Free B006OAL1QM EBOK by Heinrich Fraenkel, Roger Manvell Page B

General Luden-dorff, made their first abortive bid for power. The putsch failed, and in February 1924 Hitler was formally sentenced to imprisonment in Landsberg fortress, where he had been detained since his arrest in November and was living at ease with Rudolf Hess composing his political testament Mein Kampf . He was to be released the following December. The National Socialist movement may have seemed crushed, but all the elements which were to come together to revive it in 1925 after Hitler's release continued to ferment. Among those were Gregor and Otto Strasser; Gregor, who had joined the Party in 1921 and had taken part in the putsch, was in 1924 a Deputy in the Bavarian Diet and the founder of the Berliner Arheiterzeitung of which Otto was the editor. The paper became the mouthpiece of the Strassers' own version of National Socialism.
    One of the main targets of National Socialist propaganda was Stresemann who, as the author of Germany's more conciliatory foreign policy, was concerned to secure the evacuation of the Ruhr and the Rhineland, to settle the problem of reparations and to build up Germany's economy through arranging foreign credits. To the National Socialists Stresemann's methods of achieving his aims simply represented appeasement of the Allies. When the Dawes Plan for reparations came into operation in 1924, foreign credit poured into Germany, and the Ruhr was gradually evacuated during 1924-25. (The Rhineland was not to be finally rid of Allied soldiers until 1930, leaving Germany free to rearm unmolested.) In 1925 the Locarno Treaty was signed guaranteeing Germany's frontiers with France and Belgium and obliging her to keep a specified area of the Rhineland demilitarised. Also in 1925 Hindenburg was appointed President at the advanced age of seventy-seven. He was to live long enough to make Hitler Chancellor.
    In 1926 two other events roused the National Socialists. The first was the vexed question of the expropriation of the estates of former German reigning families, and the second the country's admission to the League of Nations. The first problem involved compensation, the princes on the one hand demanding exorbitant sums while the Socialists and Communists were calling for expropriation without any com- pensation at all. This question was to divide Strasser, Goebbels and Hitler. As for the League of Nations, Goebbels was within only seven years to pay a brief visit to Geneva as Hitler's personal representative at the League; on his return Germany withdrew from the League after a matter of days.
    Goebbels was soon employed not merely as Gregor Strasser's secretary but also as a Party speaker and representative in Rhineland-Westphalia. He continued to be based at Elberfeld in the Rhineland-Nord Gau, or district, of the Party. His salary was 200 marks a month, and he worked in association with Karl Kaufinann, who was Gauleiter or Party Leader for the Rhineland-Westphalia district, and was in charge of the office in Elberfeld. By a stroke of good fortune, one of the rare links in the chain of Goebbels' diaries survives from this period and is preserved in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. This diary, which is in manuscript and covers over two hundred pages in a series of notebooks, belongs to the period 3rd August 1925 to 16th October 1926. It is of the greatest importance in the history of Goebbels' career, because it was during this period that he came into direct contact with Hitler for the first time and finally decided to throw in his lot with him rather than remain with the Strassers. Only ten days after the last surviving page of the diary ends, on 26th October 1926, Hitler appointed him Gauleiter for the Party in Berlin.
    The diary is written in the same strained, highfalutin style as the novel Michael, even though Goebbels was twenty-eight years old when he wrote the greater part of it. It is the only strictly private document of any length and importance written by