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Some Social Characteristics of Early Nazi Party Members, 1919–23

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Paul Madden
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Extract

A requisite for determining the nature of a political movement is identifying the segments of society which provide its base of support. In the case of German National Socialism, however, historians and political scientists have often neglected an empirical analysis of the social composition of the party membership, concentrating instead on its “program,” its leadership, and its organization. From these aspects of Nazism, they have deduced that the movement must have had great appeal for certain dissatisfied groups in German society during the interwar period, and that those groups in fact made up the bulk of the party's rank-and-file members.

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Articles
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Central European History , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 34 - 56
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Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1982

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References

1. For a brief bibliographical synopsis of previous statistical studies concerning the NSDAP membership, see Appendix 1. (These studies are cited below by short title.)

2. Pollock, J. K., “An Areal Study of the German Electorate, 1930–1933,” American Political Science Review 2 (1944): 89–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heberle, Rudolf, Landbevölkerung und Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bendix, Reinhard, “Social Stratification and Political Power,” American Political Science Review 6 (02 1952): 357.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Loomis, C. P. and Beegle, J. A., “The Spread of German Nazism in Rural Areas,” American Sociological Review 11 (1946): 724–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. It has also been suggested that the social composition of the party differed markedly from one area of Germany to another. See Nyomarkay, Joseph, “Factionalism in the National Socialist German Workers Party, 1925–1926: The Myth and Reality of the ‘Northern Faction,’ ” Political Science Quarterly 80 (07 1965): 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Orlow, Dietrich, The History of the Nazi Party: 1919–1933 (Pittsburgh, 1969), pp. 56, 86, and 104.Google Scholar

5. A partial list of works which subscribe to this thesis includes Seymour Lipset, Martin, Political Man (New York, 1960)Google Scholar; Winkler, Heinrich August, Mittelstand, Demokratie und Nationalsozialismus (Cologne, 1972)Google Scholar; Nolte, Ernst, Three Faces of Fascism (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; and Bracher, Karl Dietrich, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism (New York, 1970), trans. Steinberg, JeanGoogle Scholar. See also the review article by Volkmann, Erich, “Mittelstand und Nationalsozialismus in der Weimarer Republik,” Das Historisch-Politische Buch, 1973, pp. 97–98.Google Scholar

6. In brief, this theory holds that persons in a given society of roughly the same age who have experienced events during their formative years which imparted to them a world view significantly different than that held by younger or older groups in the same society constitute a political “generation.” The more profound the shared experiences of the group, the more cohesive it becomes, with age outweighing factors such as class and geographic background in political affiliation. This argument has been developed in a number of works, including Eisenstadt, S. N., From Generation to Generation: Age Groups and Social Structure (Glencoe, 1956)Google Scholar; Berger, Bennett M., “How Long is a Generation?” British Journal of Sociology 11 (05 1960): 10–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rentala, Marvin, “A Generation in Politics: A Definition,” Review of Politics 25 (01 1963): 409–522Google Scholar; Gasset, José Ortega y, The Modern Theme (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Marias, Julian, Generations: A Historical Method (Univ. of Alabama, 1970)Google Scholar; Spitzer, Allen B., “The Historical Problem of Generations,” American Historical Review 78 (Dec. 1973): 1353–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mannheim, Karl, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Kecskemeti, Paul (Oxford Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 302–3Google Scholar. Those who identify Nazism as a generation revolt argue that the First World War produced at least one extremely cohesive generation, with a homogeneous world view that made them more susceptible to the Nazi appeal regardless of their class affiliation. The most convincing recent champions of this thesis are Loewenberg, Peter, “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort,” American Historical Review 75 (Mar. 1971): 1457–1502CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Merkl, Peter, Political Violence Under the SwastikaGoogle Scholar. Many historians, however, have pointed out the apparent youth of NSDAP members in the pre-1933 period, including Vermeil, E., L'Allemagne, Essai d'explication (Paris, 1945), pp. 294–95Google Scholar; Heberle, Rudolf, From Democracy to Nazism (Baton Rouge, 1945), pp. 9–10Google Scholar; Bracher, The German Dictatorship, p. 91; Hofer, Walther, Die Diktatur Hitlers: Bis zum Beginn des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Konstanz, 1960), p. 11Google Scholar; Orlow, Dietrich, “The Conversion of Myths into Political Power: The Case of the Nazi Party, 1925–1926,” American Historical Review 72 (Apr. 1967): 906–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Noakes, Jeremy, “Conflict and Development in the NSDAP, 1924–1927,” Journal of Contemporary History 1 (Oct. 1966): 3–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schoenbaum, David, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Germany 1933–1939 (London, 1966), pp. 11 and 30Google Scholar; Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers, p. 50; and Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, p. 68, who argues that “the most striking single social fact about the party is that it was a party of the young.” Albert Krebs also pointed out in Allen, William Sheridan, ed., Infancy of Nazism: The Memoirs of Ex-Gauleiter Albert Krebs 1923–1933 (New York, 1976), p. 41Google Scholar, that youth played an important role in party recruitment.

7. See especially Lerner, Daniel, The Nazi Elite (Stanford, 1951)Google Scholar, and Banaszkiewicz, Jakub, “German Fascism and People of the Social Fringe,” Polish Western Affairs 8 (Aug. 1967): 251–88.Google Scholar

8. Between the formation of the NSDAP and the Machtergreifung the party underwent several transitions, at least one of them profound. The generalizations arrived at in this essay apply only to the period up to the beer-hall putsch. The Nazi party as it was refounded in 1925 differed considerably from the early party in tactics and organization, if not in strategy. It may well have attracted recruits very dissimilar in social origins from those of the early party.

9. The three used by Maser in Frühgeschichte der NSDAP.

10. Apparently not the lists of the same name quantified by Douglas in “The Parent Cell.” Douglas's volume contains 2,548 entries (p. 60), whereas the volume at the Berlin Document Center contains 2,988. Entries on Douglas's lists ceased either at the end of July (p. 56) or the end of Aug. (p. 58), 1921. The last entry on the lists at the BDC were from Oct. 1921. There is no note on the inside cover of the BDC document such as described by Douglas. Nevertheless, the two must necessarily be reproductions of the same early lists, the copy at the BDC having an update of two to three months over Douglas's source.

11. There is no consensus in the many works that have appeared on the early years of the NSDAP about the number of members it contained at any given time; estimates have varied widely. Working from the membership lists in Adolf Hitlers Mitkämpfer and the Hauptarchiv collection it was possible to establish the approximate number of members who joined the party in a given year by the simple expedient of finding the highest membership number for Dec. of that year and the lowest for Jan. of the succeeding year, keeping in mind that the DAP began its numbering sequence with 501. Where the numbers for Dec. and Jan. were not consecutive, the number most nearly in the middle is given. Using this method, the strength of the pre-1924 NSDAP was as follows: Dec. 1919–214; Dec. 1920—2,352 (2,138 new members); Dec. 1921—4,302 (1,950 new members); Dec. 1922—8,202 (3,900 new members estimated); Nov. 1923—55,287 (47,085 new members). This does not take into account the persons who may have left the party, as there was no indication of exits on the membership lists. The figures for 1922 are estimated very roughly; the last new member of the Hauptarchiv list for that year joined in Oct. New members had apparently entered the party at the rate of slightly over 300 per month up to that time, so that figure was used to compute the total number of new members. Volz, Hanz, Daten der Geschichte der NSDAP, p. 7Google Scholar, says the Deutschsoziale Partei was incorporated into the National Socialist movement in Oct. 1922, but does not say how many people this involved. If it was large, the number of party members at the beginning of 1923 could have been considerably higher than the 8,000-plus estimated here. Volz himself gives an estimate of “rund 6000 eingeschriebene Mitglieder” in the party at the beginning of 1923.

12. The Hauptarchiv lists are far from complete. Unlike the lists in Adolf Hitlers Mitkämpfer, they are not mostly from Munich and vicinity, but come from various groups, almost all in South Germany. The few lists for 1922 contain only 369 entries—an obviously unsatisfactory number from which to draw firm conclusions. The statistics derived for 1922 should be used with great caution. By far the largest number of entries in the Hauptarchiv lists are from the period Aug.-Nov. 1923. During the ten months preceding the beer-hall putsch, over 47,000 persons apparently became Nazis. Approximately one-tenth of those are recorded in the Hauptarchiv lists. The figures for 1923, like those from 1922, are not derived from a scientific sample and should be used with caution. The Hauptarchiv lists for 1923 used in this study are the same as those used by Kater in “Die Soziographie.”

13. All areas of Germany south of the Main River, excluding the Rhineland, are included here as “South Germany.”

14. The “Aus der Bewegung” column in the Völkischer Beobachter during the period Feb. 8–28, 1923, mentions 71 Ortsgruppen, some as far north as Bremen, as far north and east as Leipzig. The party already had many locals in the Rhineland at this date, including those at Düsseldorf and at Bonn.

15. This is in agreement with the findings of Orlow, History of the Nazi Party, p. 138, Farquaharson, J. T., The Plow and the SwastikaGoogle Scholar, and Angress, Werner T., “The Political Role of the Peasantry in the Weimar Republic,” Review of Politics 21 (July 1959).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. An excellent discussion of the Mittelstand thesis can be found in the review article by Volkmann, “Mittelstand und Nationalsozialismus in der Weimarer Republik,” pp. 97–98.

17. This generalization apparently originated with Heiden, , A History of National Socialism (New York, 1935)Google Scholar. It has found its way into virtually every study of Nazism and is especially popular among East European historians. See especially Banaszkiewicz, “German Fascism and People of the Social Fringe,” pp. 251–88, and Pospisil, Evelyn, “Diskussionsbetrag: Die Massenbasis des Faschismus,” Jenaer Beitrag für Parteiengeschichte 31 (Feb. 1969): 31–40.Google Scholar

18. Among the more convincing attempts of this nature is Lipset, Political Man, pp. 129–30, 140, and 146–48.

19. With few exceptions, the studies mentioned in Appendix 1 all concluded that the Mittelstand/lower middle class made up the majority of the rank-and-file members of the early NSDAP.

20. See especially Martin, F. M., “Some Subjective Aspects of Social Stratification,” in Glass, D. V., ed., Social Mobility in Britain (London, 1954)Google Scholar; Lewis, L. S., “Class and Perceptions of Class,” Social Forces 42 (1964): 336–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kahl, J. A., The American Class Structure (New York, 1957)Google Scholar; Jackson, J. A., Social Stratification (Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar; Coxon, A. P. M. and Jones, C. L., “Occupational Similarities: Subjective Aspects of Social Stratification,” Quality and Quantity 8 (1974): 139–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Campbell, J. D., “Subjective Aspects of Occupational Status” (unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Harvard, 1952).Google Scholar

21. Deuerlein, Ernst, “Hitlers Eintritt in die Politik und die Reichswehr,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 7 (Apr. 1959): 177–227.Google Scholar

22. Franz-Willing, Die Hitlerbewegung; Maser, Frühgeschichte der NSDAP; Kater, “Zur Soziographie”; and Douglas, “The Parent Cell,” respectively.

23. Statistisches Jahrbuch für den Freistaat Bayern, 1919 (Munich, 1919).Google Scholar

24. An excellent starting point for those interested in determinants of social class is Coxon, Anthony P. M. and Jones, Charles L., The Images of Occupational Prestige (London, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which contains a thorough discussion of previous works on the topic; and, by the same authors, Class and Hierarchy: Social Meanings of Occupations (London, 1979)Google Scholar. Also useful are Goldthorpe, John H. and Hope, Keith, The Social Grading of Occupations: A New Approach and Scale (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar, and an older work by Loomis, C. P., Beegle, J. A., and Longmore, T. W., Critique of Class as Related to Social Stratification (New York, 1948)Google Scholar. A careful reading of these works will reveal two important points to historians: (1) there is a singular lack of unanimity among sociologists as to assignments of occupational groups to social classes, and (2) most models of occupation-based social class hierarchies are derived from public opinion polls! Representative samples of persons from all walks of life are asked to rank certain selected occupations in order of prestige, income, social status, etc. The researcher then tabulates the results and constructs his model. Coxon and Jones have challenged the validity of this methodology. It is interesting to note that even Marxists are presently confused concerning the assignment of occupational groups to social classes. There is considerable debate as to which groups should be considered bourgeois and which ones are the proletariat. On this see especially Hunt, Alan, “Theory and Politics in the Identification of the Working Class,”Google Scholar and Poulantzas, Nicos, “The New Petty Bourgeoisie,” in Hunt, Alan, ed., Class and Class Structure (London, 1977).Google Scholar

25. This is the argument championed in Maser, Frühgeschichte der NSDAP, and in Franz-Willing, Der Ursprung. Douglas, “The Parent Cell,” apparently agrees with their position.

26. Kater, “Zur Soziographie.…”

27. Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch.

28. See Flechtheim, Ossip, Die Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands in der Weimarer Republik (Offenbach-am-Main, 1948)Google Scholar, and Hunt, Richard N., German Social Democracy, 1918–1933 (New Haven, 1964).Google Scholar

29. The Abel biographies contain a wealth of information on the sample derived as described in Appendix 1 below, which has recently been exhaustively reworked by Merkl, Violence Under the Swastika. A number of the cases discussed in detail by Merkl strongly suggest that the individuals who joined Hitler's movement did so (or so they themselves thought) because of ideological conviction rather than economic considerations. Only the sort of detailed information, but on a statistically meaningful sample of Nazis, such as is available on individual party members in the Abel biographies would justify a final conclusion on the class status of the NSDAP membership.

30. For an explanation of the choice of categories and the criteria for assigning specific occupations to those categories reflected in Table 3, see Appendix 2.

31. The statistics for the occupational structure of the Reich were compiled from Statistik des deutschen Reichs, Band 402, vols, I and II, Die berufliche und soziale Gliederung der Bevölkerung des Deutschen Reichs (Berlin, 1927)Google Scholar, which were derived from the 1925 census. The statistics for Bavaria were compiled from Statistisches Jahrbuch für den Freistaat Bayern, 1919 (Munich, 1919)Google Scholar. The method used was simple, but time-consuming. I simply divided the German workforce as described in the Statistik and the Jahrbuch into the same categories into which I divided the party membership.

32. This finding is in conflict with a number of previous generalizations about the early Nazi party. Bracher argued in The German Dictatorship, p. 91, that after Hitler joined the party “the working class element diminished. At the same time, many unemployed found their way into the party.” Both these statements contradict the statistics above. Zapf, Wolfgang, Wandlungen der deutschen Elite: Ein Zirkulationsmodel Deutscher Führungsgruppen, 1919–1966 (Munich, 1965), p. 52Google Scholar, contends that persons from all occupations could be found in the NSDAP in its early years. “Nur die Industriearbeiterschaft war nicht sehr zahlreich vertreten.” Pospisel, “Die Massenbasis des Faschismus,” contends that “The NSDAP did not succeed in penetrating the ranks of the working class.” These arguments are not substantiated by the figures in Table 3. Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, pp. 74–76, has collected a great number of eyewitness reports of Nazi rallies (including some from leaders of the KPD and the SPD) that led him to the conclusion that the Nazis attracted considerable support from the ranks of the proletariat before 1924. The reports are supported by the statistics above.

33. The high percentage of preputsch Nazis from the upper middle and upper classes shown in Table 3 contrasts sharply with a number of previous characterizations of the early NSDAP membership. claim, Maser's in Frühgeschichte der NSDAP, p. 107Google Scholar, that “until Hitler joined the party, the German Workers Party was a group of workmen, especially railway workers,” and Nyomarkay's, Joseph similar generalization in Charisma and Factionalism in the Nazi Party (Minneapolis, 1967), p. 58Google Scholar, that “the DAP at its inception … was composed of people of working class origins,” are both in conflict with the figures derived by this study. Nor can Orlow's contention in History of the Nazi Party, p. 17, be supported that in 1920 “the DAP's still relatively small membership was, socially and economically, a very homogeneous body. For the most part the members came from the same social milieu as Drexler and the old guard.” Thornton, Michael was also mistaken when he wrote in Nazism, 1918–1945 (London, 1966), p. 27Google Scholar, that it was only the “bigoted lower-class mind” that was attracted to the party. Zapf, Wandlungen der deutschen Elite, p. 52, correctly concluded that a representative portion of the old German elite joined Hitler's party. Hitler himself apparently succeeded in securing financial support from the wealthier elements in Bavaria in 1920–21 including Frau Bechstein, and from all over Germany in 1921–22 after a speech at the Nationalist Club in Berlin. See Volz, Daten der Geschichte der NSDAP, p. 9. The generalizations of Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, pp. 80–82, that the early Nazi party contained “a heterogeneous mixture of people of all classes and all professions and trades,” and of Carstens, Rise of Fascism, p. 94, that the early party represented “a fair cross section of the Munich population at the time,” are both in general agreement with the figures above.

34. The column for “farmers” under Bavaria and the Reich include only those men actually engaged in farming, excluding their families and excluding many of those included under “agriculture” in the Statistik such as fishermen, lumberjacks, and forest rangers.

35. For the economic situation of German farmers, 1919–23, see Angell, James W., The Recovery of Germany (New Haven, 1929), esp. pp. 18, 393, and 397.Google Scholar

36. This generalization apparently originated with Heiden, History of National Socialism, p. 90, who wrote that the “backbone of the Nazi movement was composed up until 1923 of the Reichswehr and the Police.” A number of subsequent works on the history of the NSDAP have repeated this mistaken assumption, from Schuman, Fredrick, Hitler and the Nazi Dictatorship (London, 1936), p. 16Google Scholar, to Nyomarkay in Charisma and Factionalism, p. 54, who argued that after Röhm joined the party in May 1919 the DAP was transformed into a party of soldiers.

37. Gordon, , “Ritter von Epp und Berlin, 1919–1923,” Wehrwissenschaftliche Rundschau 2 (June 1959): 64.Google Scholar

38. There is a definite possibility that many Nazis, especially in the SA, were ex-soldiers. There is no doubt that the party leadership made efforts to attract this group into its ranks in articles in the Völkischer Beobachter and in another publication, Der Nationalsozialist, calling on Frontsoldaten to support the movement.

39. A number of tracts on National Socialism emphasize the importance of the unemployed in the NSDAP membership. Typical of these is Bracher, The German Dictatorship, p. 91.

40. Loewenberg, “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort.” Merkl also emphasizes the generational aspects of Nazism in Violence Under the Swastika. Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, p. 71, agrees, writing that “in many ways the NSDAP represented a rebellion of dissatisfied youth against an elder generation that had not only stumbled into a war but had failed to win it, and that had equally failed to create a world with which these young men could sympathize.”

41. The figures for Bavaria are from Statistisches Jahrbuch für den Freistaat Bayern, p. 13. The age breakdown for the Reich is from Statistisches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Reichs (Berlin, 1928), pp. 16–17Google Scholar, based on the 1925 census. During the period 1919–23, forty-five persons under seventeen years of age joined the party, the youngest only fourteen. They are included with the seventeen to twenty group.

42. Maser, Frühgeschichte der NSDAP, pp. 107–8.

43. For official Nazi attitudes and policies toward women see Evans, Richard J., The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London, 1976)Google Scholar. Also valuable are Bremme, Gabriele, Die politische Rolle der Frau in Deutschland (Göttingen, 1956)Google Scholar; Kirkpatrick, Clifford, Nazi Germany: Its Women and Family Life (New York, 1938)Google Scholar; and McIntyre, Jill R., “Women and the Professions in Germany, 1930–1940,” in Nicholls, Anthony and Matthias, Erich, eds., Democracy and the Triumph of Hitler (London, 1971).Google Scholar