Strasserism
Strasserism denotes a dissident strand of National Socialism developed by brothers Gregor Strasser (1892–1934) and Otto Strasser (1897–1974) within the early National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), emphasizing revolutionary anti-capitalism, worker empowerment, and guild-based economic reorganization alongside ultranationalism and antisemitism.[1] Gregor Strasser, a World War I veteran and early NSDAP organizer, significantly expanded the party's membership in northern Germany through administrative leadership and propaganda efforts, while Otto Strasser articulated ideological visions rejecting monopolies, advocating nationalization of key industries, and opposing totalitarian centralization in favor of federalism.[2][1] Diverging from Adolf Hitler's accommodation of industrial elites and emphasis on racial hierarchy over class conflict, the Strassers prioritized a "socialist revolution" to dismantle finance capitalism, leading to internal party rifts, Gregor's assassination during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, and Otto's expulsion and exile to form the militant Black Front opposition group.[1][3] Though marginalized and eradicated under Hitler's regime, Strasserism's legacy persists in postwar neo-Nazi circles and third-position ideologies that invoke its rhetoric to claim a "purer" or less imperialist form of fascism, despite retaining core Nazi tenets of authoritarianism and ethnic exclusion.[1][3]Origins and Key Figures
Gregor Strasser
Gregor Strasser (31 May 1892 – 30 June 1934) was a German politician and early leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), recognized for his organizational efforts in expanding the party's membership in northern Germany and his promotion of economic policies emphasizing nationalization and worker participation within a nationalist framework.[4] Along with his brother Otto, he represented the party's "left-wing" faction, which prioritized anti-capitalist measures targeting large-scale finance and industry while maintaining core Nazi tenets of racial hierarchy and antisemitism.[2] Strasser served as a lieutenant in the German Army during World War I, where he was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery.[2] Postwar, he participated in Freikorps units combating communist uprisings, including the suppression of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919. He joined the NSDAP in 1920, shortly after its founding, and actively supported Adolf Hitler's leadership during the early 1920s. Strasser took part in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, resulting in a brief imprisonment following its failure.[2] Upon release, he focused on party propagation in northern Germany, leveraging his skills as an orator and administrator to increase NSDAP membership from around 20,000 in 1925 to over 100,000 by 1928 through establishment of local branches and recruitment drives.[4] As Reichsorganisationsleiter from 1928, Strasser oversaw the party's bureaucratic structure and was instrumental in its electoral gains, serving as a Reichstag deputy from 1930. His economic vision, articulated in the NSDAP's 1932 Immediate Economic Program, called for land reform through expropriation of uneconomic estates, nationalization of banking and large trusts, mandatory profit-sharing in industries, and state oversight of production to curb unemployment, which stood at 6 million in 1932.[5] These proposals aimed to dismantle "interest slavery" and finance capital—often coded as Jewish influence—while preserving private property for small enterprises and emphasizing national self-sufficiency, distinguishing his approach from both liberal capitalism and Marxist internationalism.[5] Strasser consistently upheld the party's antisemitic stance, editing the Nationalsozialistische Briefe publication that propagated racial theories and attacks on Jewish economic dominance.[4] Tensions with Hitler escalated in late 1932 amid negotiations with Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher for a coalition government, where Strasser advocated pragmatic power-sharing to achieve NSDAP goals, viewing a pure dictatorship as unattainable given the party's 37% vote share in July 1932 elections.[6] Hitler, prioritizing absolute control and alliances with industrialists, perceived this as disloyalty, leading to Strasser's resignation from party leadership on 8 December 1932.[4] Despite withdrawing from active politics, Strasser was arrested on 30 June 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives purge, interrogated at Gestapo headquarters, and executed by shooting, officially justified as eliminating a potential rival threat though he posed no organized opposition.[7] His death eliminated the last significant internal challenge to Hitler's consolidation of power, solidifying the NSDAP's shift toward authoritarian centralism over factional socialism.[4]Otto Strasser
Otto Johann Maximilian Strasser was born on 10 September 1897 in Bad Windsheim, Bavaria, into a middle-class Catholic family.[1] He enlisted in the Imperial German Army at age 17 and served as a lieutenant during World War I, experiencing frontline combat that influenced his later nationalist views.[1] After demobilization in 1919, amid Germany's economic turmoil and revolutionary unrest, Strasser briefly studied economics before entering politics.[1] Strasser joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) in 1920, recruited by his older brother Gregor, and quickly rose in its ranks during the party's formative years.[1] He contributed to organizational expansion in northern Germany and emphasized the party's anti-capitalist program, editing publications like the Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung and authoring pamphlets that promoted a revolutionary national socialism blending nationalism with workers' control of production.[1] Ideological frictions emerged as Adolf Hitler prioritized electoral alliances with conservatives and industrialists, which Strasser viewed as betraying the NSDAP's 1920 25-point platform's socialist elements.[1] By 1930, escalating disputes—particularly over Hitler's endorsement of the Young Plan reparations and rejection of immediate anti-capitalist revolution—led Strasser to resign from the NSDAP on 4 July.[1] He founded the Black Front (Schwarze Front), formally the Union of Revolutionary National Socialists, as a splinter group seeking to reclaim the party's original radicalism, attract disaffected left-wing Nazis, and undermine Hitler's control through propaganda and underground networks.[1] The Black Front published the newspaper Die Schwarze Front and advocated guild socialism, land reform, and nationalization while retaining antisemitic and authoritarian stances, though it remained marginal with limited membership estimated in the low thousands.[1] Following the Nazi consolidation of power in 1933, Strasser fled Germany to evade arrest, relocating successively to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, France, and Bermuda before internment in Canada as an enemy alien from 1940 to 1943.[1] During exile, he authored I Was with Hitler (later titled Hitler and I) in 1940, detailing his break with the Führer and positioning himself as the authentic National Socialist, while collaborating sporadically with anti-Nazi exiles and Allied intelligence for broadcasts against the regime.[8] His brother Gregor's execution in the 1934 Night of the Long Knives purge highlighted the regime's intolerance for internal rivals.[1] Strasser returned to West Germany in 1955, attempting to relaunch political activities through the German Social Union, but faced rejection due to his Nazi associations and the Federal Republic's denazification policies.[8] He lived quietly in Munich, writing memoirs and defending Strasserist ideas until his death on 27 August 1974 at age 76 from a heart attack.[8]Ideological Core
Nationalist and Revolutionary Principles
Strasserism's nationalist principles centered on a völkisch conception of the German Volk as an organic national community bound by shared ethnic heritage, culture, and blood, rejecting cosmopolitan urban elites as parasitic elements alien to genuine German identity.[9] Advocates like Gregor and Otto Strasser prioritized the sovereignty and unity of this national body over individualistic or class-based divisions, envisioning a Volksgemeinschaft that subordinated personal interests to collective national renewal and opposed the perceived fragmentation imposed by the Treaty of Versailles and Weimar liberal democracy.[9] This nationalism was framed as inherently anti-internationalist, drawing selectively from conservative traditions while purging capitalist influences, as articulated by Gregor Strasser: "From the right we shall take nationalism without capitalism and from the left socialism without internationalism."[1] The revolutionary dimension of Strasserism rejected gradualist or parliamentary reforms in favor of a radical national uprising to dismantle the existing bourgeois order and establish a corporatist state aligned with the Volk's will.[9] Gregor Strasser promoted a "national revolution" that would integrate socialist economic restructuring—such as state oversight of key industries and profit-sharing—with völkisch goals, viewing the Sturmabteilung (SA) as a vanguard for mobilizing the working masses against capitalist exploitation.[9] Otto Strasser extended this to a more explicit anti-capitalist thrust, advocating the formation of self-governing occupational guilds and a "socialist revolution" to prevent war and division, positioning organizations like the Black Front as training grounds for revolutionary cadres committed to a federated European order under German leadership.[1] This revolutionary ethos emphasized direct action and mass mobilization over electoral legality, aiming to forge a "people's community" that transcended traditional left-right dichotomies through total societal transformation.[1]Economic Policies and Anti-Capitalism
Strasserism emphasized a radical anti-capitalist orientation within National Socialism, advocating for the dismantling of finance capital and large-scale industry in favor of worker participation and national control, while rejecting both Marxist internationalism and liberal free markets. Gregor Strasser, as a key architect of the NSDAP's economic agenda, promoted policies aimed at subordinating private enterprise to state oversight, including the nationalization of the banking system—already partially state-owned—and monopolies to redirect profits toward national revival rather than speculative interests. His 1932 Immediate Economic Program called for guaranteeing employment through massive public works, abolishing "capitalist exploitation" via legal mandates, and implementing profit-sharing in revived industries once interest rates were forcibly reduced under state control.[5] These measures sought to break the "shackles of interest slavery," drawing from the NSDAP's 1920 25-point program but pushing for immediate, revolutionary enactment against big business dominance.[5] Central to Strasserist economics was opposition to department stores and corporate consolidation, with proposals to ban new large retail chains, reorganize existing ones to protect small traders, and prioritize small firms in public contracts, reflecting a guild-like preference for decentralized production aligned with national self-sufficiency. Land reform featured prominently, including a 10 billion mark investment in reclaiming 8.5 million hectares of arable land to boost agricultural output by 2 billion marks annually, alongside settling the eastern territories with tax-exempt small farms supported by low-interest loans, aiming to redistribute estates from absentee owners to ethnic German producers.[5] Worker housing initiatives, subsidized at 40% by the state to build 400,000 units yearly and employ 1 million, underscored a vision of social welfare tied to productive labor rather than dependency.[5] Otto Strasser extended these ideas into a more explicitly "Germanic socialist" framework post-1930, envisioning corporatist guilds and hereditary leaseholds to supplant both capitalist individualism and communist collectivism, with nationalization of heavy industry and profit-sharing models granting workers up to 10% equity stakes.[1] He critiqued finance capitalism as a Jewish-dominated force enabling exploitation, advocating revolutionary expropriation of royal and aristocratic estates for peasant redistribution, while maintaining private property for productive nationals under communal oversight. This strand prioritized anti-capitalist mass action, including strikes and worker councils, but subordinated economics to völkisch nationalism, diverging from Hitler's pragmatic alliances with industrialists like Krupp and Thyssen, which Strasser viewed as betrayals of socialist principles.[1] Strasserist economics thus represented an internally contested "third way," empirically untested due to suppression, but theoretically rooted in pre-1933 NSDAP radicalism before Hitler's consolidation favored autarky over redistribution.[1]Racial and Antisemitic Components
Strasserism incorporated a völkisch racial nationalism that conceived of the German Volk as an organic racial community rooted in blood, soil, and shared destiny, excluding non-Germans and emphasizing national rebirth through socialist means. This worldview aligned with early National Socialist ideology, where racial purity underpinned anti-capitalist revolution, viewing economic exploitation as tied to racial betrayal. Antisemitism formed a core pillar, depicting Jews not merely as a religious group but as a parasitic racial element dominating international finance and fomenting Marxism, thereby threatening Aryan solidarity.[10] Gregor Strasser propagated these racial and antisemitic tenets as Reichspropagandaleiter from 1926 to 1928, directing antisemitic agitation to propaganda specialists and regional functionaries, including calls for excluding Jews from citizenship and economic life per the NSDAP's 1920 platform. His writings, such as speeches collected in Arbeit und Brot (1932), framed racial hygiene and volkisch renewal as prerequisites for combating Jewish-influenced capitalism, without diverging from party orthodoxy on biological exclusion.[11][12] Otto Strasser echoed this antisemitism, linking Jews to "debt slavery" and plutocratic control in early NSDAP activities, though he prioritized economic over purely biological framing, criticizing Hitler's racial obsessions as distractions from class struggle. In exile, his Black Front retained anti-Jewish rhetoric, portraying Judaism as antithetical to German socialism, and upon returning to West Germany in 1955, he resumed explicit anti-Jewish propaganda, assailing Jewish influence in media and finance. This persistence underscored Strasserism's causal view of Jewish agency in Germany's woes, distinct from Hitler's genocidal escalation but no less exclusionary.[1][13]Development and Conflicts in the NSDAP
Early Integration and Rise
Gregor Strasser joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) in 1920 shortly after its founding and rapidly ascended within its ranks, participating in the November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.[4] Following the putsch's suppression, the NSDAP was banned and fragmented, with Hitler imprisoned until December 1924; during this period, Strasser sustained Nazi activities in northern Germany, leveraging his pharmaceutical business connections to fund and organize local cells. Upon Hitler's release and the party's reformation in February 1925, Strasser was granted autonomy to propagate NSDAP structures beyond Bavaria, establishing himself as a key organizational figure in the north and west.[14] In September 1925, Strasser formed the National Socialist Working Association (NS-Arbeitsgemeinschaft), comprising around a dozen Gauleiter from northern and western regions, which emphasized socialist rhetoric to attract working-class support while adhering to Hitler's overarching leadership.[1] This group facilitated the NSDAP's expansion, with party membership surging from approximately 27,000 in early 1925 to over 130,000 by late 1928, largely attributable to Strasser's systematic recruitment and administrative reforms, including the creation of a centralized card-index system for members. Otto Strasser, joining the party in 1925 after brief SPD involvement, collaborated closely with his brother, editing the NS-Briefe newsletter to disseminate their variant of National Socialism stressing anti-capitalist measures.[15][1] By 1928, Gregor Strasser was appointed Reichsorganisationsleiter, overseeing the NSDAP's political apparatus and implementing a hierarchical Gau structure that enhanced efficiency and ideological dissemination.[9] This role solidified the Strasser brothers' influence within the "left wing" of the party, where they advocated for revolutionary economic policies alongside nationalism, contributing to electoral gains such as the NSDAP securing 12 Reichstag seats in 1928 and positioning it as a viable opposition force by the early 1930s. Their organizational efforts contrasted with the more ideologically rigid southern factions, fostering internal tensions but undeniably propelling the party's rise amid Weimar economic instability.[16][17]Disputes with Hitler
Gregor Strasser's disputes with Adolf Hitler centered on ideological divergences over economic policy and strategic pragmatism within the NSDAP. Strasser pushed for aggressive anti-capitalist reforms aligned with the party's 1920 25-point program, including nationalization of trusts, profit-sharing in large industries, and expansion of the Folk Community to encompass worker representation in management.[2] Hitler, however, prioritized political consolidation and viewed radical economic measures as expendable propaganda tools, favoring alliances with industrialists like Fritz Thyssen and Emil Kirdorf to fund the party's electoral campaigns starting from 1928. These differences reflected Strasser's commitment to "undiluted socialist principles" against Hitler's instrumental approach to socialism as a means to rally the masses without alienating potential capitalist backers.[2] Power struggles intensified as Strasser's role as Reichsorganisationsleiter from 1928 enabled him to expand NSDAP membership from 25,000 in 1925 to over 500,000 by mid-1932, fostering a network of regional leaders loyal to his organizational vision.[4] Hitler and allies like Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring perceived this autonomy as a threat, accusing Strasser of fostering a "leftist" faction that undermined centralized control.[6] Ideological friction peaked during debates over the NSDAP's response to the Great Depression, where Strasser advocated participatory government coalitions to implement social reforms, while Hitler rejected compromises short of absolute power.[18] The crisis erupted in November 1932 when Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher offered Strasser the vice-chancellorship in a proposed cabinet, aiming to split the Nazis.[19] Hitler, informed via Goebbels, branded the overture treasonous and convened an emergency meeting on December 6, 1932, in Weimar, where he isolated Strasser and demanded absolute loyalty.[18] Strasser, under pressure and facing party ostracism, resigned all positions on December 8, 1932, citing health issues but effectively capitulating to Hitler's ultimatum; this triggered resignations from several Gauleiter sympathetic to Strasser, nearly collapsing the party's structure before Hitler's personal interventions quelled the revolt.[2][4] The episode underscored Hitler's intolerance for internal rivals prioritizing ideology over his Führerprinzip, setting the stage for Strasser's marginalization.[18]Otto Strasser's Departure and Black Front
Otto Strasser resigned from the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) on July 1, 1930, amid deepening ideological rifts with Adolf Hitler. The resignation followed the party's refusal to support the Berlin transport workers' strike earlier that year, which Strasser viewed as a legitimate proletarian action against capitalist exploitation, while Hitler and Joseph Goebbels deemed it communist-influenced and issued orders prohibiting NSDAP members from participating.[1] Prior tensions had escalated in May 1930 when Hitler attempted to acquire Strasser's publishing house, Kämpfer Verlag, which Strasser rejected, leading to public criticisms of Hitler's moderation toward big business.[1] Strasser's advocacy for immediate revolutionary anti-capitalism, including land reform and worker guilds, conflicted with Hitler's strategy of compromising with industrialists to consolidate power and funding.[20] In the wake of his departure, Strasser established the Kämpfgemeinschaft Revolutionärer Nationalsozialisten (Fighting League of Revolutionary National Socialists), known as the Black Front, on July 4, 1930, as a direct challenge to Hitler's leadership.[1] The organization positioned itself as the authentic exponent of National Socialism, emphasizing socialist economics within a nationalist framework and calling for the overthrow of both capitalist structures and the Hitler faction.[20] It published the newspaper Die Schwarze Front to disseminate anti-NSDAP propaganda, critiquing Hitler's alleged betrayal of revolutionary principles.[1] The Black Front attracted a small cadre of disaffected Nazis and intellectuals but struggled with limited resources and internal divisions.[1] Activities included smuggling literature into Germany and forging alliances with other anti-Hitler groups, though it remained marginal and ineffective in mounting significant opposition.[1] By 1933, following the NSDAP's seizure of power, Strasser's exile forced the group to operate abroad, primarily from Austria and Czechoslovakia, where it continued broadcasting and publishing efforts via outlets like Der Schwarze Sender.[1] The Black Front dissolved effectively after Strasser's further flight in 1934, though its ideas persisted in his later writings.[20]