The Bamberg Conference () included some sixty membersThese included the would-be dissidents Gregor Strasser, Joseph Goebbels, Karl Kaufmann, Ludolf Haase and Franz Pfeffer von Salomon as well as the Munich faction of Wilhelm Frick, Rudolf Hess, Julius Streicher, Hermann Esser, Gottfried Feder, Phillip Bouhler, Max Amann and Alfred Rosenberg. Hermann Göring was still in his Beer Hall Putsch-motivated exile in Sweden; Ernst Röhm had left the party and the SA in 1925 before starting his self-imposed exile in South America following his contretemps with Hitler over the proper role of the SA in the Nazi movement. of the leadership of the Nazi Party, and was specially convened by Adolf Hitler in Bamberg, in Upper Franconia, Germany, on Sunday 14 February 1926 during the "wilderness years" of the party.After the end of the disastrous hyperinflation in 1922-23 Germany, the economy started a return to prosperity in the mid-1920s. Support for the Nazi party waned due to the relative prosperity the country was experiencing under the Weimar Republic.
Hitler's purposes in convening the ad hoc conference embraced at least the following:
to curtail dissent within the party that had arisen among members of its northern branchesThe so-called dissidents were led by Strasser, although he was a Bavarian and had been dispatched to the north by Hitler to expand the party's base there. and to foster party unity based upon—and only upon—the "leadership principle" (Führerprinzip) to establish without controversy his position as the sole, absolute and unquestioned ultimate authority within the party, whose decisions are final and non-appealable to eliminate any notion that the party was in any way a democratic or consensus-based institutionHitler insisted that the party must be based solely on the Führerprinzip. As was expressed by Hess, in "German democracy", authority flows downward and responsibility flows upward; followers must follow the leader without question and must be completely responsible to him. to eradicate bickering between the northern and southern factions of the party over ideology and goalsConsiderable personal animosity between the northern faction and the Munich clique --represented by Esser and Streicher, who were unnecessarily insensitive to the underlying causes of intraparty factionalism-- also motivated the dissent. to establish the Twenty-Five Point Programme as constituting the party's "immutable" programmeThe statutes of the party were amended soon after Bamberg, at the party's General Members' Meeting in late May 1926, to state expressly that the 1920 Twenty-Five Point Programme that was so hastily established by Hitler and Anton Drexler --during an impromptu all-night meeting of those two that was conducted around Drexler's dining room table-- was "immutable." Hitler realized that ideological controversies were inherently complex, and that they led to thought and debate. More subtly, such controversies inevitably entailed the exposure of both internal inconsistencies within the competing ideologies themselves and external inconsistencies between any ideology and the actual and empirical political realm; and this, in turn, fostered yet other conflicts and engendered attempts at conflict resolution. Hitler's rather astonishing political insight was that, for a party based on the Fuhrerprinzip, this entire dialectic process was simply counter-productive. Such debates, dialectics and disagreements, even though founded in good faith on both sides and even though intended to "improve" the party, contravened the Führerprinzip and diverted energy from the goal of obtaining political power. Ideological "programmes" (if taken seriously) would also tend to limit the Führer's freedom of action in the drive for political power, and Hitler had no intention of subordinating himself to any programmatic expression of an "idea," no matter how central such an idea might be. The personality of the Führer, not the content of an ideology, was the meaning of National Socialism under the Führerprinzip.
Background To achieve his objectives, Hitler had to pressure the dissident northern faction to accept the leadership of Munich and to adhere without question to the Führerprinzip. His decision to convene the Bamberg Conference was something of a gamble—it could have provoked an express revolt by the northern faction or otherwise exacerbated the north-south conflict, leading to a rupture—but Hitler chose to nip a possible nascent rebellion in the bud. He correctly believed that the dissidents lacked both the heart and the stomach to press their dissent, and that their true intent was not to challenge his leadership but to "rescue" him from the "reactionary" forces of the Munich clique, who had by default come to dominate the party whilst Hitler served his 30-month jail term in Landsberg Prison for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch (during which he also completed Mein Kampf).
Gregor Strasser Soon after Hitler was banned from public speaking in Bavaria on 9 March 1925,In a private meeting of 4 January 1925, only a fortnight after ending his incarceration in Landsberg, Hitler convinced Bavarian Prime Minister Heinrich Held to lift the Bavarian ban on the NSDAP and its organs (principally the SA and the Völkischer Beobachter). This particular prohibition was removed, effective 16 February 1925, ending the Verbotzeit. Hitler, who apparently could not stand prosperity, promptly delivered a rabble-rousing speech at Munich's Bürgerbräukeller, containing strong suggestions of the need for violent action, and the Bavarian authorities responded in early March 1925 by banning him from speaking in public meetings within the confines of Bavaria. Other states followed suit. he appointed Gregor Strasser to develop the party in the north. Strasser, a hard-working and gregarious pharmacist of forceful personality who read Homer in the original for relaxation, Krebs p. 229. was an effective public speaker, had exceptional organizational talents Shirer p. 122. and dramatically increased the number of Nazi cells in the north from 71 after the putsch to 262 by the end of 1925. Kershaw p. 166.
Strasser was more idealistic than Hitler and took the notion of "socialist" in the party name with some degree of seriousness. The Communists were a larger factor in the more industrialized north, and Strasser was sensitive to the appeal that "socialism" had to those dissatisfied workers who were tempted by the red flag.Goebbels, who had a Ph.D. in German literature and who had at least read Marx in the original, joined Strasser enthusiastically in the emphasis on "socialism." His self-image was that of revolutionary, and he chafed at the notion of the party's becoming an instrument of petty bourgeois politics. He also apparently felt that the Munich clique was ruled by lesser men, and he chafed under their leadership in Hitler's absence.
Strasser was more radical than Hitler on the issue of adherence to the "legal and constitutional" method of obtaining political power through the Weimar Constitution's electoral processes. He had been the SA leader in Lower Bavaria before the Beer Hall Putsch and was not convinced that Hitler's repudiation of force, violence and putsch as a path to political power was correct.
Most serious, perhaps, was the attitude of the northern faction to the party's Twenty-Five Point Programme, which indisputably was intellectually confused and often half-baked. Considering the circumstances in which it was written, it is hard to imagine that it could be otherwise. To Strasser and Goebbels, men with intellectual and ideological bents, the absence of intellectual rigor was a serious defect.
The Hagen meeting Strasser first convened a meeting of the party leaders of about a dozen northern Gaue in Hagen, Westphalia on 10 September 1925. The meeting failed to accomplish much, as Strasser was absent due to his mother's serious illness. Nevertheless, the delegates unanimously rejected the strategy of electoral participation, formed the National Socialist Working Association (Full name: Working Association of the Northern and Western German Gaue of the NSDAP), enacted statutes to govern the organization, established a fortnightly publication called the National Socialist Letters (Nationalsozialistische Briefe) with Goebbels as editor, and respectfully notified Hitler in writing of these developments. In no way was this an open revolt against Hitler or an attempted secession from the NSDAP; Hitler gave his approval to the formation of the Association.His approval was not solicited but by giving it, Hitler underlined his ultimate authority over Party activities.Read p. 145. The members of the Working Association were by statute dedicated to work "in the comradely spirit of National Socialism under the leadership of Adolf Hitler."
Nevertheless, the organization's intent to reshape the programme of National Socialism threatened Hitler's absolute authority. The underlying premise of the Working Association was, in effect, democratic: neither Munich headquarters nor the Führer could have all the answers and the best solution was a comradely, communal and cooperative effort by concerned Party members, who would combine their skills and intelligence to formulate a winning programme.
The Hanover meeting In November 1925 Strasser produced his own draft programme, and circulated it among the dissidents.Goebbels contributed heavily to the draft, which also called for large-scale nationalization of industry, participation by workers in department stores, abolition of "stock exchange capitalism," formation of a European Customs Union led by Germany and eventual alliance with Russia against the "fiendish ... corruption of the West." Read p. 145. It basically proposed a corporate state, with peasants tied to their land in a quasi-feudalistic manner and with the means of production under government control, while private property rights were nevertheless respected. The most inflammatory provision was the advocacy of expropriation of princely estates, such as the Hohenzollerns and the Wittelsbachs. The draft was often incoherent and vague, however, and it promoted controversy even among the northerners. On 24 January 1926 a meeting of the dissidents in Hanover became extraordinarily heated when Gottfried Feder appeared (uninvited but as Hitler's representative) and objected strenuously to the proposed programme in any form. As a result, the conferees opted to shelve the Strasser draft, and further work on a new proposal was delegated to a small group.Opposition was voiced not only by Feder but also by Pfeffer, Haase, and Robert Ley on various points. Noakes pp. 26-27.
They did, however, support the initiative to expropriate, without compensation, the landholdings of the German princes, an issue which would be the subject of an upcoming plebiscite; the expropriation initiative had been sponsored by the Left, including the Communists.Ibid. p. 146. At the time the party was receiving contributions from several nobles, and Hitler was personally receiving 1500 marks per month --approximately 75% of his income-- from the divorced Duchess of Sachsen-Anhalt. Furthermore, such an expropriation would not endear the party to the conservative industrialists who were currently contributing and who, Hitler hoped, would become an ever-growing source of party funds. The dissidents also passed a resolution to start a new publishing house, the Kampfverlag, which would operate a new party newspaper for the north, Der Nationale Sozialist. The proposed newspaper would obviously compete with the Party's Völkischer Beobachter. Some Gauleiter were even so bold as to criticize Hitler, although the resolution that was adopted expressly stated that the northerners did not intend to displace the leadership decisions of Munich and that, in any case, the expropriation issue was "not one which touches on the fundamental interests of the party."