Chapter 54 Chapter 9 Family Death (3)

The result of the referendum on the "youth plan" held at the end of 1929 was that Prime Minister Straussmann and his moderate plan won.Although, he died before the votes were counted.To defeat this measure, Hitler's shaky coalition with Hugenberg's National People's Party needed 21 million*? , but they received only 6 million votes.For Hugenberg, it was a fatal defeat, but Hitler deftly turned the defeat into a kind of victory.Hitler, who never championed a lost cause, turned to Hugenberg and broke his alliance with him, as unpredictable as he had formed it.By this time, he had been secretly gathering forces — amplified by the referendum campaign — for the upcoming national elections.But observers who spoke highly of the Nazis were extremely rare.In a footnote to his memoirs, Lord Dubnon, the former British ambassador to Berlin, wrote of the Führer: "Hitler has been gradually forgotten since 1924".Dr. Arnold Ulfers, rector of the Berlin Political School, and historian Arnold Thornby both agree with this statement.

Hitler thought of victory, and he felt that victory was possible if he could win the workers back to his cause.To do this, he must adopt a new and drastic publicity strategy. At the beginning of 1930, a law student died in Berlin, and Hitler's opportunity came.The student was Horst Wessel, 21 years old, and his father was a pastor and a Freemason.Wessel betrayed his bourgeois family, became a loyal brownshirt, and died in a bloody street battle with the Reds.He once wrote a poem, published it in a magazine, and later set it to music.Hanf Stangel wrote: "The tune is similar to the music of Viennese bars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries." The original lyrics are as follows:

You and I met eyes, You and my lips touch each other, You and I are in love. Wessel does nothing more than "warm the tune to the march".The poem is called "Raise the Flag! "It was made to commemorate the comrades who died—"those who were shot dead by the 'Red Front' and the reactionaries".Wessel is in love with Ena, a former prostitute, and lives with her.In order to drive them away, the landlady turned to the Communists for help.As a result, a group of red elements rushed into the lover's room.The group leader, one of Erna's close friends, reportedly yelled, "You see why!" before shooting Wessel dead.To gain political capital from this deplorable event, the Communist Party falsely accused Wessel of being a pimp — which he was not.Goebbels turned Wessel into a working-class Jesus — which he wasn’t. "He deserted his family and his loving mother," wrote the unsuccessful novelist Goebbels, "to live among the people who despised and spurned him. There, in a proletarian quarter, in a rented room In the attic, a young man began to build a youthful, simple life. The Jesus of socialism! A man who draws attention to poverty!"

As Wessel lay dying in a hospital, Goebbels turned this petty personal dispute into a political murder.At the end of the meeting in the gymnasium, he went so far as to ask the participants to sing Wessel's song: "Flags fly, drums sound, flute sounds, thousands of people sing, the German Revolution, flags fly high!" February 23 On that day, Wessel finally died. "His spirit does not die, he continues to live among us," Goebbels wrote.He was "still marching in our ranks." To push this propaganda campaign to its peak, Goebbels decided to hold a grand and lavish funeral for him, with Hitler delivering his last speech.However, the head of state has reservations about this kind of exaggeration.The same goes for Goering – who has been rushed back to Germany after treatment for drug addiction in Sweden in order to try to get elected to parliament.He argued that the situation in Berlin was tense enough that the Führer's safety could not be guaranteed.According to Hanf Stangl's recollection, "If we are not careful, the consequences will be disastrous. After all, we only have 12 people in the parliament, and we are weak and unable to make capital from it. If Hitler came to Berlin, then the bull of the Communist Party As far as he is concerned, he is a matador's red cloth. We cannot afford the consequences."

The funeral was held in Hitler's absence due to false claims of illness.Goering is correct.The mourners were attacked by the Reds; the funeral procession became a fight against the Reds.When Goebbels stood in front of the grave and shouted "Horst Wessel!" and the stormtroopers shouted "Yes!", stones flew from outside the wall and hit the grave.The propagandist Goebbels could not have been more pleased than this. "As the casket sank," he wrote, "these fellows shouted at the door . Grave, go! Germany is at the end of the road!" From these words, one can never guess what the real relationship between ordinary Reds and Nazis was.Although they fought each other mercilessly, they felt a unique camaraderie between them.In the barroom or *?It is not uncommon for them to unite when a fight in a tavern is interrupted by the police.Both are driven by a passion for a cause; both believe that when the end is right, the method is also right.They all share similar socialist goals and share a disdain for parliamentarism.On May 1st the previous year, they marched arm in arm along the streets of Berlin to protest against the suppression of the parade, and shouted the same slogan: "Freedom, work, and bread!" , they also hated the Jewish police chief Benhard Weiss (Goebbels called him "Isidore"), and they all believed that the police was "Isidore's" force and a brutal enemy of all revolutionaries.

The Hitler-Otto Strasser feud became public two months after Goebbels squeezed the propaganda out of the Horst Wessel affair.Since his younger brother went to Munich to take up an important party position, Otto became the main contributor to the editorials of the three newspapers founded by Grigor.While still bearing the National Socialist banner, they were in fact forums for the promotion of Otto's iconoclastic views, often at odds with those of Hitler. In April, Otto Strasser gave his full support to the strike of the Saxon metalworkers, bringing the differences between them to a head.Industrialists, like Fritz Diessen of the Allied Steel Works, insisted that Hitler fire Strassel if he still needed a stipend.

At first, Hitler used threats, but to no avail.So he went to Berlin in person to exercise his personal influence.The two met twice in the "Shanshuxi Hotel".In seven hours, Hitler tried his best to flatter, threaten and lure, and cheated and coaxed. However, the result of the two meetings only exposed differences.Neither gave an inch; Hitler offered to make Otto the party's propaganda minister, but the latter refused.Although the two failed to reach an agreement, Strasser and his surroundings did not immediately split with the party, "because there is still hope, Hitler is affected by the discussion", and Hitler may even abandon the "Rosenberg line".They are also reluctant to make the split a public event, which could damage the party's chances of victory in the upcoming Saxony state election.However, Otto Strassel also realized that it was impossible for him and his socialist followers to stay in the Nazi party.This is because Hitler had admitted that he intended to adopt the principles of Mussolini's fascism and deal with industry.The talks also revealed that Hitler was determined to make his new ideas vague and "open to endless interpretation" in order to use absolute authority as a means to achieve total control of the party.He knew instinctively that once National Socialism became a concrete programme, the Führer principle would also be jeopardized.Hitler must have felt insulted that the young Strassel dared to contradict him openly and brazenly.However, when he drove back to Munich, he neither commented nor attacked publicly.Nor did he threaten Otto, although "all means are at my disposal." He only announced in the newspapers (as Gregor Strassel had done) that there was no dispute in Berlin, He and Otto agreed.Hitler's approach was not to publicly punish the rebels, but to support the expulsion of Otto's party members from the party one by one. Only at the end of June did he issue veiled instructions to Goebbels to purge Otto Strasser and his followers from the party. "As long as I lead it," he wrote, "I will not allow the National Socialist party to become a club of shallow literati and Bolshevik debates in salons; it will remain a disciplined organization as it has always been. It was not created for Stupid purely theoretical research, not a political association of migratory birds, but a struggle for the future of Germany - when there will be no class distinctions in Germany, and the new German people will decide their own destiny!" So he instructed Go Bayle, to "ruthlessly purge those elements in Berlin out of the party."Goebbels did this within a few weeks.Later, Strassel publicly called on socialists to withdraw from the party, but only 24 people responded, and even Otto's own brother opposed it.Gregor and two other leftist party members issued a statement saying, "They will unite under Hitler's leadership and strictly abide by party discipline." Gregor once told friends that his brother would always be a deserter.My brother's departure and his attack on the party was pure madness and stupidity. "

The public split between Otto Strasser and Hitler caused a sensation in the press but was almost silent in the party.In the long-term splitting struggle between the North and the South, Hitler tried his best to act as an arbitrator, only wanting a compromise between the two sides; after winning, he was very magnanimous.He kept Gregor Strassel high in the party, and even when Otto embarrassed him in front of witnesses, he tried to keep their differences to a minimum.He made it look as if Otto Strasser had turned himself out of the party.Now that the killing battle was over, Hitler could concentrate all his energies on the national elections to be held in September.