Mail-order Demagogues: The NSDAP School for Speakers,1928–34

What made the Nazi message more appealing than any other party of the late Weimar Republic? One member of the NSDAP had greater influence than any other on its perception by the electorate. His promises reached more ears than Adolf Hitler’s. He revolutionized, rationalized and standardized party propaganda. He trained thousands of speakers. He defined Party policy on the key issue of the day, namely the economy, and put his interpretation on the central tenets of the NS policy. His name was not Joseph Goebbels. His name was Fritz Reinhardt. In 1928 he set up a correspondence school for training party speakers in Herrsching am Ammersee. The school initially consisted of a typewriter and a letterbox. From Postfach 57 in Herrsching, Reinhardt claimed, he had trained 6000 ¹ speakers between 1928 and 1933. ² Due to Reinhardt’s initiative it cost the Party less to train a speaker than print a poster. ³ When the Weimar Republic became an ever more pronounced ‘democracy without democrats’ after the economic crash of 1929, why did the National Socialists receive more votes than any other anti-democratic party? ⁴ This article argues that Reinhardt’s Rednerschule provided the Nazis with the image of coherence, organisation and strength so often attributed them by historians. ⁵

The standard rendering of the Nazi Party’s rise places heavy emphasis on the role of propaganda, spoken and visual, in propelling the movement to prominence as the democratic parties were tarnished by association with an ailing state. Much was made in these narratives of the unique charismatic attraction of Hitler. Hypnotic powers and a messianic appeal were attributed to him. The language of religious epiphany and conversion were the dominant metaphors. Hitler appears to have believed that he had such a magnetic attractiveness, and his speeches were peppered with religious allusions and imagery. ⁶ However, it is unconceivable that most of the 13 million who voted for his party in July 1932 had heard him speak. What advantage was lent to the Party through propaganda cannot be explained exclusively by reference to its leader’s speaking techniques.

Gerhard Paul has stressed instead the party’s posters as the key propaganda vehicle; their violent colours and imagery were supposed to have drawn the eye of the electorate and given form to their deep dissatisfaction. However, the electorate had long been exposed to modern advertising techniques and visceral propaganda. If a media presence really had been the deciding factor, then the nationalist media mogul Alfred Hugenberg would have polled higher than Adolf Hitler. Instead it seems more plausible that posters drew attention to the party, but its speakers turned that attention into votes. In the elections of 1930 and 1932 the Nazis received support from all over the country and from across the social spectrum. ⁷ Fritz Reinhardt’s school enabled the Party to hold hundreds of simultaneous meetings throughout the state on a given topic in a single day and repeat the procedure the following day. Also the enrolment of new speakers also necessitated continuous campaigning.

Fritz Reinhardt was the driving force behind the Rednerschule der NSDAP. Born in Ilmenau, Thüringen in 1895, ⁸ He trained as a salesman in Germany and in Riga. It was there that he was interned by Russia at the outbreak of the First World War. He languished in Siberia until his repatriation in July 1918. In 1919, he became a director of the Thuringen Business School, which was a subsidiary of the Academy of Business and Tax in Ilmenau. Before the First World War, Reinhardt had been a member of the Deutsch-Völkisch Bund. He joined the NSDAP in 1923 and lost his job at the business school because of his Party membership. ⁹ Reinhardt moved to Herrsching am Amersee, where he founded a distance learning school in 1924 and gave business courses by post. He joined the Party again when it was re-founded in 1925, was made Branch Leader (Ortsgruppenführer) of Herrsching in 1926, district leader (Bezirksleiter) in Upper-Bavaria South in 1927, and Regional Leader (Gauleiter) of Upper-Bavaria Swabia on the first of June 1928. In 1929, his school for training speakers received official party recognition. Only he had the power to train the party’s public representatives. ¹⁰

From 1930 to 1934, he held the office of Reich Propaganda-Leader II (RPL II). Joseph Goebbels occupied the office of Reich Propaganda Leader I. ¹¹ These were separate departments which initially co-operated but later fell to acrimonious rivalry. With Goebbels’ appointment as RPL I, Himmler’s efforts to organize all speaking engagements centrally were abandoned. The Gau were made responsible for their own staff of speakers. Each Gau and Ortsgruppe had to appoint their own propaganda leader. Outside of election periods the top echelon of speakers – Reichsredner – were required to make themselves available to speak five times per month for both their Gau and the Reich propaganda leadership. However, the RPL I maintained effective control over speakers at the Gau and Ortsgruppen level through financial inducement. Such was the importance of ticket sales to the finances of branch offices that the RPL I needed only to threaten to starve a Gau of visits from Reichsredner in order to bring them into line. ¹² The RPL II was nominally subordinated to Gregor Straßer’s Reichs organization leadership. Reinhardt’s department provided the training while Goebbels’ awarded the licences. The primary point of contention between the offices was the right to publish material for speakers. Himmler had granted Reinhardt the right to publish Rednermaterial in 1929. Goebbels ignored this and began publishing a similarly formatted Rednerinformation in 1931. In 1931 Goebbels also dropped the I from RPL I in his letterhead and signed his correspondence Reichspropagandaleiter. However, according to Longerich, Goebbels remained an ‘isolated figure in the Party leadership without his own powerbase’. ¹³

Reinhardt eventually gave up the RPL II office and the School to Goebbels’ propaganda ministry in 1934. ¹⁴ In 1930 Reinhardt also became a Reichstag deputy. He was the first Nazi to sit on the Reich Budgetary Committee. In 1933 he entered the Ministry of Finance as a State Secretary with responsibility for the budget and taxation. He remained in this position till 1945. During his time in the finance ministry he exercised great influence over appointments and dismissals, and thus greatly facilitated the ‘co-ordination’ (Gleichschaltung) of the ministry. Reinhardt treated the civil servants subordinated to him much as he had his students. They were required to pay to attend Reinhardt’s lectures and to buy his pamphlets.

Geoffrey Pridham adds some colour to the monochromatic picture of Reinhardt given in his brief biographies. He notes that Reinhardt’s parsimonious micromanagement of his region did not endear him to his subordinates. He quotes an informant of the Munich police who relayed complaints regarding the volume of orders issued by Reinhardt, ‘which because of their scope are not complied with by most leaders and because of their dictatorial character [were] felt disagreeable’. ¹⁵ Schwerin von Krosigk, Finance Minister from 1932 to 1945, was said to have described him as a ‘born school master’. ¹⁶ This goes some way to explaining the affinity between him and the greatest Nazi pedant, Heinrich Himmler. ¹⁷ Reinhardt’s prose style was priggish and terse. In Lesson 3 of the 1931 course he reminds his students that they must read, and understand the line of reasoning behind, every word of the course material:

Every single hour of the lessons must be methodically and painstakingly studied by the participant, from the first to the last line. After working through the course material the participant must feel himself pleased and happy to have advanced his knowledge by another good distance. ¹⁸

This article is the first to assess the content of the speaker’s course and to place this material in the context of the study of Nazi propaganda in general. ²⁰ The Rednerschule was unique. The SPD had had a speaker’s school between 1906 and 1914. Its lessons were given in Berlin and paid for by the Party. In the eight years of its operation it managed to train only 203 speakers. ²¹ No attempt was made to reinstate it after the First World War. Puzzlingly, though its existence has been noted by many, the Rednerschule has been the subject of only scant attention from historians. ²² Most references to the School are oblique. Gerhard Paul notes ‘with his “Reichsrednerschule” – doubtless the most important innovation of the Himmler era – Reinhardt made himself indispensible to Hitler’. ²³ Bar stating that Reinhardt claimed to have trained 6000 speakers Paul makes no further comment on the Rederschule.

Only two historians have written in a concerted manner on the School. ²⁴ Randal Bytwerk’s article was written for the consumption of rhetoricians, hence its focus was primarily on how the School taught rather than what the School taught. ²⁵ As with Arafe’s thesis, the titles of some of the Rednerschule speeches were given, but content was not discussed. Thus the vast majority of the School material has lain untouched by historians. Bytwerk argued that the Party won over the vast majority of its members through meetings. ²⁶ Thus he sought to demonstrate the importance of the Rednerschule by implying a causal relationship between the numbers of speakers available to the Party and its rate of growth. ²⁷ He argued that the School provided an indispensable service to the NSDAP, by allowing it to penetrate into rural areas and saturate regions with meetings. He criticized Dietrich Orlow’s denigration of the School as ‘primitive’ and offering ‘no political education’. ²⁸ On the contrary, Bytwerk stated, while the School offered only limited advice on rhetorical technique, ²⁹ Nazi ideology and argumentation occupied centre stage, with knowledge of the line of reasoning behind the speech given the leading role.

Indeed, Orlow was not the only distinguished historian to dismiss the School without having done any serious research on the subject. Joachim Fest cited no sources for his false claim that the School was in operation from 1926 to 1932. ³⁰ He followed Orlow in stating that training given to Rednerschule students was primitive and entailed learning by rote. He went on to add that the ‘petty-propagandists’ (Kleinpropagandisten) produced by the School would have brought very little in the way of benefit to the party. ³¹ Rote learning was the opposite of the method espoused by the Speaker School. Reinhardt aimed, in accordance with Adolf Hitler’s assertions in Mein Kampf, to drill the Party’s core claims into the mind of the student. ³² In turn, the speaker was instructed to do the same with his audience. The School leader sought to make his students more convinced National Socialists by appeals to their intellect not just their emotions. In this regard the Rednerschule differed from the party’s visual propaganda and the speaking style of Adolf Hitler alike.

To date, no historian has written more than Arafe on the school. His unpublished 1976 PhD thesis devoted one chapter and an appendix to the Speaker School. Arafe stressed the School’s uniqueness and its cost-effectiveness. He claimed that it offered an avenue of advancement to unconnected young men that no other party could match. ³³ Unfortunately, due to the lack of any lists of students, this assertion is unverifiable. He identified the core themes of the School as race, Volk, the NS program for government, anti-Marxism, finance and interest, agriculture and foreign policy. However, Arafe did not provide illustrative material to demonstrate what it was he meant by these headings. Engagement with course content was rare in his work. It reached its zenith when Arafe noted that students gave their first speech on ‘the interest and tax slavery of all productive Germans’, and their second on ‘the expropriation of the farmer’. ³⁴

In a case study, Arafe described the establishment of an Ortsgruppe in rural Oberwesterwald near Frankfurt am Main by party-member Hammer. In the 15 months from September 1929, the Party’s share of the vote grew from 1.8 per cent to 24 per cent in the district. He argued that it was the School that made this increase possible due to the fact that Hammer could draw upon the services of Reinhardt’s trainee speakers free of charge. ³⁵ Indeed, much of the surviving correspondence of the RPL I consists of complaints by speakers due to incomplete or slow payment of honorariums.

As further evidence for the impact of the School, Arafe draws attention to a letter dated May 1930 from the Berlin police presidium to its Bavarian counterpart seeking explanation for the marked increase in the number of new speakers being used by the Party. ³⁶ In response, the presidium received a description of the Rednerschule. The effect of the School on the quantity and quality of Nazi agitation was also noted by the Prussian police authorities. During the election campaign of 1930 a police report stressed, ‘hardly a day passes on which there are not several meetings even in narrowly restricted local areas’. ³⁷ The report described the speakers as students of Reinhardt’s school and remarked that they showed, ‘rhetorical skill combined with subjects carefully chosen to suit the particular audience’. This was said to have produced ‘halls which are almost invariably overcrowded with enthusiastic listeners’. ³⁸

Reinhardt’s lessons centred upon providing a sample speech from the Wirtschaftlicher Beobachter or Völkischer Beobachter. Students were required to paraphrase and learn the line of reasoning of the speech. By the fourth month of the course students were expected to be able to speak for two hours with limited notes. On the eve of their maiden performance the student was required to have done over 100 hours of rehearsal on his first speech, having learnt the 34 paragraph text four paragraphs at a time. He was then obligated to give his first speech in the presence of his Branch-Leader or a deputy thereof. This was to take place in an area where no National Socialist had previously spoken, or if such a place did not exist in the Gau, then in neighbouring Ortsgruppe. If the student met with the approval of his superior he was then required to begin work on his second speech and perform four times a month for the remaining eight months on topics dictated by Reinhardt. By the end of the course the student had four two hour speeches thoroughly drilled into his memory and had performed at least 30 times. ³⁹ The stream of students needing practice compelled the Party to campaign continuously and lent them the impression of dynamism, numerical strength and conviction that impressed the residents of Nordheim, Marburg, Stettin, Hammelburg and many other towns. ⁴⁰

The course demanded ardent commitment on the part of the student for speaking engagements were to be fulfilled without any lessening of written assignments. Reinhardt’s tone was brusque and imperative. Bytwerk translates from lesson (Unterricht) 2 of the June 1931 course:

It is absolutely essential, that you follow my comments and instructions to the letter. Each deviation lessens the chances of success. Do not think that one thing or another is unnecessary. I do not require anything that could be called unnecessary. ⁴¹

Correspondence between Reinhardt and the then Deputy Propaganda-Leader Heinrich Himmler indicates that the Party was quick to recognize the potential value of the school. ⁴² In August 1928 Reinhardt was invited to address the ‘Reich Leadership Conference’ to describe the school. ⁴³ In October of the same year, Himmler instructed those Gauleiter who requested more speakers to send forward students for Reinhardt’s course rather than fruitlessly pester him for that which he could not provide. The course was first tested exclusively on Reinhardt’s subordinates. In February 1928 Reinhardt announced to those in the Gau of Munich Upper-Baviaria that he required each Ortsgruppe to provide two students for his speaker training course. ⁴⁴ He promised preferential treatment to the students of his course in the awarding of electoral candidacies and an honorarium for every speech given once the course was completed.

The first course given by Reinhardt had 100 students and began in July 1928. From November, the Party gave a further sign that the School was on the path to official recognition when the National Socialist daily newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (VB) began carrying regular reports on the activities of the Rednerschule students. The VB was used not only to publicize the School, but also to co-ordinate the school’s speakers and orchestrate propaganda campaigns. ⁴⁵ Each student was required to subscribe to the paper and to Reinhardt’s own Wirtschaftlicher Beobachter. The daily party papers also contained supplementary course material. Students were ordered to keep scrapbooks of articles organized by theme so that they might draw upon them when composing their own speeches. The second course, this time open to party members from all over Germany, began in October 1928. ⁴⁶ According to Reinhardt 500 students were enrolled. ⁴⁷ Reinhardt’s focus was on providing speakers for rural areas. The reasons for this were twofold; small farming communities were the most prevalent form of settlement in Reinhardt’s region and rural areas had been neglected by other parties. ⁴⁸

On 18 April 1929 the School was officially recognised by Hitler and was given the title Rednerschule der NSDAP. ⁴⁹ Notification of its creation was sent to every branch office of the party. Himmler justified the creation of a party speaker school on the grounds that a lack of speakers was preventing the growth of the party. ⁵⁰ It appears that he too believed meetings were the most effective way of wining support. Therefore he lauded Fritz Reinhardt who, by his own initiative, had created the Distance School for Speakers (Rednerfernschule). According to the Deputy Propaganda-Leader the School had been successful. From the beginning of the new course on 10 June 1929 it would be recognized as the Speaker School of the NSDAP. He went on to state that the value of the School rested on the provision to speakers of substantive, officially approved material. Thus by his knowledge and conviction the speaker might convince others. Therefore the speaker could take to the hustings safe in the knowledge that, ‘his material was irrefutable even for the sharpest of opponents’. ⁵¹ Himmler stated clearly that what Reinhardt taught was the official Party position. Thus, when asked for clarification of the Party’s position on antisemitism on the 28th July 1930, by Party-member Fruggel of Lauenburg, Pomerania; Himmler replied: ‘from your letter I gather that the Lauenburg Ortsgruppe apparently has not obtained the Rednermaterial as ordered by the Reichsleitung. I demand that this be promptly rectified. Strict obedience of the Reichsleitung’s orders saves pointless questions and much work’. ⁵²

The School did more than just train speakers. It constituted an attempt by Reinhardt and Himmler to fix the course of the NSDAP to the right, especially with regard to economics. No mention was to be found in the Rednerschule materials of the left wing policies espoused by Robert Ley and Reinhold Muchow, nor was the existence of the National Socialist Factory-Cell Organisation (NSBO) alluded to. ⁵³ Capital and heavy industry were to remain in private hands. The School sought to standardize an amorphous series of maxims that were admitted under the banner of the NSDAP. That is not to say that it rendered the party’s aspirations coherent. Its policies remained a hodgepodge of handouts, but for the first time there was an orthodoxy on economic policy and that orthodoxy was taught in a coherent manner. It lent the party’s propaganda an air of monolithic discipline and purpose which it had previously lacked. It allowed the Party propagandists to make a credible claim on the reins of government. Thanks to Reinhardt the Party could conduct campaigns on a scale larger than any other with limited financial resources. At a time when the system of democratic governance had ceased to function the administrative aplomb shown by the Nazis drew much admiration. ⁵⁴

With official recognition, the purchase of Rednermaterial was made compulsory for past and present pupils and all local and regional offices of the Party. ⁵⁵ The speakers’ material contained lectures, interpretations of government policy and reams of economic data and statistics. ⁵⁶ As part of his first order as Propaganda-Leader II, Reinhardt announced that three courses would be offered in 1930 and that a further five were planned for 1931. By May 1930, Reinhardt claimed 2300 party members trained or in training, of whom 600 had already spoken, and 100 had spoken more than 30 times. ⁵⁷ By August 1931, Reinhardt expanded his activities still further. He started putting on residential ‘holiday courses’ in Herrsching am Ammersee. These were intensive two-week courses taught by Reinhardt himself with contributions from party approved ‘experts’ on race, politics and economics. Further classes were also given in Munich city centre in January 1932. ⁵⁸ The list of guest lecturers at these courses was testament to the importance the Party attached to the School. The first two week event in August 1931 drew Alfred Rosenberg, Richard Walther Darré, Julius Streicher, Heinrich Himmler and Gregor Straßer. ⁵⁹ Though it was not to be all work: three concerts, two patriotic plays and a trip to the Zugspitze were also included in the plan.

In the outline of the October 1928 course, Reinhardt referred to the pivotal role of speakers in promoting the growth of the Party. He bemoaned the dearth of party members willing to speak to the public. Therefore the party’s grandees were not being used to their fullest effect. The course structure adopted in October 1928 remained virtually unchanged until the school’s dissolution in 1934. ⁶⁰ It was divided into course work (Lehrabschnitte), ‘conversations’ (Unterhaltungen), lectures (Vorträge) and lessons (Unterricht). Each piece of course work entailed 36 hours’ labour to be completed in 12 days over the course of the month. This was provided to students at the beginning of the course. It laid out the structure of the course in minute detail. ‘Conversations’ were the questions that the student was to provide written answers to. These were posted monthly. The majority of these questions were set in order to demonstrate that the student had completed and understood his coursework. Others took the form of antagonistic questions the speaker could expect to receive from opponents of the Nazis. Reinhardt frequently harangued his students for using incomplete sentences and answers that were too short. Cuttings of articles thought particularly pertinent were copied from the VB, annotated by Reinhardt, and distributed amongst his students. This suggests that not all students complied with the requirement to subscribe to the Party paper. Indeed, there are numerous notices of overdue payment for news-, pamphlet- and course-material subscriptions sent to local group-leaders and students preserved in the NSDAP main archive folders pertaining to the office of the Reichspropagandaleiter II. ⁶¹ Lectures were special speeches that did not come from the VB or Reinhardt’s paper, but which nevertheless were also included in the course material.

From the third month onwards, the student received ‘lessons’, which consisted of general corrections of their assignments. The student was required to study all the sample answers and corrections. Reinhardt would reproduce what he considered outstanding answers, expand on others, and castigate some. Upon receipt of the corrected questions, the student was required to practice answering them orally. Reinhardt was exceptionally fond of reminding his students to be thorough and to speak loudly and clearly. Such exhortations occur several times in each lesson. A guideline on how to heckle speakers in the Nazis’ opponents meetings is testament to Reinhardt’s zeal for micro-management:

Thorough study is required of such arguments, that constitute intellectual weapons, through which we will embarrass the main speaker in the assemblies of our opponents and shake the confidence of the audience in him and steer their attention to National Socialism. Many such arguments will be supplied. ⁶²

As an example of the impact of the school, the VB reported 20,000 meetings held by the NSDAP in the Reich in 1928, but 34,000 held in the lead-up to the August election campaign of 1930 and fully 54,000 held in the two weeks prior to the first round of the Presidential election of 1932. ⁶⁴ Without the volume of speakers trained by Reinhardt this would manifestly not have been possible. He also devised a standardized commissioning form in which the time location and topic were added by hand. The speaker was required to fill in another form after the meeting, listing name, topic, location, preparation, order, attendance, security, attacks by opponents and comments. ⁶⁵ One such meeting report (Versammlungsbericht) from 7 June 1931 tells of a rather uneventful meeting in Olching on the outskirts of Munich. ⁶⁶ The speaker, a resident of nearby Ottobrun, stated that the meeting was advertised by poster, and attended by only 30 people of whom just five were not party members. ⁶⁷ Listening posts (Horchposten) of opponents were said to be present, but there were no disturbances. The atmosphere was good, but subdued due to the poor attendance. Under ‘comments’, the speaker, whose name is not legible, recommended that:

through a bit more house-to-house legwork, we could attract more young people. Due to the fact that large attendances are not to be reckoned upon in Olching in the near future, I suggest that the local office not book the larger auditorium, but one of the side-rooms for 50 to 60 persons. An over-full side-room is much better than an empty auditorium. ⁶⁸

Information also flowed in the opposite direction, which allowed the RPL II to prepare its students for the latest criticisms of opponents. Lesson 5 of the June 1931 course contains an example of this tactic. The text of a speech recently given by the Socialist member of the Bavarian parliament Dr. Wilhelm Hoegner, entitled ‘In the Anteroom of the Third Reich’, was reproduced in abridged and annotated form. Each paragraph of Hoegner’s speech was followed by a paragraph written by Reinhardt. Some of Hoegner’s predictions were chillingly accurate. He warned that the Nazis would not respect the rule of law, that they would destroy the trade unions and steal their wealth, and that their lust for power would lead them and Germany to destruction. Students were instructed to reply to the impassioned content of Hoegner’s speech with sneering jibes and polemical assaults. ⁶⁹ Thus, when Hoegner reminded the audience that it was the SPD which had brought them the advantage of the eight-hour working day, Reinhardt replied: ‘the eight hour day – what a tremendous advantage: what is more, for millions it has become a zero hour day. Their gratitude must be eight times greater’. ⁷⁰

The study of Nazi propaganda before 1933, and particularly of the Rednerschule material, contributes to the removal of the greatest bar to understanding the remarkable electoral success of the NSDAP. It enables one to lessen the glare of hindsight. All who study the Nazis are painfully aware of what the regime delivered, to the point that it obscures from the mind’s eye that which the Party had promised on its way to power. One may attribute great importance to an antisemitic caricature in the background of a placard, for it serves as a signpost to genocide, but for the majority of the German electorate, NS racial ideology was merely an unappealing eccentricity, ⁷¹ something the Party had toned down in its national and most of its regional campaigns in order to gain mass appeal. Those who voted for the Nazis based their decision on the information available at the time. That the electorate was confronted with visceral election posters which promised violent destruction of the ‘system’ and pastoral renewal is common knowledge; that Hitler’s promises of revenge and utopian pan-German co-operation were appealing is also known. However, this does not tell the whole story of the NSDAP’s appeal. Hitler defined the spirit which imbued the Party but left the letter of Party policy to others. One of those others was Fritz Reinhardt. His students’ promises to the electorate are crucial to understanding the party’s electoral success. By reference to the economy, Reinhardt could access the aspirations and anxieties of the electorate. He used a different leitmotif both to the Party’s visual propagandists and to Hitler. Posters generally portrayed Germany as an inarticulate giant clothed in the garb of either a farmer or of a worker. Hitler in his speeches and writing predominantly used a corporeal metaphor to communicate his views. Germany was conceived of as a body in need of sustenance, subject to disease and prone to parasites. ⁷² As befitted the erstwhile business studies teacher, Reinhardt favoured a corporate metaphor; Germany was portrayed as a mismanaged concern, steered by corrupt and incompetent embezzlers.

Such was the opprobrium heaped upon democratic governance that an untested populist dictatorship became increasingly attractive. There was insufficient support for a return of the Hohenzollerns’ rule. As Kurt von Schleicher, the last chancellor before Hitler, remarked, the choice was ‘not monarchy or republic, but: What should this republic look like?’ ⁷³ The student speakers claimed that once in power the Nazi Party would bring an end to the democratic experiment and begin a new experiment in populist dictatorship. ⁷⁴ They claimed that the NSDAP shared the desires of the electorate for prosperity and stability. The speakers did not promise that a National Socialist dictatorship would embark upon an unprecedented rearmament program, start a war and commit genocide. They offered to bring prosperity, stifle political ferment and disregard the stultifying legal norms of the Weimar state. In unison, Reinhardt’s speakers promised a new approach: not to arrest economic and social reform, but to accelerate it by removing legal fetters. Hitler frequently stated that once in power he would use extra-constitutional violence against those he deemed enemies, but the Rednerschule student made no such threats. The spectre of violence was to be seen in the pageantry of the Sturm Abteilung. The threat stood before the stage rather than on it. ⁷⁵ Instead, the student speaker was instructed to focus primarily on describing how the NSDAP would remake the German economy, rationalize it and insulate it from further international crashes. The SPD was relentlessly attacked, branded incompetent, negligent, malignant and corrupt. Reinhardt continued unstintingly to attack the SPD after it had lost power. It seems he calculated that, in order to break the Weimar constitution, the legal foundation of the state, he first had to break support for the Party which had called it into existence. In this endeavour he was only partly successful, for according to Jürgen Falter, one in every 10 Nazi voters in the summer of 1932 was an ex-Social Democrat. ⁷⁶ This figure pales when one considers that one in four workers voted NSDAP.

The propaganda promulgated by Reinhardt was very different from Goebbels’s facetious style. Rednerschule students were instructed to describe a program for government with even earnestness. Speakers were encouraged to tailor their appeals to the ear of the audience. They were helped in this regard by the fact that most only ever spoke in their own region. Therefore they knew the burning local issues and used them to illustrate the party’s program. ⁷⁷ Students were equipped with material designed to appeal to all social strata. However, there was a bias toward material that appealed to voters from rural areas and small towns. Latent antisemitism permeates the course material; it served, as Richard Bessel has argued, as the glue which held the ideology together. ⁷⁸ In common with its depiction in Mein Kampf, the First World War was portrayed as the ur-catastrophe and the period in which the grand conspiracy against Germany first revealed itself. However, Reinhardt packaged this core tenet of National Socialism primarily in economic terms. The course material of the Rednerschule also provides some interesting glimpses behind the papier mâché edifice of Nazi propaganda, such as an injunction thrice stated on criticizing the Catholic Church. Reinhardt stated that there was nothing to be gained by attacking religion and the political meddling of the churches should be left to the highest rank of speaker (Reichsredner) to criticise.

Why do economic matters figure so prominently in the Rednerschule material? It was the issue that deeply affected the broadest cross section of the electorate, and therefore it was one a party with mainstream aspirations could not afford to neglect. Himmler was of the opinion that rural voters were not to be won over by talking politics, but by talking economics – since that was what the former were interested in. On 5 April 1929 he wrote to Reinhardt:

[a] Party member from Munich writes us: ‘Through an acquaintance I hear that in Steinhöring (Upper-Bavaria, near Ebersberg…) a growing fondness for National Socialism is brewing in the heads of farmers. Nothing but Hitler is spoken of. I believe it would be most profitable if a meeting were to be convened there, if we can win over a farmer the rest will follow of their own accord. Further information can be had from the loyal party member Herr Windstetter (shoe shop in the building of the Guesthouse zur Post). The advertisement for the meeting must take in the whole area, not just Steinhöring. Naturally more must be said about business than politics due to the fact that that interests farmers more.’ I request that you take note of the above and make the necessary arrangements. ⁷⁹

Economics was Reinhardt’s area of expertise. ⁸⁰ He also had more room for manoeuvre due to the lack of official economic policy. The School’s racial, antisemitic and foreign policy maxims were copied from the relevant passages of Mein Kampf. ⁸¹ Where possible, the fears of the electorate were given Jewish forms. Lessons commonly began with a reference to a recent economic crisis, such as a rise in unemployment or a budgetary impasse. One or more of the four core themes was introduced by reference to it. ⁸² Commonly, this was retrospectively linked, by reference to the unpropitious nature of the SPD, to the supposed inequity of Germany’s reparations obligations which in turn was tied to the defeat in the First World War. Throughout, there ran an undercurrent of antisemitism which was directly acknowledged eventually when the ‘grand conspiracy’ was unpacked. From there, Reinhardt ranged forward with autarkic solutions which he promised would restore prosperity; by promising to bring prosperity Reinhardt offered the German electorate that which they desired most. According to Adam Tooze, it was what the Nazis unleashed war for: to create a great continental colonial empire equal in size and wealth to the United States of America. ⁸³ Tooze conceived of the quest for Lebensraum as a nineteenth-century style land grab. Economics served as the portal to all aspects of Nazi ideology for Reinhardt, whereas the First World War was the hook on which Adolf Hitler had hung his arguments in Mein Kampf. Time and again he used the emotional force of the recent catastrophe to distract from the incoherence of his arguments. Reinhardt used the same technique, only with a different recent catastrophe in mind. One could reasonably expect, given Hitler’s pre-eminence in matters of propaganda, the war to occupy the same role in the teaching material of the Rednerschule as it did in Mein Kampf. ⁸⁴ However, it did not. The First World War occupied a prominent rather than the primary position. The Great War, race, Marxism, agriculture and the SPD were the only subjects each to have had an entire lesson devoted to them. Reinhardt maintained a pseudo-scholarly tone throughout, quoting extensively from historians and politicians.

Reinhardt appears to have had little interest in Nazi racial theory. The lesson he did devote to it was imported wholesale from a lecture on ‘Hereditary Healthcare’ (Erbgesundheitspflege) by the prominent Nazi racial theorist Dr. Karl Astel, and did so without comment. ⁸⁵ Reinhardt used economics as the populist preface to lesson 5: ‘We are against any rise in taxes…, if these are to serve the tribute-madness.’ ⁸⁶ Economics stands at the gateway to most lessons and was used to introduce new themes.

The most fruitful point of comparison for the Rednerschule is the visual propaganda printed by the NSDAP during the same period. It allows one to ascertain the degree of co-ordination that existed between the RPL II and the rest of the Party. Gerhard Paul’s study of all election posters up to 1933 found that attacks on opponents were the subject of most. In common with the school’s hierarchy of targets, it was the SPD that bore the brunt of the attacks. In the posters, the Social Democratic Party was cast as being responsible for

all of the ills of the Republic and stood as a synonym – as it was put in one election placard from 1930 - for ‘treason, fraud, corruption, social reaction, bribery, law for the protection of the republic and sixty years of tribute-slavery.’ ⁸⁷

On another point of parity, Paul noted that in the Nazis’ visual propaganda, antisemitism played only a marginal role and that antisemitic posters became fewer in number as the Party grew in popularity. ⁸⁹ It seems that the Nazis felt that they would have to first sell their interpretation of events before they could sell their explanation. Therefore, what they believed to be the grand Jewish conspiracy was intimated more often than delineated. Where possible, all opponents were othered by being labelled Jewish or agents of a Jewish conspiracy. This was particularly evident in attacks made on the SPD. As Geoffrey Pridham puts it, ‘anti-Semitism did not form specifically one of the major themes of party propaganda in the early 1930’s but it often provides a leitmotiv for major propaganda themes.’ ⁹⁰ In poster as well as Rednerchule propaganda, antisemitism was the point on the horizon toward which all the villains in the National Socialist worldview orientated themselves. Antisemitism was predominantly couched in economic rather than racial terms by posters and the school. It was ‘international Jewish high-finance’ which was blamed for Germany’s economic woes. ⁹¹ As Pridham noted ‘[t]he broad mass of the Nazi voters in the early 1930’s were not conscious racialists, for they were motivated primarily by political and economic discontent’. ⁹²

Ben Lieberman has described the bewildering array of pejoritive connotations which were attached to the term ‘system’ during the Weimar Republic. ⁹³ All parties – from the SPD to the Nazis – criticized a ‘system’. ⁹⁴ The apparent common denominators were first that the ‘system’ was portrayed as a deliberate betrayal of the national interest, and second it was not equivalent to the state. In fact, nearly all the parties who railed against the ‘system’ wanted a strongly interventionist state. ⁹⁵ The German National People’s Party (DNVP) used the term when attacking parties in government. They attached epithets such as ‘Versailles’, ‘November’ and ‘Jewish-Marxist’ to the term. The Communists (KPD) favoured epithets such as ‘international finance capital’. The Nazis used all of the above and many more as can be seen in the Rednerschule course documents. The NS use of the term was to suggest an expropriative conspiracy which was bent on destroying Germany. This seems to have resonated with the electorate for, as Gerald Feldman notes, in post-Versailles Germany a:

condition was being created in which nearly all classes of society felt disadvantaged and exploited to the benefit of others and in which loss of confidence in the state was combined with a deep and not easily specifiable resentment. ⁹⁶

Gerhard Paul claimed that Hitler’s propaganda before 1933 relied heavily on mythic and utopian symbols. ⁹⁹ However, this did not mean that the rest of the Party followed the same tack. Hitler’s vague assertions leave one in no doubt as to his earnestness, but they do not delineate a specific path. Hitler defined the spirit of the movement but Reinhardt’s school set itself the task of defining policy. Reinhardt sought to demonstrate the party’s aptitude for government. The numerous pages devoted to explaining the Reich’s labyrinthine tax regulations, proposed changes to company law and the restructuring of how the trade of stocks would be governed were unlikely to have entertained any except a specialized audience. Yet every student was required to learn them. This was certainly not in line with Hitler’s guidelines on propaganda which all students were required to study at the beginning of the course. It indicates that the School sought to portray the NSDAP as a safe pair of hands, not as radical avengers. It also served to fix the party’s orientation toward conservative economic policies and to drown out the left-leaning elements in the movement.

The greatest point of divergence between the poster propaganda of the Party and Reinhardt’s School was in the portrayal of violence. Nazi election posters used stark colours and frequently depicted acts of violence. Reinhardt, on the other hand, revelled in recounting to his students information on the mass rally of Storm Troopers (SA) and Security Staff (SS) members which took place on 17–18 October 1931. It was the single largest demonstration of paramilitary force seen in the Weimar Republic. The NSDAP claimed that 104,000 attended from all over Germany. ¹⁰⁰ This was an important figure in the struggle for legitimacy with the Republic, for it meant that the Nazis could assemble a force greater than the Reichswehr. Reinhardt chose to focus on the ‘splendid striving and the strict discipline’ of the marching columns and neglected to mention the two dead and 61 injured in clashes between the SA, SS, Police and KPD. ¹⁰¹ While not encouraging his students to condone or threaten acts of violence, Reinhardt left them in no doubt as to the importance of violence to the Nazi cause. On page four of Lesson 3, Reinhardt coolly informed his students:

The greater the number of violent attacks that this state commits against us, the less we need to use our money and strength on making the electorate aware of us. The methods by which the state attacks us serve only to demonstrate the innate strength of our movement. One could say the strength of the National Socialist movement is ‘officially recognised’! ¹⁰²

The National Socialists sold themselves as the Party of order, strength and efficiency. Their perceived ability to bring an end to the democratic impasse and establish authoritarian government won them the backing of the conservative elites. ¹⁰³ It also appealed to a broad spectrum of voters for whom democracy had become irrevocably associated with intolerable, intractable crises. Reinhardt’s school was emblematic of the National Socialist ability to organize. His students by their manner, by their method and by their program for reform demonstrated that the NSDAP had to be included in any future configuration of government. Herein lays the function of the interminable reams of figures and the lessons devoted to proposed alterations to company and tax law. They demonstrated the party’s earnestness. In this approach, the Rednerschule was unique among Nazi propaganda organizations. For it was not exclusively reliant on ‘sentimentality’ (Gefühlsbezogenheit) in the manner that the poster campaigns were. ¹⁰⁴ It articulated how the new and appealing National Socialist spirit would be translated into policy, which would allow the Nazis to govern Germany more cheaply and efficiently than their predecessors. Thus, it was a combination of intrigues from above, violence from below and the Nazi knack for mobilizing resentment that brought them to power. Were it not for the Rednerschule, the NSDAP could not have gotten its message across; it could not have convinced a third of the electorate to vote for it. The Rednerschule course material tells of an innovative, coherent and highly organized electoral machine. It confirms the view that the NSDAP attempted to appeal to all non-Jewish sections of German society in word as well as poster. It demonstrated that the Nazis made their electoral breakthrough while promising prosperity rather than militarism. The School ensured that the electorate knew what the Party stood for. The Nazis were the most prominent and palatable alternate system of government for a sizeable minority of a fragmented electorate. Without the school, the continuous campaigning and the saturation tactics would not have been possible. The Rednerschule delivered these benefits to the Party and delivered them for free. As T.W. Arafe states: ‘[t]he very intensity of Nazi political activity acted as a powerful magnet’. ¹⁰⁵

The key to explaining the rise of the NSDAP lies in the heterogeneity of means employed by the Party and its unity of purpose. No one factor brought the Party to power. This article has delineated the working of a facet of Nazi propaganda before 1933 and shown it to have been either misrepresented or ignored by most historians. The neglect of the Speakers School could not have been due to a lack of information on the school; as the course outline was published in a widely disseminated text in 1969. It appears instead, that the School failed to interest historians because it did not fit with the portrayal of NS propaganda under the Lower Middle Class thesis. However, without taking the contribution of the School into account one cannot claim to know what the NSDAP promised the electorate.