Review of “The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945”
Book Review by qpooqpoo
The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945
by William Sheridan Allan
Brattleboro, Vermont: Echo Point Books, 2014.
No higher being will come to save us,
No God, no Kaiser, nor Tribune.
If we want freedom from our misery,
We’ll get it only by ourselves.¹
Obviously, the Nazis are not to be admired for their silly ideology. To them, humans were merely cogs in the social machine. Their quest to mold society according to their vision through force—to pluck the weeds so as to make the perfect garden—was just a repeat of what civilizations have tried and failed to do from the dawn of history. It was doomed from the start, just as is every attempt to rationally plan and control the development of a society. Nevertheless, the Nazis were astonishingly effective in their single, clear, and concrete short-term goal of attaining ultimate political power in Germany, and their experience can offer some useful lessons to those committed to ending the industrial system in order to save humanity and wild nature. This title is a good place to start. Its main takeaways can fall under four categories:
(i) The Nazi’s profit-driven organizational model;
(ii) The Nazi’s use of hierarchy and discipline;
(iii) The internal culture of the Nazi party, including its composition; and,
(iv) The cultural environment surrounding the Nazi party.
(i) The Nazi organization operated like a business, or, more precisely, a pyramid scheme. Within the pyramid, the local group was the most basic unit, operating in towns and counties. The next step up, the regional offices (known as “Gau”), oversaw the local groups, who in turn were overseen by the Nazi national headquarters in Munich. The Gau would supply material and directive to a local group that the local group would pay for out of funds collected from membership dues and organized events and other fundraising in its locale. Cash in advance was the rule for everything that the local group received in return from the Gau—from printed propaganda material to speaker’s fees. While each Nazi-party member had to pay dues each month, it was the local group that was in charge of collecting them. Roughly one third of the dues could be retained by the local group. The rest had to be turned over to the Gau, which in turn had to give over half of what it received to the national Nazi-party headquarters. The requirement of making these fixed monthly remittances kept every level in the Nazi party “keenly interested in accurate membership records.”²
Nazis who missed three payments were automatically expelled from the party. New members also had to pay an initiation fee (which could be waived and would vary depending on income) as well as be assessed periodically for campaign contributions. There were also collections for a whole host of projects—elections, newspaper printings, fund-raising of various kinds exacted by regional and national leadership.³ Individual party members couldn’t personally profit from the party’s income. However, the expectation was that the competition for status and rank within the hierarchy would return the investment of individual members by granting them positions within the government, or else other satisfying or lucrative favors within the new system once the Nazi’s came to power.⁴
The main source of income came from mass meetings: from the admissions tickets for, and the donations taken during or after, a party event. These were primarily political speeches by trained and able Nazi speakers (but would often be supplemented by or could include other performances and activities). Therefore, the local group became very conscious of the quality of its meetings and its speakers—especially their entertainment value. The key to the whole system “was the method of adapting mass meetings, with appropriate speakers, to local interests and concerns. Because what worked was immediately measurable in terms of attendance and contributions, effective themes and speakers were repeated while ineffective activities could be discarded.” (p. 82). There was thus constant feedback for what kinds of activities worked best. This became a self-reinforcing system and allowed for a great degree of autonomy among the various group leaders: “Local groups were given almost complete freedom of action as long as they produced money, members, and votes.” (p. 82). The Nazis kept close track of whoever came to their meetings and afterward worked hard to get such people to join, contribute to, or to at least vote for, the NSDAP (p. 78).
(ii) Much like a franchise corporation sets the rules and priorities of the franchisees, the Gau’s propaganda department formulated exact rules on how to run the meetings: “with a checklist for everything from the advertising to the use of the SA (Stormtroopers). There was even a model script with the actual words to be used at all points in the meeting plus blank spaces for the name of the town, the speaker, etc.” (p. 81); “There were guidelines and pamphlets for door-to-door campaigning, slides and films, leaflets to pass out at meetings or stuff into mailboxes, posters for billboards…and gummed stickers to be pasted onto walls. …advice on how to compose personal invitations to ‘discussion evenings’ and even a breakdown of the expected costs for staging a mass march.” (p. 81).
The more the local group held profitable meetings and recruited members, the more propaganda materials and other resources it could obtain to buy new materials to recruit new members and supporters.
(iii) The Nazi movement was a middle-class movement. Most were middle-class and had business experience. They were not usually lower- or working-class. This translated into a remarkable competitive advantage over the Nazi’s political rivals, in particular the Social Democrats (SDP), whose roots were primarily working-class. The skill and energy of the Nazis appeared mysterious at a distance but became understandable once you looked at the local level.
The “NSDAP [Nazi party] was the first mass movement of the middle class… [they] understood how to keep account ledgers… were familiar with fundraising, inter-office memos, equipment leasing, etc.” (p. 143). As a result of this pre-existing orderliness, frugality, disciplined task-solving and industriousness, Nazi solutions were often “ingenious, flexible” (p. 78), while exhibiting “vigor and thoroughness” (p. 202).
By virtue of their superior organizational efficiency, the Nazis had the potential to outwork their opposition, and this was a potential they vigorously realized: it appears, in the period from 1929-1932, that they simply were more hard-working, putting on more meetings, organizing more marches and more events, than the opposition.
(iv) (A) The Nazi’s could get away with more violence and intimidation:
In the 1920s and 1930s, the world was a far freer place, on an individual day-to-day basis, than it is today, simply by virtue of the relative technical primitiveness of the society of that time. This greater freedom was reflected by the higher degree of individual-on-individual violence and roughness. It would be reasonable to say that their society was thus more “dynamic” in the sense that, by virtue of this greater freedom, individual associations could crop up and evolve with a far greater degree of vigor and autonomy than they can today. In addition to this natural proclivity to more violence and roughness, the specific political turmoil of the period—especially from 1929-1932—led to such a high frequency of political violence that the violence simply became normalized within the culture. Added to this, of course, was the fact that many of the Nazi’s were veterans of WWI and were already accustomed to a great deal of violence themselves. They were also far more disciplined, tough, and conditioned to respect hierarchy than the average person today. Most of these cultural attributes were likely common to the great revolutionaries throughout history, and its implications for a revolution by modern individuals against the industrial system needs further exploration. It is obviously a far more difficult task for a modern revolutionary movement operating within an advanced industrial setting to establish the culture of fear and intimidation that surrounded the Nazis.
By 1932, political violence “was becoming a permanent institution… Between July 1 and July 20 there were 461 political riots in Prussia in which eighty-two people were killed and over four hundred seriously injured.” (p. 119). Exchanges of taunts and insults became a daily occurrence. Scuffles and fights increased in frequency—and they could often be brutal.
Prison terms were extremely light: for assault with a deadly weapon, prison sentences ranged from two to six months. (p. 121). “[T]he courts were generally lenient… so that hotheads on both sides were encouraged.” (p. 146). This stands in stark contrast to advanced industrial societies today, where individual-on-individual violence is, and must be, ruthlessly suppressed for the sake of the smooth and orderly functioning of the industrial system.
(B) The Nazis provided what their society wanted:
Most people wanted radical answers, and they were tired of eternal political strife. They wanted hard, sharp, clear leadership: “When politics becomes a matter of vilification and innuendo, then eventually people feel repugnance for the whole process. It is the beginning of a yearning for a strong man who will rise above petty and partisan groups.” (p. 90).
The Nazi’s “presented the appearance of a unified, purposeful, and vigorous alternative.” (p. 86). The people also wanted complete answers. The Nazis provided a holistic worldview that stood completely apart from the contemporary society and promised a brighter future. “The SPD [Social Democrats] emphasized the evils of Nazism but had no alternative program… It…could not promise a better future.” (p. 145).
People need to be impressed by pageantry and controversy. The Nazi’s provided this, both for their inherent propaganda value, but also to satisfy the yearnings of the population for entertainment and escapism during the dark economic times.
The Nazis “drew the tortured masses into the mammoth meetings where one could submerge oneself in the sense of participating in a dynamic and all-encompassing movement geared toward radical action in fulfillment of every need.” (p. 134).
(C) The Nazis established themselves as the most radical group.
The Nazis “had established themselves as both respectable and radical.” The Nazis “appeared vigorous, determined and, above all, ready to use radical means…” (p. 92) [emphasis added]. The Nazis had “stolen the banner of radicalism.” (p. 145) [emphasis added].
“The Nazis had to prove… that they were willing to use the power apparatus in a ruthless and effective way…. The initial investment of terror would multiply itself through rumor and social reinforcement until opposition would be looked upon as wholly futile.” (p. 184).
The Nazis were consistently portrayed in local media as violent and vicious.
(D) The Nazis exploited pre-existing hatreds.
The Nazis exploited the pre-existing social hatred of the Socialists.⁵ In the same way, anti-tech revolutionaries can point out that contemporary leftists are simply agents of the technological system, attempting to force the system’s morality and conditioning down everyone’s throat in order to grow the system more efficiently. In doing so, anti-techers may be able to redirect strong pre-existing animosities and social currents against the techno-industrial system itself.
The Social Democrats of the Weimar era can plausibly be analogized to today’s leftist mob—Antifa, SJWs, BLM, etc.—and more broadly speaking, the perceived oppression of institutionalized political correctness. Popular opinion in Germany at the time was that the Social Democrats were simply not serious revolutionaries. Maybe this perspective is paralleled by many people today who view leftist activism as largely a “play-act” (also: “Live Action Role Playing” or “LARPing”); collective non-rational outbursts of frustration that ironically enhance the status quo rather than undermine it.
Interestingly, anti-Semitism was largely absent in Northeim and was not promoted. Undoubtedly it was exploited throughout Germany in other locales, but the culture of Northeim, the specific town studied in this book, did not lend itself to this. This stands as a good example for the adaptability and self-correcting nature of the Nazi propaganda system.
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NOTES
1. German Socialist version of the International, reproduced as an epigraph to Chapter 6. (p. 69).
2. Page 79.
3. “[M]embers of the Nazi party were exploited for all they could bear.” (p. 80).
4. “Although the local leaders did not personally get to keep the profits generated from meetings and other sources, profits meant that funds were then available to be applied locally for further recruiting activity, and the leader who was successful in building backing for Nazism could expect promotion within the Nazi hierarchy.” (p. 81)
5. Most of the middle class at the time were “bitterly opposed to the Socialists.” (p. 296).
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