Strasser and National Bolshevism [1]

The Early Years

I have decided to start my series of essays on National Bolshevism with a discussion of Gregor Strasser, allegedly one of the leading lights of something called National Bolshevism. The following thoughts on Gregor Strasser and National Socialism are in large measure inspired by Peter D. Stachura’s definitive biography: Gregor Strasser and the Rise of Nazism.

Gregor Strasser was born on 31 May 1892 in the small Upper Bavarian town of Geisenfeld near Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, the eldest of a staunchly Catholic family of four sons and a daughter. The Strassers were of old peasant stock but Gregor’s father broke with the family tradition by entering the civil service of the Bavarian royal house, the Wittelsbach. Gregor’s mother, Pauline (née Strobel), originated from a middle-class civil service family in Dinkelsbühl (Franconia). In sum, Strasser, like Adolf Hitler, had a solid lower-middle class/middle class background.

Gregor Strasser grew up wanting to be a doctor, but his family’s modest financial circumstances didn’t allow him to pursue such lengthy studies; hence, Strasser chose instead to become a chemist. He started his apprenticeship in the small town of Frontenhausen in 1910 at the age of 18. In 1914 the outbreak of war disrupted his studies, for he volunteered for army service along with his two brothers, Paul and Otto.

Strasser joined the First Bavarian Foot Artillery Regiment on August 18, 1914 and during the next four years his saw substantial service at the front. By all accounts he was a brave and popular soldier, who was awarded several high decorations. Rising from the rank of corporal in May 1915 to junior officer four months later, and then lieutenant of the Reserve in January 1916, Strasser suffered fairly serious wounds which continued to trouble him right into his political career.

In later political life Strasser repeatedly looked back to his “Fronterlebnis” years as the best of his life, emphasizing their importance in shaping his political beliefs. They reinforced his already present nationalism and social awareness. He felt the comradeship of the trenches could be translated into a true socialist community in civilian life, in which class differences and privilege no longer mattered and in which the principle of achievement (“Leistungsprinzip”) determined an individual’s status.

The war convinced him of the rottenness of the Wilhelmine Reich. He criticized its failure to evolve “a united concept of the state”, its perpetuation of social and class tensions, and its inability to integrate the workers into society. However, the November Revolution and its aftermath disgusted him to an even greater extent. Strasser was one of the many ex-servicemen who felt acutely alienated from the new, post-W.W. I Germany.

Following the completion of his studies, Gregor Strasser became politically active in Bavaria. By mid-1920 he was leader of the Landshut branch of the völkisch Verband nationgesinnter Soldaten (VnS), an ex-servicemen’s group that had been set up immediately after the Kapp Putsch in early spring 1920. However, by the autumn of the same year the VnS was disappointing Strasser’s hopes and he joined the Einwohnerwehr (EW), or civil militia, which had as its purpose the maintaining of law and order. Ostensibly apolitical, the EW soon became a conservative-nationalist and anti-socialist counter-revolutionary movement. During that same year another momentous event in Strasser’s life occurred, at the age of 28, Strasser married on 15 April 1920 his girlfriend of some years’ standing, Else Vollmuth, in the Catholic church in Traumstein.

The post-war period in Germany saw the birth of a plethora of extremist political movements, one of them was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). The NSDAP played an inconspicuous part in German life during its very early years. Membership, which stood at a mere 1,100 in June 1920, slowly increased, but it was not until Hitler took over as leader in July 1921 and began to display his impressive organizational and propagandistic skills that the NSDAP was really put on the map as a political force of considerable magnitude. Additionally, the chaos and decline of the NSDAP following Hitler’s incarceration for his role in the unsuccessful Putsch highlighted his indispensability for the movement’s coherence.

It remains a mystery to this day when Gregor Strasser joined the NSDAP or the Sturmabteilung (SA). Various dates have been given but lack supporting evidence. Strasser himself was surprising evasive on occasion about the subject. The most reliable information points towards autumn 1922, which is much later than previous accounts of his career have suggested.

The “Socialist” Years, 1925-8

The period stretching from the refoundation of the NSDAP in early 1925 to the Reichstag elections of May 1928, when crucially important changes took place in the party’s character, organization, propaganda and social bases of support, constitutes a distinctive phase in the history of National Socialism and in development of Strasser’s personal Weltanschauung. Hitler’s dilemma at that point in time was exacerbated by a certain dichotomy between the party’s northern section that was committed to a nebulous form of “socialism” and to attracting blue-collar industrial workers, and the southern end of the party, based in Munich, which pursued an essentially Hitlerian national-racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist course. Hitler’s problem in 1925-6 was to reach an accommodation between these two viewpoints, but this necessitated facing up to his northern supporters, whose leading spokesman was Strasser.

Although at pains to emphasize that for “National Socialists…the struggle against Marxism in its every form is a sacred task” and that there had to be no suspicion that “we sympathize with the Marxist Soviet Republic and its Jewish leadership”, Strasser believed at this time that Russia and Germany, as oppressed nations, had broadly similar interests and should unite in a common struggle against the capitalist West in the grip of Jewish finance. However, Hitler’s strongly anti-Bolshevik animus and his concept of eastward expansion (Lebensraum), which was clearly expressed in Mein Kampf, put a dampener on Strasser’s seemingly pro-Russian ideas. Following the Bamberg Conference of February 1926 and the publication later that year of the second volume of Mein Kampf, Strasser changed his views on foreign policy and accepted Hitler’s argument for a German alliance with England and Italy.

In the realm of economic theory, Strasser’s concept of “German socialism” was laden with emotion rather than reason, and appeared to mean little more than a utopian desire for a return to the Middle Ages with their corporative crafts and guilds. He tried to explain the difference between his socialism and Marxist socialism in this way:

What distinguishes us from…Jewish-led Marxism is not only a fervent national outlook, but something deeper: the rejection of the materialistic world view…We hate from the bottom of our souls the levelling, comprehensively idiotic Marxist ideology! Socialism does not mean the domination of the masses, the levelling of achievement and reward, but rather socialism is the deeply felt Prussian German idea of ‘service to all’.

Another occurrence worth mentioning concerns the birth in the northern section of what appeared to some as a mechanism to counterbalance the ideological influence of the South, i.e. the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Nord und West Deutschen Gauleiter der NSDAP (AG) under Strasser’s leadership. The AG was not a fronde directed at Hitler as party leader; his position was never questioned. From Strasser’s perspective, on the other hand, the AG may have represented something more: he may have seen it as potential weapon against Hitler’s position in the party. If these were Strasser’s thoughts at the inauguration of the AG, they were soon dispelled once he saw that as an ideological or organizational unit it had little coherence and, therefore, offered no likelihood of serving as his power-base for a challenge to Hitler.

The Draft, which was drawn up under Strasser’s supervision, reflected the essence of his ideas as he had been expounding them during the early 1920s. As Peter D. Stachura notes:

The Draft did not differ fundamentally from the original party programme: it amounted to a relatively more precise and emphatic reaffirmation of the ‘socialist’ or, more accurately, the anti-capitalist parts of the 1920 statement. Prominent sections of the Draft upheld a brand of extreme racist-nationalism and pan-German imperialism to which no one in conservative Munich, let alone Hitler, could reasonably object….the Draft included a demand for the return of colonies – a peculiar aim of so-called ‘socialists’ – while the only new proposal in foreign affairs was for a United States of Europe and a custom union. Furthermore, the Draft’s anti-semitism, though not attaining the high standards set in Mein Kampf, was, by demanding the deportation of all Jews who had entered Germany since the beginning of the First World War, and the withdrawal of German citizenship from all Jews who remained, consistent with the NSDAP’s and völkisch movement’s general attitude towards the ‘Jewish problem’.

The Draft failed lamentably as a ‘socialist’ document. Its proposal on nationalization worker participation in industry, profit-sharing and co-ownership, and its agrarian reform ideas, involving the break-up of the largest estates into small peasant holdings, were tentative, woolly, and characteristic merely of the AG members’ roots in a utopian-romantic version of lower-middle-class anti-capitalism.

From an ideological viewpoint, the Draft cannot be taken seriously as indicative of the existence of a “socialist” or “left wing” current in the NSDAP during 1925-6. Additionally, the AG had no meaningful organizational or personal integrity: it was a shakily constructed body of various northern leaders who, as it transpired, had differing views on the theme that supposedly united them, ‘socialism’. In other words, the whole idea of a ‘Nazi Left’ in the NSDAP at this time has little meaning. There was never such an animal. The degree of unification in these respects that would justify the use of the term ‘Nazi Left’ as an identifiable entity within the party did not exist. The objective political role in the NSDAP of these ‘socialist’ was demagogic, tactical and propagandistic. The erroneously labeled “Nazi Left” and “Strasser wing” did not exist in concrete terms.

Strasserism

Strasser never expanded upon his “socialism” in a way that would make it in some way intelligible. As always, his “socialist” ideas remained extremely vague and eclectic. He frequently invoked the concept of a “national Socialism” yet did little to explain systematically what he meant by this term. Strasser’s forte was not theorizing, and so his vehement anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois rhetoric was about the extent of his “socialism” during the 1920s. For him National Socialism offered a unique, idealistic kind of socialism designed to return to the working class dignity of labour and a place in the national community. However, based on his “Gedanken über Aufgaben der Zunkunft” (“Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future”), we can emphatically say that he dismissed as liberal-Marxist nonsense the concept of equality:

…we have realized that the idiotic belief in the equality of man is the deadly threat with which liberalism destroys people and nation, culture and morals, violating the primordial sources of our existence. [And further] we have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are ‘basically equal’…People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in life and…in their positions in society and in the state! But this inequality in turn has only one standard, can and must have only this one standard: the achievement of the individual for society, for the nation, for the state!!

When in 1927 Strasser became involved in a debate with Alfred Rosenberg whether the NSDAP should put more emphasis on nationalism or socialism, Strasser’s arguments in favour of socialism followed the familiar pattern of vacuous slogans and catch-phrases. In the end Rosenberg remained unconvinced and expressed his regret at both the superficial content and polemical style of Strasser’s response.

To be continued.