I think Allen’s area of interest is a very important one—his decision to concentrate on the Nazi development in the locality of Northeim is very useful in illustrating how, as he argues, the Nazi Seizure of Power of the German nation was so successful via their propagandist measures on the local level. It’s difficult to understand how a whole nation came to support this Reich, and I think Allen’s bottom-up theory is very well-founded.
What caught my attention the most was Allen’s insight into the local tactics of the SPD against the Nazis. The more and more I read our textbooks the more disappointed I become in the SPD and the left during the time. I keep trying to see a formidable move by the Left against the Nazis’ rise to power, and it’s all been very disappointing. That they refused to identify themselves as a revolutionary party is, I think, one of key factors that led to the failure of the SPD to maintain the democratic Weimar republic. Allen points out that prior to 1918, the three-class voting system maintained the “traditional order…[where] towns like Northeim were run by a closed clique of wealthy people” (44). The universal suffrage proceeding the 1918 revolution is argued to ”enable the SPD, with its mass backing, to have a dominant voice in the Northeim City Council for the first time in the town’s history” (44). So they had the membership and the numbers backing their party. What happened? Why couldn’t they stop the Nazi momentum? Of course external factors like the depression has quite a lot to do with this, but I’m focusing more on the SPD itself.
As Allen describes the situation after the election in 1930, the town was able to see such a dramatic division between the Nazis and the SPD members because SPD membership did not weaken. The direction that the party chose as their offensive and defensive moves against the Nazis (after most of the Right was swallowed up by the NSDAP) as a childish game of one-upping each rally, demonstration, speech was poor decision-making on their part. The fact that there were enough SPD members even in such a small town/area like Northeim suggests that, with the right organization, the SPD could have overpowered the Nazis by maintaining the majority and its membership, and using their own momentum to defend democracy.
Against such a extremist and radical right, what the left should have done is not to succumb to the Nazi tactics of propaganda; by participating in their game of popularity rather than ideology, the SPD lost the battle from the start (it seems that the Nazis really had the whole propaganda thing down…obviously).
On a different note, the NSDAP ban was to have been lifted on the grounds that they were no longer a threatening party in the German political sphere. Their radical ideologies and their attempted putsch is obviously a dangerous organization against Weimar. If the justification of banning them in the first place was to defend their democracy given their history of a coup, then why, after the Nazis started getting more and more membership and support, did the ban not get reinstated? Wasn’t it obvious that Hitler’s release from prison brought back the putsch-y (definitely not a real adjective…maybe putschliche) sentiment back into discussion?
In this week's reading I was also really surprised at the SPD inability to keep the Nazis under control, especially because they had significant support in the years before the depression. I think one of the reasons is definitely that they tried to succumb to the tactics of radicalism. Sheridan Allen mentions that the SPC were doomed when they tried to do this because they were not willing to go to the level of radicalism that the Nazis were prepared to do. In addition, I think that the SPD were too focused on their core constituencies (workers) to try to gain support in other areas. This can be seen when Sheridan Allen describes that the Volksblatt/SPC exploited the bankruptcies of three Northeim artisan shops to attack “Nazi business methods” which he describes as rubbing “salt in the wounds of the middle class.” Perhaps if the SPD thought of the Nazis as more of a political threat rather than purely a putsch threat they would have done a better job of undermining the Nazi political campaign.
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