The whole dispute around which this quarrel and struggle revolved was the old, old doubt which had filled Otto Strasser until the day when the forces of reaction fired on Hitler at Munich - whether Hitler would be true to his Socialist professions, whether he really meant to lead Germany to a new social order and to a German Socialism, or whether he was the catspaw of the old, embattled ruling classes in Germany, big business and big landownership.

After five years with Hitler, Otto Strasser was confirmed and strengthened in the doubts he had felt before 1923, and in 1930 he accepted the logical consequence of this - he bade Hitler farewell.

His brother, easy going, not yet convinced and loth to abandon a loyalty, wandered on at Hitler's side, filled with inward misgivings, loth to break away, and saw Otto Strasser's words come true when Hitler came to power. But this was too late; Gregor was then a broken and a doomed man. Otto, clearer-sighted and more resolute, though less of a great popular figure, had cut the hawser in time, and lives to pursue his mission - that of avenging Germany and of avenging Gregor Strasser.

The story of those five years, between his half-convinced, still doubting, surrender to Gregor Strasser's persuasions, and his final breakaway is therefore more that of a direct conflict between Hitler and Otto Strasser, with Gregor continually trying to make them link arms, than between Hitler and the two Strassers. This gives Otto Strasser his claim to attention to-day, and his eligibility to a big part in the future.

For he was right; Gregor was wrong; and Hitler was wrong, or rather Hitler is so mendacious a man that we do not know yet whether he was wrong or not, because we do not know, and perhaps never shall know, what he really wanted. In any case, the struggle was joined between him and Otto Strasser. Between them, placatory, stood Gregor Strasser. In the background, sometimes advancing to the front of the stage to put in a word or two or do a little stiletto-stuff, moved other figures - the malignant hobgoblin Goebbels; the Falstaffian but vindictive Göring; the bespectacled bosom-snake Himmler.

Five stormy years!

When Otto Strasser joined his brother Gregor, and became Hitler's liege, Gregor was the real head of the party in the vital and largest area of the Reich -- North Germany -- from which Hitler was barred.[2]

The party was in a bad way -- the ignominious collapse of the Munich adventure lay but eighteen months behind it -- and the two Strassers set diligently to work to reinvigorate it. Gregor took as his personal, paid assistant an unknown man, the sycophantic dwarf who later, at his downfall, was to prance around him with waspish jeers and taunts, Doctor Joseph Goebbels. The Strassers began their work by issuing the National Socialist News-Letters, published for the officials of the party only, and in these the principles and doctrine of the Socialist, or Strasser, wing of the party were expounded and developed.

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GREGOR STRASSER

The 'fight against Munich', that is, the fight between the tactician Hitler in Munich and the convinced Socialists Gregor and Otto Strasser in Berlin, dominated the life of the party at this time, and Goebbels, with his talent for telling rhetorical thrusts, took a leading part in it on the Strasser side. Suspicion and distrust of Hitler were widespread, and the conflict blazed into open flame at the famous 'Leaders' Meeting' at Hanover in October 1925, which was called to concert measures for improving and strengthening the party organization throughout Northern Germany, and for removing dissensions. It was attended by such notable Nazi leaders of to-day as Viktor Lutze, the present Brown Army Commander; Rust, the Schools Minister; Kerrl, the Church Minister; Robert Ley, the Labour Front Leader; Hildebrandt, the Mecklenburg Statthalter; and of course the two Strassers and Goebbels.

Hitler, banned from North Germany, sent to it a representative, Gottfried Feder. The meeting developed into an open expression of dissatisfaction with Hitler, and one resolution after another was passed which clearly showed this feeling.

The meeting was unanimous, save for Dr. Ley, who repeatedly protested that resolutions and decisions taken without reference to Hitler were invalid, whereon Rust exclaimed, 'We will not tolerate a Pope in our party', and Goebbels proposed that Hitler should be expelled. Gregor Strasser tactfully slurred over these things, stating that he was not a candidate against Hitler for the leadership, but was concerned to improve the organization in North Germany, which had been entrusted to him.

The conference then resolved that all North German branches of the party should be amalgamated in a single North German organization under Gregor Strasser; that all officials of the North German party must look to the Strasser News-Letters for their political guidance; that a publishing house should be founded in Berlin, under Gregor and Otto Strasser, which would take over all publicity and press work for the party in North Germany. Further, it was resolved, and this was vital, that the political programme (for 'real German Socialism') drawn up by the Strassers was accepted, and the entire body of North German leaders, save Ley, pledged themselves to vote, at the next National Congress of the entire party, for this programme to be substituted for the famous, but obsolete and imprecise, 'Twenty-Five Points' taken over by Hitler from the little party he had bought out, with Röhm's money, in Munich in 1919.

These Twenty-Five Points were adopted by Hitler as his programme and he had always refused to allow any discussion of them. He had, however, added a rider, which was in effect an annulment, to one of the most important of them, that which demanded the break-up of big estates for settlement purposes. This modification was made by him as a concession to big-business and big-landownership interests with which he was, so long ago, already in privy negotiation. This demand for the expropriation of land, however, was one of the most important things in the Twenty-Five Points, and one of those which justified the claim of the party to the name National Socialist. Its emendation made Hitler most suspect to such men as Otto Strasser. As this conflict of ideas and ideals between Hitler and the Strassers, between the convinced National Socialists and the merely power-seeking men in the party, plays a great part in the whole German development until the present day, and in the story which this book has to tell, I have reproduced the Twenty-Five Points as an appendix, for comparison with Otto Strasser's programme of 'A German Socialism' which is explained in a subsequent chapter.

The Hanover meeting, with its rebuff to Hitler, its endorsement of the Socialist part of the National Socialist programme, and its declaration of allegiance to Gregor Strasser, was thus a triumph for the two Strassers and their doctrines. It was followed immediately by their discomfiture, the first of the setbacks which ultimately led to Otto Strasser's breakaway from Hitler and to Gregor Strasser's dismissal and murder. Hitler out-manoeuvred them in this manner.

On receiving Feder's report from Hanover, he called a counter-meeting of all South German leaders at Bamberg, and invited the North German leaders, Strasser's men, to attend. None of them went, because at this time politics was an expensive spare-time luxury for these men, most of whom were living on the edge of poverty or had businesses which they could not leave; even the fare was a serious obstacle.

Only Gregor Strasser, who had his famous free-railway-pass, and Goebbels, who had 200 marks a month from Strasser, attended. Goebbels there first saw Hitler. He saw more. He saw Hitler's host of salaried officials from the embryo Brown House in Munich (Hitler was getting money from the magnates) and he saw swarms of Hitler's motor cars. He mentally contrasted this with the poverty-stricken picture of the North German leaders' meeting and with his own paltry 200 marks a month.

Thereon, Goebbels decided that he had been standing on his bad leg and shifted his weight on to the good one. In sonorous and repentant tones, he declared that he could not associate himself further with the decisions of Hanover, whither he had called for the expulsion of Hitler.

Gregor Strasser was left isolated. His own supporters were absent. Goebbels had publicly betrayed him. He was poor; Hitler had the money. He shrugged his shoulders and accepted defeat.

He was left at the head of the North German organization, because Hitler was not allowed in North Germany anyway, but Hitler refused to discuss the Strasser programme. The Twenty-Five Points were restored to their place as the official programme of the party.

From that day dated the deadly enmity between the Strassers and Goebbels, which may yet see a spectacular issue. Goebbels, purring, left the meeting in Hitler's motor car. Max Amann, the head of Hitler's Eher Publishing House, gazed curiously at him and murmured to Hitler: 'This is the Mephisto of our party.'

As an instance of the kind of issue which agitated opinion within the party in those days, and led to such dissensions, I may mention that the dispute about the confiscation of the property of the former reigning dynasties was in progress. On the ground that war-disabled men, inflation victims and others had had no compensation, the Strassers, and the bulk of the party were for confiscation; Hitler, who was bargaining with the magnates behind the scenes, was against it.

Nevertheless, the Strassers resumed the struggle in North Germany, and Gregor persuaded Otto, as Goebbels had left him, to give up his job in Count von Hertling's concern and devote all his time to the party. This happened at the beginning of 1926. With the money he received as compensation for surrendering a contract which still had two and a half years to run, Otto Strasser founded the North German publishing house, the Kampfverlag, and began to publish National Socialist newspapers in Berlin and throughout North Germany.

In the years 1926-28 the entire North German section of the National Socialist Party was inspired by and controlled through the Kampfverlag, of which the Strassers and a third partner, Hinkel, held the shares in equal parts. It was bigger than Hitler's own publishing house, the Eherverlag, at Munich. Through it, the great struggle for the mind of Germany was waged, a struggle of ideas, of organization, of publicity and of finance, a battle between Munich and Berlin, between Hitler and the Strassers, between Eherverlag and Kampfverlag.

In 1927 Hitler delivered his great blow, one which was eventually to prove fatal to the Strassers.

Looking round for an instrument to use against the Strassers, whose incorrigible convictions hampered his tactical ideas, he picked on Goebbels, the penitent of Bamberg, the detested enemy of the two brothers in Berlin. Goebbels he made Regional Leader of the party in Berlin, in 1927, and instructed him to begin publication of a newspaper, the Angriff, rival to those issued by the Kampfverlag. His mission was to be a thorn in the Strasser side.

It was a curious position. Otto Strasser, who held no party office, was formally entitled to publish the official party organ for Berlin; Goebbels, who was the party leader in Berlin, published a non-official paper in competition with it. Gregor Strasser was Hitler's deputy, the National Socialist leader for all North Germany; Goebbels was made leader for Berlin in order to undermine and overthrow him. This was one of the earlier examples of Hitler's methods of attaining his ends.

For three years, from 1927 to 1930, the vendetta was pursued with tremendous bitterness, at first behind the scenes, then in the open. The vendors of the rival newspapers fought each other in the streets, while the Socialists and Communists laughed and rubbed their hands; but in this feud Goebbels had the advantage, for he was the commander of the Berlin Storm Troops.

One day, Hitler himself came to Otto Strasser's well-appointed office in the Nürnbergerstrasse and tried to induce him voluntarily to suspend publication of his newspaper, which preached National Socialism, the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung. Strasser answered: 'Why should I? We were first in the field. Our papers have appeared for years. We have the official party authorization to publish. We did the spadework and broke the ground. The party and its press are now thriving, thanks to our work. Tell Goebbels to stop publication of his paper.'

Hitler answered: 'This is not a question of right, but of might. Goebbels has the Storm Troops, and what can you do if twenty Storm Troopers come here one day and smash the place up?'

Otto Strasser opened his drawer, laid his revolver on the table -- I said before that he loves this gesture -- and said, Herr Hitler, in that case you will have eight Storm Troopers the less'. Hitler shouted: 'But you can't shoot my SA men!' Said Otto Strasser: 'I thought you said they were Goebbels's SA men. If they are yours, you can stop them. Anyway, I'll shoot anybody who breaks in here with the intention of attacking me.'

'We should have broken openly with Hitler then', says Otto Strasser. 'That was the right moment, and we were in a very strong position. But Gregor always wanted to avoid the open conflict. He thought we should win in the end anyway, and should appear to give way by transferring our offices outside Berlin.'

Between 1929 and 1930 the rise of the party was so rapid that the Kampfverlag grew rapidly, and had to make daily papers out of several of its weekly papers. The friction with Hitler and Goebbels consequently increased. At last Hitler sent for the three partners in the Kampfverlag, the two Strassers and Hinkel, to come to Munich. (Hinkel is to-day Reich Commissioner for the Jewish Question, having retained Hitler's favour through his subsequent compliance in this matter.)

'Hitler behaved like a madman. He shrieked and roared at us, and then flattered us. He offered to buy the Kampfverlag from us at any price we liked to name, and offered Hinkel and myself deputy's seats in the Reichstag. [A deputy's seat in Germany was a fairly profitable thing.] Gregor was ready to sell, but his share was only a third. I refused point blank and contrived to get Hinkel to refuse also. The conversation lasted many hours and at times was conducted in a Bedlam-like atmosphere. At one point I remarked mildly, "You are mistaken, Herr Hitler", whereon Hitler shouted, "I cannot err, everything that I do and say is history".'

The tension approached explosion point. At last the breach came. The immediate cause was a metalworkers' strike in Saxony.

The Strassers and the North German section of the party supported the strikers, and the official order of the party to its members was 'strike'. The Employers' Federation then sent an ultimatum to Hitler that it would cut off its contributions to his exchequer unless the strike order were at once countermanded. Hitler ordered the Saxon Branch of the party to countermand the strike order and instruct its members not to take part. The National Socialist Leader for Saxony, Mutschmann, gave way, but the Strassers held fast, and the official press of the party urged the workers to continue the strike. Thus, the open conflict broke out - in the spring of 1930.

Hitler came to Berlin and had two long and stormy meetings with Otto Strasser, who suffered at them from his old handicap - Gregor had begged him not to provoke a split, because in that event he would stay with Hitler. Gregor's motive was always the same; he believed that the National Socialist movement was good and that the only fault was one of tactics, which could later be corrected; he did not believe that anything fundamental was wrong with the party. Otto took the opposite view.

These two encounters with Hitler are of great interest. Otto Strasser recorded them immediately afterwards, as literally as he could remember them, and published them in his Aufbau des Deutschen Sozialismus (Structure of German Socialism) in 1931.

Thus for many years the record of those two terrific conversations has been on record and in print, available to all who wanted to study the man Hitler. To-day the accounts of his hysterical orgasms in such conversations come from all sides. Ambassadors, who formerly counted among his admirers, publish them. His former lieutenants publish them. Mental specialists all agree that this man is mad. The peers who wooed him all agree that this man is mad. Everybody agrees, quite suddenly, that this man is mad.

Why? He has not done anything now that he did not do, repeatedly, in the seven preceding years of his might - save the pact with the Bolshevists. He has not said anything now that he did not say over and over again in those years and long before. He has touched no summit of delirium that then was beyond his reach.

Here, in these two protracted wrangles with Otto Strasser ten years ago, you find it all - the shouting and screaming, the half-witted jargon -- like a low music-hall comedian caricaturing a diehard major of the most exaggerated type -- even the threats and the ultimatum.

On the one side, Otto Strasser, who wanted a straight answer on an issue of major political importance. On the other side, the cheapjack ranting of Hitler, who pulverized the clearest question and the most logical argument alike with shouted retorts of 'Marxism', 'Bolshevism', 'Democratic bunkum', 'Nonsense' and so on. There it all is, the same picture, in every detail, with which the world has become familiar since the outbreak of war.

Nowadays, people think. 'Of course, a man who behaves like that is clearly irresponsible, a public danger. If the world had only known'. But the world could have known. It could have known from this account of Otto Strasser's of his two-day struggle with Hitler. But it did not want to know. Strasser's narrative would even have been discounted, as exaggerated, by anybody who took the trouble to read it. To-day, the world has become sufficiently familiar with Hitler to know that it is a life-like portrait, true in every detail.

It is, indeed, the first such portrait, painted long before Hitler came to power, at a time when the world was only languidly interested in Hitler and did not believe in his capacity to do the harm he has done. It is strange that it did not attract attention later, when Hitler had come to power, and any fifth-rate gutter-journalist from Berlin could go abroad, to England or America, and publish the 'inside story' of Hitler. Here was the inside story, and nobody bothered to read it.

I believe Strasser's book, containing the account of these two conversations, has never been translated; at any rate it has never appeared in English. If any foreign statesman, having the interests of his country really at heart, had wished to learn what sort of a man Hitler was, he could have found all he needed here. A statesman who had read these pages would not, unless he were incorrigibly wooden-headed and blind to his country's interests, have found himself years later talking about 'that eternal tendency to suspect Herr Hitler which unfortunately only breeds counter-suspicion', or suchlike twaddle.

Here he would have found, if he wished to know it, the true picture of Hitler. A thimblerigger, a three-card-trickster, a mountebank who sought to make his trashy wares look genuine by shouting them ever more loudly, as does the ranting cheapjack at the fair, a man without truth, honour or loyalty, a third-rank political swindler destined through intrigue to be borne to the loftiest heights of power.

His adversary, in those days, was a man who believed in certain things and wished to attain power in Germany in order to bring them about; Hitler, as these conversations show, believed in nothing, but thought these certain things worth professing as a means to attain power, when he meant to do something quite different.

The two men are as different as night and day, as thief and honest man, as renegade and patriot. The greatest renegades, in all countries, are those who shout their patriotism loudest, bawl their national anthem loudest, clamour loudest that they will not sheathe the sword in wars in which they do not fight, cry loudest for that patriotic conscription which will not conscript themselves.

Hitler, in this understanding of the word, is the greatest patriot of all time, a worthy crony of those in other countries who sang his praises and propped him up until he could plunge Europe in war again, and then, in their pure patriotism, began chanting 'the man is mad, we must finish with him, send the young men away to finish with him, down with him'.

He deserves, and they deserve, an honoured place in the Valhalla of such patriots. They are the men who have made Europe what Europe is, and if you like it, you like it. If only, one day, we could have just one settling of accounts with these renegades. If they have their way, they will soon be betraying us again, with and through Göring.

Such men enabled Hitler, this cesspool-product Hitler, the greatest traitor and renegade that Germany ever had, for years to pose and be accepted as a German patriot, of all ludicrous things. By similar means, men in Britain who should be pilloried as renegades are able to pose, not for years, but for decades, with the halo of a shining patriotism encircling their heads.

I shall give long extracts from the two conversations here because they so clearly illuminate the theme of this book, the method by which renegades-called-patriots succeed ever and again in bringing about war in Europe, and the characters of the two men called Adolf Hitler and Otto Strasser. For many years after the publication of these conversations, such is the level of intelligence in Europe, it was possible to present Hitler, because he was entirely and cynically and avowedly self-seeking and without any feeling for the welfare of Germany, as a patriot: Otto Strasser, because he had precisely this feeling for the welfare of Germany, and was not self-seeking, and clung to his convictions, as an anti-patriot and 'Red'; to this appalling extent is the public opinion of Europe, and particularly of Britain, slave to the millionaire-owned newspapers whose mission, as it believes in its purblindness, is to inform.

The theme of these two long verbal rencounters is the old, old dispute. Strasser asks quietly again and again, in a dozen different ways, 'Are you for Socialism; do you mean what you say; have you the ideal of a better social order in view; or are all these only phrases which you use to catch votes; is power your only real aim?'

Hitler, in reply, rants, rails, and roars: 'I am the anointed of Heaven, you are an intellectual crank' (do you remember those sergeant-majors whom Otto Strasser so loathes from his recruit days?), 'I know what is best, what you say is the purest Marxist-Bolshevist-Liberal-Democratic-Socialist-Communist-Red muck'. (It is not I, but Hitler, who marries the adjective 'pure' with 'muck'; he does it continually; he would.)

These are not direct quotations, but they give the picture. The contest is between a man of convictions, ideals, and logical mind; and a liar who believes in nothing and is prepared to use any means to counter an argument, crush an adversary, or bring about a war.

On the one side of the table sits a man of clear thought and convictions who can pungently put and counter an argument; on the other, a ridiculous tub-thumper, vain as a peacock, who can produce no answer to a direct question but a string of meaningless catchwords, who is thrown into hysterical paroxysms by any simple interrogation, because he knows himself to be a liar, and who clearly shows that he has no ideals or convictions whatever, that he is only for the means and leaves the end to look after itself.

These meetings took place on May 21st and 22nd, 1930. The first began with the familiar tirade -- Hitler's technique never changes, from Otto Strasser in 1930 to Kurt von Schuschnigg in 1938 and Sir Nevile Henderson in 1939 -- of shouted reproaches and threats, on account of the tone taken in the publications of the Kampfverlag, culminating in a demand for the immediate dissolution of that publishing house, or else ... But when Otto Strasser rose and quietly said he had come for a discussion and was not prepared to listen to an ultimatum, Hitler, as ever, became calm and friendly, and the talk began.

The battle was joined with Hitler's objections to criticisms made in Strasser's papers about the appointment, by the first National Socialist Minister, Dr. Frick, in Thuringia, of one Schulze-Naumburg to a high post in the realm of art. Strasser replied that the younger generation of artists of National Socialist sympathies held this gentleman to represent the wax-flowers-under-a-glass-bowl period in art and had the right to state its opinion. Hitler's rejoinder began, 'Everything you say proves that you have no idea of art. There is no such thing as an "older generation" or a "younger generation" in art, there is only art, and particularly Greek-Nordic art'. Strasser interjected another view and mentioned 'Chinese and Egyptian art as an expression of the souls of those peoples'. Hitler answered: 'What you say is the most obsolete Liberalism. There is no such thing as Chinese or Egyptian art, only Nordic-Greek art ...'

*

The conversation begun on this level remained on the same level throughout. Hitler's next reproach was against an article which, as he complained, 'differentiated between the Idea of National Socialism and the Führer, and even put the Idea higher than the Führer'.

Strasser, while disclaiming any disrespect for Hitler, said he held precisely that view. A Führer 'might become ill, or die, or conceivably deviate from the Idea; but an Idea was of divine origin, and eternal'.