Otto Johann Maximilian Strasser (; 10 September 1897 – 27 August 1974) was a German politician and an early member of the Nazi Party. While his older brother Gregor led the party's northern group, Otto served as its primary theoretician. Through their main publishing house, the Kampfverlag, they promoted an ideology based on Nazism, that later became known as Strasserism, which sought to replace capitalist private property with a medieval-style system of "hereditary fiefs" (Erblehen).Kühnl, Reinhard, Zur Programmatik der nationalsozialistischen Linken: Das Strasser-Programm von 1925/26, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte vol. 14 (1966), No. 3, p. 327-331. Otto broke from the party due to disputes with the dominant Hitlerite faction. He formed the Black Front, a group intended to split the Nazi Party and take it from the grasp of Hitler. During his exile and World War II, this group also functioned as a secret opposition group.
Historian Hans Mommsen has commented that Otto Strasser was "in most respects" the intellectual superior of his brother Gregor.Mommsen, Hans (1996) The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy. Translated by Elborg Forster and Larry Eugene Jones. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. p.331 Peter Stachura argues that the concept of so-called left-wing "Strasserism," and Gregor's image as a principled "socialist" martyr, were largely fabricated by Otto in his writings.
Life and career
Early life and World War I Born at Bad Windsheim, Strasser was the son of a Catholic judicial officer who lived in the Upper Bavarian market town of Geisenfeld. Strasser took an active part in World War I (1914–1918). On 2 August 1914, he joined the Bavarian Army as a volunteer. He rose through the ranks to lieutenant and was twice wounded.Strasser, Otto. Germany Tomorrow. Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1940, p. 11. p. 12.
Freikorps and SPD (1919–1920) Strasser returned to Germany in 1919, where he served in the Freikorps that in May 1919 put down the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which was organized on the principles of workers' councils. About this time, he joined the Social Democratic Party.
According to his own later accounts, he participated in the opposition to the Kapp Putsch in 1920. During this same period, Strasser was also actively associated with the right-wing Juniklub (June Club). Working alongside conservative revolutionary ideologue Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Strasser became a regular contributor to the club's nationalist weekly Das Gewissen (The Conscience), a group that notably sympathized with the Kapp Putsch. Still, he allegedly grew increasingly alienated from his party's reformist stance, particularly when it put down a workers' uprising in the Ruhr, and he left the party later that year.
Strasser received his doctorate in political science from the University of Würzburg in 1921. He then joined the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Berlin as an assistant advisor, where he worked until 1923 before moving into the private sector. Leveraging his World War I connections, he was hired by his former platoon leader, Count von Hertling, who directed the large spirits conglomerate Hünlich-Winkelhausen. Strasser shortly advanced to become the director of the company's Saxony branch and eventually served as the Count's right-hand man in Berlin. He became active in nationalist movements, publishing several political articles under the pseudonym "Ulrich von Hutten".
Nazi Party (1925–1930) In 1925, he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), in which his brother, Gregor, had been a member for several years and worked for its newspaper as a journalist, ultimately taking it over with his brother. He focused particularly on the "socialist" elements of the party's program and led the party's faction in northern Germany together with his brother and Joseph Goebbels. His faction advocated support for ideologically Nazi unions, profit-sharing (workers receiving 10% of shares) and what was later characterized as an advocacy for closer ties with the Soviet Union, though this "pro-soviet" claim has been disputed by Reinhard Kühnl.
Their 1925–1926 "Strasser Program" advocated for the breakup of large agricultural estates into redistributed "hereditary fiefs" (Erblehen). On foreign policy, it also advocated for a "Greater German Reich" including Austria, the creation of a Central African colonial empire, and the formation of a "United States of Europe." The draft contained a detailed section on the "Jewish Question," which called for the expulsion of Jewish immigrants and the stripping of citizenship from all German Jews. Under this proposed system, German Jews were to be reclassified as foreigners ("Palestinians").
His idea of "state feudalism" revolved around establishing a "de-proletarianized," agrarian society composed of fiefs and guilds. Under this system, agricultural land would be granted by the state as family possession for independent (unaided) cultivation and passed on only to male heirs. Political power was to be exercised through a system of corporate estates (Stände) ruled by a cultivated elite, rather than parliamentary democracy. To achieve this vision, he advocated for relocating urban populations to the countryside (de-urbanization), dismantling heavy industry into small, decentralized structures, and phasing out international finance in favour of a barter economy, while encouraging domestic private banks and allowing interest on unsecured loans.
Throughout the late 1920s, Otto authored numerous articles and speeches that were published under Gregor's name. This practice utilized Gregor's parliamentary immunity to shield Otto from prosecution, though it consequently subjected Gregor to a series of libel lawsuits.
According to his former associates, although Strasser particularly showed opposition to "Ultramontanism" in the 1920s, he had already joked at the time that he was willing to use religion, claiming that he would return to the "bosom of the Holy Roman Church" if politically necessary, adding: "they will take me, those cowl-pissers" (Kuttenbrunzer).
Despite disagreements with Hitler, the Strassers did not represent a radical wing opposed to the party mainstream. Regarding finance, Gottfried Feder was more radical and held great favour at the time. The Strassers were extremely influential within the party, but the Strasserist program was defeated at the Bamberg Conference of 1926. Otto Strasser, along with Gregor, continued as a leaning Left Nazi within the party until he seceded from the NSDAP in 1930 following an aggressive attack led by Joseph Goebbels at a General Assembly on June 30, resulting in his expulsion from the meeting. This 1930 split also ended his political relationship with his brother.
Nazi dissident in Germany (1930–1933) On 1 July, Strasser telegraphed Hitler requesting an explanation for Goebbels' actions. None would come. Strasser then seceded from the Nazi Party to form the Action Group of Revolutionary National Socialists, which later transformed into the Black Front,Mommsen, Hans (1996) The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy. Translated by Elborg Forster and Larry Eugene Jones. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. p.348 composed of like-minded former NSDAP membership. The group was intended to split the Nazi Party and operate as a dissident faction against Hitler's leadership.
Gregor Strasser publicly condemned Otto's secession as "pure madness" and accused Otto of treating the party in a "treacherous way".
Otto Strasser later described his break with Hitler in a highly dramatic way, portraying it as a profound ideological conflict. He depicted Hitler as a "Roman Catholic fascist" dictator and himself as a principled German Protestant philosopher, quoting Martin Luther, claiming that he insisted on "ideas" above "leaders." He rejected the "marvels of technology" touted by Hitler, and said "I had to deny the so-called progress of mankind to begin with, because I was unable to regard the invention of the toilet as a work of culture."Strasser, O., Mein Kampf. Eine politische Autobiographie (My Struggle. A Political Autobiography) (Frankfurt/M., 1969), p. 62, quoted in Zitelmann, Rainer (2022). Hitler's National Socialism. Oxford: Management Books 2000 Ltd.
Shortly after his exit, Strasser unknowingly confided to an undercover police informer that while the NSDAP "was no longer revolutionary," he still considered Hitler's antisemitism to be sincere and it was politically "extraordinarily effective."
Otto Strasser then published his "Fourteen Theses" in 1930. The program proposed the state's "supreme ownership" (Obereigentum) over land and resources, reorganizing proprietors into the status of "fief-holders" (Lehensträger) It also declared a historical mission to "overthrow the worldview of the Great French Revolution," affirming human inequality and seeking a strong central power based on the "personal responsibility of the leaders" in place of the "irresponsibility of an anonymous mass." On foreign policy, it demanded Germany to act as the "backbone and heart of white Europe," embracing war as the "will of destiny" to secure "living space" (Lebensraum). The theses pledged to protect the "German soul" from "racial degeneration" and "supra-national forces" such as "Jewry" and Ultramontanism, demanding a new legal system that would recognize only ethnic Germans (Volksgenossen) as citizens.
To build his new movement, Strasser allied with military figures like Major Bruno Buchrucker, whom Strasser would later call his "best friend",In Strassers Book: Hitler und ich von 1940, p. 148f; cited from Patrick Moreau: Nationalsozialismus von links. Die »Kampfgemeinschaft Revolutionärer Nationalsozialisten« und die »Schwarze Front« Otto Straßers 1930-1935. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-421-06192-0, p. 40. an avowed monarchist known for his brutal suppression of the 1920 Kapp Putsch workers' strike, and who considered ideological programs "inessential." Despite this, Strasser entrusted Buchrucker with formulating the group's "Programmatic Principles" for its first congress, which largely corresponded to earlier publications by Strasser.Moreau, Nationalsozialismus, p. 57.
The Black Front's most significant attempt to destabilize Hitler came in 1931, when they supported the Stennes revolt, a major mutiny by the Berlin SA led by Walther Stennes. According to Strasser, during this power struggle, Stennes provided him with private letters exposing SA leader Ernst Röhm's homosexuality. These letters were subsequently leaked to the Berlin police, creating a massive public scandal designed to severely damage Röhm and the Nazi Party's reputation. Following the revolt, several hundred expelled SA members joined Strasser, and the groups briefly merged.
In May 1931, Freikorps veteran Hermann Ehrhardt initiated the merger of Stennes's faction and Strasser's group into the "German Nationalist and Socialist Fighting Association" (NSKD). Ehrhardt was acting as a government agent and secretly channeled state resources into the NSKD to consolidate paramilitary opposition against Hitler.
In Strasser's later memoirs, he claimed that their efforts to split the SA were financed by wealthy industrialists, most notably the steel magnate Otto Wolff. Strasser wrote that he used this "seemingly heaven-sent" funding to actively bribe SA members to abandon Hitler, offering them "more money than Hitler had offered".