This revisionist history of the Nazi seizure of power argues, contrary to most previous interpretations, that there was no alliance of Nazis and conservatives in the winter and spring of 1933. Beck concedes that such an “alliance of elites” eventually came about in July 1933, but not as a voluntary partnership or a congruence of interests; rather the “fundamental shift in political orientation” (p. xiii) on the part of the Bildungsbürgertum was the result of Nazi violence and terror directed against conservatives, which earlier historians have allegedly underestimated. The author of a well-received monograph, The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives, Bureaucracy, and the Social Question, 1815–70 (1995), Beck began his present study as a search for the factors that might have motivated Germany's “cultivated bourgeoisie” to embrace Nazism, but he could find no answers in the many local and regional archives he visited. Instead he was surprised to find evidence of “open conflict between German Nationals and Nazis in March, April, and May 1933” (p. xiv) and of “the Nazis' almost frenetic hatred for their conservative allies” (pp. xiv-xv). Only after they had been subjected to sustained Nazi intimidation and terror did conservatives cooperate with the Nazis to construct the Nazi dictatorship that eventually emerged from the turmoil of the Machtergreifung. Beck concludes that “German Nationals were powerless when confronted with this ‘revolutionary’ violence, not only because they found themselves outnumbered by SA thugs, but because they were trapped in their legalistic thinking and thus reluctant to repay violence in kind” (pp. 302–3). His thesis is based mainly on DNVP party records that document the rivalry between those Nationalist leaders who wanted to maintain their own independent party after the passage of the Enabling Act and Nazi leaders, who wanted to establish a single-party dictatorship. Having inveighed against Weimar partisan politics ever since the party was founded, the DNVP was in no position to contest the NSDAP's ban on the multiparty system. Beck's larger purpose is to portray Nazism as a socially revolutionary “anti-bourgeois movement” (p. 299) quite distinct from the “national-conservative” DNVP with which it was supposedly allied. He contends that historians up to now have failed sufficiently to examine or appreciate “the pronounced anti-conservatism of National Socialism” (p. 301). “Given the prominence of the ‘socially revolutionary’ element of Nazism, which trained its wrath on the conservative establishment, it would be wrong to maintain that any Bündnis der Eliten remained intact during the period of the seizure of power” (p. 302). He even goes so far as to argue that contemporaries in the 1930s “could not help but get the impression that the sharpest dividing line in the German party system ran between the Nazis and German Nationals—rather than between either of them and the Left” (p. 166).
Beck's thesis of Nazism as a socially revolutionary movement is neither as new as he claims, nor is his argumentation convincing. His claim that Nazism was as much opposed to the reactionary Right as to the revolutionary Left, or, put differently, that conservatives were victims of Nazi terror in the same way as liberals, democrats, and socialists were, is, in fact, contradicted by much of the evidence he provides, especially in the book's most valuable chapter, “Between the Dictates of Conscience and Political Expediency: The DNVP and Anti-Semitism.” Here Beck takes issue with the “strong tacit assumption in the literature that the DNVP, by virtue of its position as the Nazis' coalition partner, exerted a moderating, even restraining influence on Hitler and the SA” (p. 177). “What the existing literature fails to tell us,” Beck quite rightly concludes, “is that [DNVP] opposition was purely theoretical and did not compel the party leadership to oppose actively anti-Semitic acts of terror” (p. 181). Beck could find “few cases of active help” in the archives, and he admits that “the mainstream conservative reaction to the multitude of Nazi excesses during the Nazi seizure of power was characterized largely by the resentment and prejudice that had traditionally been a component of the DNVP's anti-Semitic orientation” (p. 205). But apart from his censure of “the anti-Semitic convictions of DNVP members and leaders alike that prevented the DNVP from standing up for the rights of fellow German citizens” (p. 217), Beck demonstrates a remarkable empathy for the “plight” of the DNVP, whose members were rapidly defecting to the NSDAP and whose leaders were unable to secure or retain high positions in government against lower-class Nazi challengers on the national, regional, and local level.
No responsible historian would deny that there were clear differences among Nationalists and Nazis, especially in the tactics they advocated and employed to achieve their shared goals: the destruction of parliamentary democracy and suppression of the Left. Nazis and traditional conservatives certainly differed in temperament, methods, and background, but not in their essential goals, which were to crush Marxism and democracy, reverse Versailles, and restore Germany's military and economic might. The affinities between conservatives and radicals on the Right were ultimately more important than their differences, as Beck's own findings attest. His largely anecdotal evidence of the increasingly bitter rivalry between the two right-wing parties for the spoils of victory in spring 1933 certainly confirms the Nazis' lack of deference for the civil service establishment and “the extent to which the Nazis—in the hierarchically structured Prussian world—looked after their own people” (p. 152), but it does not justify Beck's conclusion that the Nazis were a socially revolutionary, “counterreactionary” (p. 150) movement. Demanding special offices and privileges for Nazi party members, sometimes at the expense of DNVP incumbents, hardly amounts to a revolution against the Bürgertum. Part of the problem is that Beck is too ready to take the Nazis at their own words. There was much talk in spring 1933 (and again in spring 1934 prior to the Röhm purge) of the need for a “second revolution,” but Beck's own evidence shows that this was simply a metaphor for placing Nazi party members in positions of power without changing traditional relations of production, power, property, or wealth.
Since its founding in 1919 ostensibly as a “workers' party” dedicated to weaning the working class from its attachment to socialism, the Nazis consistently appropriated the vocabulary of socialism (and the color red as well as the May 1 holiday) both to deceive and recruit potential supporters. Beck takes the “anti-bourgeois” orientation of Nazism seriously, even while conceding that the term “bürgerlich” in Nazi usage meant something quite different from the term “bourgeois” in Marxist usage. Beck dismisses the need for precise definitions on the odd and dubious grounds that “getting involved in a quagmire of definitions might result in making clear-cut statements impossible” (p. 27). When Göbbels wrote in his diary on April 18, 1933, that “the revolution must stop nowhere,” he was not attacking “bourgeois, conservative values” as Beck suggests (p. 229), but was defending his employment of young, inexperienced Nazis in his new Ministry of Propaganda on the grounds that their enthusiasm and nationalistic idealism made up for their lack of bureaucratic skills. His disapproval was not aimed at the social or economic status of the middle classes, but at the materialistic consumption- and comfort-oriented attitudes that made the political mobilization of ordinary German burghers for Nazi objectives more difficult. Even if the Nazis did frequently refer to their “German revolution” as “socialist,” does that mean that we as historians have to follow their lead? This is taking empirical methodology to an uncritical extreme.
Associating the Nazis' radical right-wing populism with the revolutionary tradition of socialism does have a long pedigree in the conservative historiography of Nazism, which has been dedicated to freeing inherited conservative values from any connection to Nazism. In the 1930s Hermann Rauschning denounced Nazis as cynical opportunists without any true commitment to the conservative ideology they professed. After the war both Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter blamed Nazism on revolutionary socialists for fueling the unrealistic material aspirations of the masses. More recently Rainer Zitelmann has championed the view that Nazism was a left-wing movement opposed to the values of the traditional Right. Beck does not go so far as to blame the Left for the rise of Nazism (as, for instance, Ernst Nolte does), but he does misrepresent the close ideological relationship among the right-wing parties by overinterpreting relatively trivial personal and partisan conflicts between Nazis and Nationalists, in which the weaker party was ultimately bound to lose out. Nationalist quarrels with Nazis were based more on personal slights and on challenges to conservative authority than on any principled opposition to Nazi policies. That German conservatives viewed the Nazis as their social inferiors is hardly surprising. Much more surprising is the failure of conservatives to mount any kind of effective resistance to the Nazis until it became utterly clear that Hitler was leading the nation to ruin.
