd fighting was essentially over, and Prussia’s Interior Minister banned the Rotfront.

Blutmai was a case study in how not to react to peaceful protest. Per usual when the state puts force to a bad purpose, the Prussian government tried to make an assault rifle out of a super soaker. In the SPD press the police described one raid as,

“It became known that a large number of Communists, armed to the teeth, were in a room of a pub in Weddingstrasse number 9. Schutzpolizei surrounded the building and forced their way in against the rioters.”

While internal police reports more candidly described the same incident as,

“A message arrived that armed Communists were supposed to be waiting in the pub in Weddingstrasse 9. The building was searched and a pistol was found, out of which no shots had been fired, together with some pamphlets.”[6]

Consequently, the rift between KPD and SPD was now permanent. If some in the party like Heinrich Brandler had previously argued that collaboration or a United Front against the Nazis was vital, there was no room for such discussions now. Per Stalin’s own rhetoric, the SPD was now considered the largest enemy to the KPD.[7]

[1] A common sentiment, not the least of which due to his odious flatulence and even more odious political views. Even Captain Erhardt remarked more than once that he thought Hitler was a psychopath. Never one to just settle at talk though, the Freikorps leader would be part of at least two assassination plots on the Nazi leader.

[2] Klussmann, U. (2012). Conquering the Capital: The Ruthless Rise of the Nazis in Berlin. Available at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/how-the-nazis-succeeded-in-taking-power-in-red-berlin-a-866793.html

[3] Which, given how Stalin later utilized the KPD, was probably more accurate than Germany’s communist leadership would have liked to admit.

[4] Goebbels, J. (1925) National Socialism or Bolshevism? In the Weimar Sourcebook.

[5] Klussman 2012

[6] Bowlby, C. (1986). Blutmai 1929: Police, Parties and Proletarians in a Berlin Confrontation. The Historical Journal Vol 29. No.1

[7] KPD lawyer and professional Hitler troll Hans Litten would wryly comment that “two people are too many for my party”. More on Litten: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-14572578