The Rise of the Nazi Party
Adolf Hitler experienced the end of World War I as a common soldier in a hospital recovering from his wounds. Although a decorated war veteran, he was not able to join the reestablished German army after the war, whose size had been limited by the Treaty of Versailles to only 100,000 soldiers. Instead, he worked as an undercover informant for the army in Munich. There, he began his political career as a gifted speaker in the various beer halls and, with six other members, formed the German Workers’ Party (or DAP, Deutsche Arbeiter Partei) in 1920. At the time, the DAP was only one of many right-wing groups in Weimar that promoted a voelkisch, national-socialist agenda. Hitler was the propaganda chairman of the party due to his considerable skill as a public speaker. During the inaugural meeting of the DAP, Hitler was able to attract and excite several thousand people with a twenty-five point program that lashed out against capitalism, democracy, and the Jews in particular. The name of the party was later changed to NSDAP (National-Socialist German Workers’ Party) to emphasize both its national and socialist program.
Repeatedly threatening to withdraw from the party, Hitler was able to reorganize the program and establish himself as the party’s leader in 1921. That same year, the NSDAP also formed the SA (Sturmabteilung or Storm Troops). Originally conceived as a sports group of the party, the SA was soon increasingly used as a quasi-military gang charged with providing security during the party’s meetings and Hitler’s speeches. One must add that other parties (notably the communists, but also the more liberal or centrist parties) likewise featured their own private corps, a result of the limited size of the official German army and the lack of civil jobs and other forms of employment in the post-war years. Nonetheless, the SA soon emerged as one of the most brutal and powerful military forces in the Weimar Republic. Already in 1923, it included 15,000 members; by 1929, it had a strength of 100,000 men and was thus as big as the official German army; in 1932, it had grown to 400,000 members. Membership in the NSDAP grew just as quickly, from 2,000 in 1920 to 55,000 in 1923, 180,000 in 1929, and 450,000 in 1932, making the NSDAP the strongest party in the election of July 1932.
The social make-up of the NSDAP during the early 1920s, including the SA, was mixed. In spite of its reference to the socialist working members, only about thirty-six percent of the party included workers, which were thus underrepresented, because workers represented more than forty percent of the total German population. By contrast, the upper class with twelve percent membership was overrepresented in comparison with the three percent it constituted nationwide. Likewise overrepresented was the lower middle class at fifty-two percent (consisting of small businessmen, small-town and rural merchants, craftsmen, office clerks, and lower civil servants and civil employees), who comprised forty-three percent of the population nationwide. The latter group in particular was attracted by the party’s anti-Semitism, because they blamed the Jews for their own private business problems and the economic woes of Germany at large.