The Salzburg Conference and the National Socialist Party of the German Volk

Posted by Bogumil

National Socialism across borders: the programme and proceedings of the 2nd Inter-State Representatives’ Conference of the National Socialists of Greater Germany, held in Salzburg, Austria over 7-8 August 1920

In 1904 the German Workers’ Party in Austria (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in Österreich, DAPÖ) was founded in Trautenau, Bohemia, by representatives from Austria-Hungary’s various ethnic-German trade-unions and workers’ associations. In May 1918, as part of a general post-War restructuring, the members of the DAPÖ voted to adopt a new name for their organization: the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei, DNSAP). When in November 1918 the Treaty of St. Germain awarded the territories of the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia and Austrian Silesia to Poland, the DNSAP consequently found itself divided into three separate national branches; in an effort to keep the party unified and coordinated under these new circumstances, the first ‘Inter-State Representatives’ Conference of the National Socialists of Greater Germany’ was held by the DNSAP in December 1919 in Vienna, with delegates attending from party branches across Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The following year the 2nd Inter-State Congress was held in Salzburg, Austria, over 7-8 August, with this meeting in particular proving to be a significant event in the early history of National Socialism. The DNSAP in 1919 had established contact with two nascent political parties in the German Republic: the German Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei, DSP), most active in northern Germany, and the Munich-based National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). Although neither group had attended the first Inter-State Congress, both were acknowledged by the DNSAP as National Socialist “brother-parties” and both dispatched formal delegations to the 2nd Congress in Salzburg, where unity was the central topic of conversation. Delegates at Salzburg voted to establish an ‘Inter-State Chancellery’ in Vienna to act as a liaison organization between them, and it was further agreed that the five brother-parties would unite as constituent parts of a single cross-border association, the National Socialist Party of the German Volk (Nationalsozialistischen Partei des deutschen Volkes, NSPDV), in which they would maintain their own programmes and independence while being subordinated to the broader programme of the NSPDV – the eventual aim being formal unification as a single party in a united Greater Germany. To that end, DSP and NSDAP delegates also agreed to divide Germany into respective ‘spheres of influence’ as a prelude to their own unification at the DSP’s upcoming party conference. Although made with great enthusiasm and pursued vigorously by National Socialists in their relations with one another over the next few years, these decisions ultimately proved ineffective. A young and still largely unknown delegate at Salzburg named Adolf Hitler would, through his eventual ascension to the NSDAP leadership, ultimately be their undoing, jettisoning the concepts of consensus-based leadership and merger-as-equals in favor of subordination to the NSDAP and centralized diktat from Munich. The five documents translated below, consisting of articles and reports by National Socialists describing the discussions at Salzburg and the programme of the NSPDV, provide an insight into this early period of ‘inter-state’ National Socialism, when the movement had a more democratic caste and when its leading figures were labor activists from Austria and the Sudetenland, rather than Hitler and his supporters.

The Salzburg Conference in Overview
The Deutsche Arbeiter-Presse of 14 August, 1920.

NS_Swastika

The article below first appeared in the Deutsche Arbeiter-Presse, the central party-organ of the Austrian DNSAP, on 14 August 1920. It provides a thorough synopsis of the events of the Salzburg Conference, its various attendees, and the topics discussed and voted upon by the conference’s delegates, and thus serves as an excellent introductory overview of the conference and of its significance to the early National Socialist movement. Although the article is unsigned, it is nonetheless probable that Dr. Walter Riehl, the chairman of the Austrian DNSAP at the time, was responsible for its authorship – Riehl was also the editor of the Deutsche Arbeiter-Presse and so would have been behind many of the newspaper’s editorials and unsigned pieces. Furthermore, the article was translated from Dr. Alexander Schilling’s biography of Dr. Walter Riehl (Dr. Walter Riehl und die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, 1933), which reproduces a significant number of Riehl’s articles from the course of his long political career. (Schilling, incidentally, was also a longstanding National Socialist, and he attended the Salzburg Conference as a delegate for the DNSAP branch in Bielitz, Poland). The article is particularly notable for its mentions of Hitler, probably the first references to the future Führer within the National Socialist press outside Germany. – Bogumil

The Greater German Representatives’ Conference of all National Socialists in Salzburg.

It cannot be denied that we awaited today’s conference, to which völkisch-socialists from across the Reich were invited for the first time, with great trepidation. To our great joy, to the jubilant enthusiasm of the old National Socialists from the German Sudetenland and of we German-Austrians, the conference not only brought us the reconciliation of two larger groups within the German Reich which had previously stood in opposition to one another (the German Socialist Party – headquartered in Hanover; and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – headquartered in Munich),¹ but also the long-awaited goal, the merger of our groups and of the new Reich-German groups to form the

National Socialist Party of Greater Germany.²

The conference enjoyed excellent attendance, not only from the German-Austrians, who by exercising their full rights of representation sent 180 representatives from all local groups, including almost every member of the party-leadership – party-chairman and Landtag deputy Dr. Riehl;³ the Salzburg Landtag deputies Prodinger⁴ and Wagner;⁵ Ertl, the chairman of the Trade-Union of German Railwaymen;⁶ Gattermayer, chairman of the Trade-Union Council;⁷ Schulz, vice-chairman of the German Postal Workers’ Union;⁸ Legmann, director of the district DHV;⁹ Heiduk, chairman of the Reich Association of German Working Youth and paymaster of the national party-leadership¹⁰ – but also representatives from abroad. This time, the German National Socialists of Czechoslovakia sent not only our revered theoretician, Prague parliamentary deputy Ing. Rudolf Jung,¹¹ as at previous conferences, but also the first chairman of the National Socialists of Czechoslovakia, deputy Hans Knirsch,¹² editor Dr. Schilling,¹³ and the chairman of the German-Bohemian provincial party-leadership, Galle,¹⁴ as well as Bornemann from Znaim,¹⁵ all of whom were sorely missed at the last conference. For the German Socialist Party (headquartered in Hanover), Ing. Brunner (Düsseldorf)¹⁶ and Dr. Runge (Leipzig)¹⁷ appeared, as well as five other representatives of this tendency, which is located chiefly in the north of Germany. Exceptionally numerous were the delegates from the second group, which has sought its adherents primarily in Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. This was represented by its first chairman, the metalworker Drexler from Munich, and by its outstanding popular Munich agitator, Adolf Hitler. Altogether the Inter-State Conference was attended by 235 authorized representatives. About a hundred external guests turned out, among them a member of the German National Assembly, National Councillor Geisler from Berlin,¹⁸ and a representative of the Greater German Freedom Party in Berlin,¹⁹ as well as representatives from Reich-German newspapers and from German newspapers in the successor states²⁰ and in German-Austria.

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The Programme of the NSDAP

Posted by Bogumil

Content and context of the 1920 basic programme of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, drafted by Adolf Hitler and Anton Drexler

So far, when transcribing or translating material for this blog, my general rule has been to try and focus on texts which aren’t otherwise widely-available or well-known, at least in English. Occasionally, however, there is a need to make exceptions. Over the past couple of years I have been involved in tracking down as many National Socialist political programmes as I can find – it has always interested me that National Socialism was in fact a fairly broad movement, with a number of National Socialist parties actually existing before or alongside the more well-known NSDAP. As a result I’ve made an effort of seeking out and translating the programmes of these various groups, with one of my goals for this blog being that it should serve as a repository for these programmes and manifestos as I come across them. In order for the blog to be as complete a repository as possible, however, this does require that I also host a document which it is otherwise very easy to find online already: the 25-point “basic programme” of the NSDAP. One detriment which I have discovered in the wide availability of the NSDAP party programme, at least, is that many of the available translations seem almost deliberately inaccurate. Point 17 of the programme in particular is frequently translated rather oddly, with the party’s call for the elimination of ground-rent (“Abschaffung des Bodenzinses,” lit. “abolition of land-interest”) often incorrectly rendered as a demand for a ban on “taxes on land.” Anybody who has read Rudolf Jung’s book on NS ideology, which covers the subject of ground-rent fairly extensively, would know that this was not what National Socialists meant when discussing its abolition – they were not calling for an end to taxation on land, but for the elimination of a particular form of unearned income (ground-rent is the rent payable on ‘raw land’ to landholders; National Socialists believed it should devolve to the community, since its value was driven by the community’s “collective work”). My hope is that my translation of the programme, on this point and on others, will at least help clear up some common misunderstandings and inaccuracies. Alongside it, and in order to make this update a little more interesting to those already familiar with the 25 Points, I have included a number of other short, related documents, namely a couple of articles and a letter from the period, as well as two short excerpts from National Socialist publications (one pro-Hitler, one anti-Hitler) from the 1930s, all of which discuss the programme to varying degrees and which should help provide a little historical flavor to how it was received within the movement initially and in retrospect a decade later.

Basic Programme of the National Socialist
German Workers’ Party

The German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP), after its founding on 5 January, 1919, was for many months a party without a programme. A set of ideological Guidelines had been drafted by Anton Drexler and read out at the DAP’s first meeting in the Fürstenfelder Hof, but this short document was regarded by early party members as inadequate, as a simple stopgap outline for the party pending the drafting of a proper, detailed programme. After Adolf Hitler joined the party in October his talents as a propagandist saw him swiftly inducted into the DAP’s leadership committee, and at a party meeting on 16 November the decision was made to set up a commission for drafting a proper programme in which Hitler (alongside Drexler, Karl Harrer, Gottfried Feder, and Dr. Paul Tafel) was to be involved. In actuality the programme which was eventually produced for the party appears to have largely been the work of Hitler and Drexler alone, composed by the two men over several “long nights together in the workers’ canteen at Burghausenerstrasse 6,” as Drexler recalled many years later. Feder is often suggested as a possible co-author, although there appears to be no direct evidence for this beyond the inclusion of some of his theories (of which Hitler and Drexler were already very familiar) within the document’s economic proposals. The new programme was first presented to the public on 24 February, 1920, at a tumultuous meeting of over 2,000 people at the Hofbräuhauskeller tavern in Munich. Hitler’s reading of the programme, point by point, above the yells and heckles of Communists and Social-Democrats dispersed among the crowd, was an event which acquired legendary status within the National Socialist movement over the following years. – Bogumil

The programme of the German Workers’ Party¹ is a programme of its time. Its leaders have no intention, once the aims laid out in the programme have been achieved, of drawing up new ones solely for the purpose of facilitating the continued existence of the party by artificially increasing the discontent of the masses.

1. We demand the union of all Germans, on the basis of the self-determination of peoples, within a Greater Germany.

2. We demand equal rights for the German Volk vis-à-vis other nations, and the revocation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain.

3. We demand land and soil (colonies) in order to feed our people and to settle our surplus population.

4. Only he who is a folk-comrade can be a citizen of the state. Only those who are of German blood, regardless of creed, can be a folk-comrade. Accordingly, no Jew can be a folk-comrade.

5. Whoever is not a citizen shall only be able to live in Germany as a guest, and must be subject to legislation relating to foreigners.

6. The right to determine the leadership and laws of the state shall belong to citizens of the state alone. We demand therefore that every public office, no matter of what type, whether in Reich, province, or municipality, may only be held by citizens.

We oppose the corrupting parliamentary custom of filling posts solely according to party considerations and without consideration for character or ability. Continue reading →

National Socialists Before Hitler, Part V: The German Socialist Party

Posted by Bogumil

“Our demands are more radical than those of the Bolshevists” – The 1918 programme outline of Alfred Brunner’s German Socialist Party

Deutsch_volkisch

As has been established so far in this series, the party which Hitler joined in September 1919 was not the first National Socialist party ever founded. It was not even the first National Socialist party on the soil of the German Reich. That honor instead goes to the German Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei, DSP), the brainchild of Düsseldorf engineer Alfred Brunner. Brunner, born 1871, had been in contact with the Austro-Hungarian National Socialists since the early days of 1904. Distraught by the consequences of Germany’s surrender and revolution, he finally decided to found his own völkisch-socialist party, and for this purpose drafted on 1 December 1918 the programme which I have translated below. Brunner’s programme outlined the foundations for a new German Socialist Party, one drawing influence from the land-reform ideals of Adolf Damaschke as well as from the philosophy of the National Socialists across the border. Brunner’s central emphasis in fact was on mass land nationalization, viewing this revolutionary socio-economic reform as the basis for eliminating capitalist power and for negating the ‘Jewish influence’ which he saw behind every social ill. Such was Brunner’s focus on social issues that he in fact considered himself “far-left”, as “more radical than the Bolshevists”, the guarantor of an idealistic, biologically-constituted “socialism of the deed” opposed to the Jewish, materialistic “pseudo-socialism” of the Marxists. Brunner was supported in his endeavors by the Germanic Order, a branch of the Thule Society who presented his programme at their 1918 Christmas conference, published it in their journal Allgemeine Ordens-Nachrichten, and provided both funding and a party newspaper (the Münchner Beobachter). The DSP was thus linked from the very beginning to the German Workers’ Party (DAP) of Drexler and Hitler, another group which owed its origins to Thule Society funding and support. For a time however the DSP was in fact the far more successful of the two parties. While the (NS)DAP initially struggled to expand outside Munich, the DSP by mid-1920 had 35 local groups throughout the country and close to 2000 members, including a strong base in Germany’s north where for many years the Hitler-Drexler party was unable to gain a foothold. What undid the DSP in the end was its decentralized organizational structure, combined with its culture of internal party democracy; lacking the dynamism and internal authority of the Hitler-Drexler party, the DSP soon lost ground to its rival and in 1922 finally disbanded and absorbed its resources and membership into the NSDAP.

Outline for the Founding of a
German Socialist Party
on a Jew-free and Capital-free Foundation
Drafted by Engineer Alfred Brunner on 1 December, 1918
Presented at the 1918 Christmas conference of the Germanic Order

To the German Volk!

World war, revolution, and turmoil lie behind us! We have waded through misery, blood and humiliation, and yet everything has remained the same; yes, things even threaten to be worse than they were before. Merely the form of government and the men in charge have changed, while capitalism and Jewry rear their heads higher than ever under democracy. As before, you, the German Volk, will be leeched dry, plundered and condemned to toil and worry. How did it come to this, and shall it remain this way forever? The cause of this failure lies in the fact that the struggle against these two powers has hitherto been conducted separately. Yet both are intimately connected.

Social-Democracy only engages in a mock-battle against capitalism, for its leaders are Jews and capitalists!

Yet the Jew-wise¹ struggle in vain against Jewry, because they stand firmly on the ground of the capitalist state order; hence both fronts are bound to collapse.

The change required to finally establish real freedom for the German Volk is to form a German Socialist Party.

German-Völkisch and Socialist

Lassalle, the founder of German Social-Democracy, must as a Jew have known his racial kin [Rassegenossen] well when he said: “A popular movement has to keep its distance from capitalists and Jews where they appear as guides and leaders, and must pursue its own aims.”

The new socialist party accepts German-born men only. It stands naturally upon the ground of political transformation; democracy will not at first be tampered with, but the party does however not want a Western-style democracy with a Jewish-plutocratic apex, but instead a free Peoples’ State [Volksstaat] in which both capitalism and Jewry have been vanquished.

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National Socialists Before Hitler, Part IV: The German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP)

Posted by Bogumil

A new name, a new programme: the 1918 ‘Vienna Programme’ of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP) of Austria & the Sudetenland

DNSAP_Poster

Less than a year after the German Workers’ Party (DAP) of Austria-Hungary adopted its new political programme, the Empire declared war on Serbia. The Great War was soon to follow, and with it came a tumultuous series of events, culminating in the defeat of the Central Powers and the dissolution of the Empire. A new era for Austria and for Europe also saw a new era for the DAP – on 5 May, 1918, DAP members met at a Vienna Reichsparteitag to adopt a new name and a new programme. The new name was the ‘German National Socialist Workers’ Party’ (DNSAP). The new programme (drafted by Rudolf Jung) was more explicitly revolutionary, now that fear of Imperial state repression had dissipated and Anschluss with Germany finally appeared possible (a hope soon dashed on the rocks of the Treaty of Saint-Germain). Union with Germany, mass nationalization, and a Peoples’ Bank to break the reigns of “the Jewish-commercial spirit” were all key features, even if the DNSAP still ambivalently committed itself to reformism. For many members the formalization of ‘National Socialism’ in both name and ideology was a long time coming. ‘National Socialist Party’, ‘German Socialist Party’, and ‘German Social Party’ had all been proposed as alternative names when the DAP was first founded in 1903. There had been intermittent appeals to change the name since then, especially as ‘National Socialist’ became a common appellation for members, with the debate beginning again in 1916 in earnest in the pages of DAP-paper Freien Volksstime. On the one hand, some party-comrades were concerned that the DAP name was unappealing to potential recruits among the farmers, civil servants, and the petit-bourgeoisie, that it did not sufficiently represent the party’s actual worldview. On the other hand, the party had been founded as a workers’ party and the name was seen as a mark of respect to a class much hard-done-by. The compromise solution, ‘German National Socialist Workers’ Party’, was the suggestion of senior Bohemian party-comrade Hans Krebs. Within months of the Vienna Programme’s adoption there would be three DNSAPs, the party broken into a trio of independent national organizations by the ceding of former Austrian territories Eastern Silesia and the Sudetenland to the new states of Poland and Czeochoslovakia.

Fundamental Party Principles
of the
German National Socialist Workers’ Party
Concluded at the last joint Party Congress for the Sudetenland and the Alpine States, Vienna, 5^th May 1918

Symbol_DNSAP

a) General Statement

The German National Socialist Workers’ Party seeks the uplift and liberation of the German working-classes from economic, political, and spiritual oppression and their full equality in all areas of völkisch and state life.

It professes itself unreservedely to the cultural community and the community of fate [Schicksalsgemeinschaft] of the entire German Volk, and is convinced that only within the natural limits of his folkdom [Volkstums] can the worker achieve full value for his labor and intelligence.

It therefore rejects organization on a supranational [allvölkischer] basis as unnatural. An improvement in economic and social conditions is attainable only through the cooperation of all workers on the soil of their own people. Not subversion and class struggle, but purposeful, creative reform work alone can overcome today’s social conditions. Private property in itself is not malign, insofar as it arises from one’s own honest labor, serves labor, and is limited in size so as not to damage the common good. We reject, however, all forms of unearned income, such as ground rents and interest, as well as usurious profits extorted from the misery of one’s fellow man. Against them we stridently advocate the value of productive labor.

The private economy can never be wholly or violently abolished, yet all forms of social property should exist alongside it and be increasingly expanded. We advocate unconditionally for the transfer of all capitalist large-scale enterprises, which constitute private monopolies, into the possession of the state, province (völkisch self-governing bodies), or municipality. Continue reading →