Berlin National Club from 1919

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The Berlin National Club of 1919 was a political club of the German upper class founded on October 2, 1919 and the intellectual center of the national right. In it, under the leadership of Alfred Hugenberg, class- conscious representatives of politics, the nobility, the military and the economy gathered , who strove to promote the “national idea” on an anti-communist basis. The club was close to the DNVP and fell into National Socialist waters at the end of the Weimar Republic .

The club

The club was founded on the initiative of the Pan-German Association and belonged to the "Hugenberg System". It emerged from the "Thursday Association" founded in January 1918. It was founded in the Prinz-Albrecht-Hotel and was based in Berlin's Friedrich-Ebert-Straße . The Hamburg National Club was founded in the same year . In the following years national clubs emerged in Mainz , Magdeburg , Leipzig and Dresden, among others . These clubs were independent organizations, but they were linked through staff links. The Berlin National Club was the largest club, with 1,800 members in 1925. The entry fee was 500 Reichsmarks and the annual fee was  200 Reichsmarks.

The club saw itself as an “intellectual rallying point for activist fighters against the Weimar system”. A promotional leaflet from the club states the basic objectives:

"[The club ...], without being a party club, but representing a truly German club in terms of composition and direction, should be a union point for all those circles in which the national idea lives in sharpness and clarity, who are convinced that a The resurgence of the German people is only possible on the basis of the national idea and they are therefore determined to counteract today's ruling, disruptive, internationally oriented forces. "

As a rule, lectures on political and economic issues were held every Monday evening - mostly by invited guests. These events were preceded by a meal together.

1932 Carl Eduard Duke of Saxe-Coburg president of the club and the NSDAP had converted Hans Pfundtner his deputy. Under her leadership, the club stood on the ground of the Harzburg Front and largely approached the NSDAP. The club management proudly wrote to Ernst Röhm in 1934 that the club had already been “a good 70% National Socialist” at the end of 1932.

The club existed until 1945 and was subsidized by the state during the National Socialist dictatorship . After the seizure of power , the number of members and the activity of the club declined. In 1936 it had 583 members.

Hitler's appearances

On December 8, 1921, May 29, 1922 and June 1922, Adolf Hitler spoke in front of the club. Little is known about the content and course of these addresses.

Wilhelm Weicher wrote about the appearance on May 29, 1922 that “the club rooms had been filled with an unusually large number of visitors”. The leadership of the meeting was in the hands of Prince Karl zu Loewenstein. Hitler responded to his party program with “captivating eloquence and perfectly formed”, after the speech “small groups formed which discussed the lecture lively”.

At the same time Hitler wrote a memorandum to industrial patrons, so that historical research assumes that Hitler did something similar in front of the Berlin club. In this memorandum of October 22, 1922, Hitler wrote:

“The Bolshevization of Germany, however, means the annihilation of the entire Christian-Western culture in general. In the foreseeable realization of this catastrophe and the inadequacy of the means to defend against it, the National Socialist German Workers' Party was founded three years ago on January 5, 1919. In a nutshell, their goal is to destroy and exterminate the Marxist worldview . - Means for this should 1. An incomparable, ingeniously developed propaganda and education organization, covering all possibilities of human influence; 2. An organization with the most ruthless strength and brutal determination, ready to oppose any terror of Marxism with one that is ten times greater. "

During one of these appearances, the President of the Association of German Employers' Associations, Ernst von Borsig, became aware of Hitler. According to a letter from Borsig's private secretary, Fritz Detert, to Borsig's son, Borsig was “so gripped by the experience of that evening” that he began to finance the NSDAP.

On February 28, 1926 and December 1, 1930, Hitler also spoke to the Hamburg National Club, and on April 11, 1930 to the Saxon National Club in Dresden .

In 1937, the 15th anniversary of Hitler's first speech to the club was celebrated in the presence of Hitler.

Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary on July 25, 1940:

“He [Hitler] speaks with contempt from the higher circles. There isn't much to be gained there for us. We must always stay with the people. He tells examples from the history of the movement, how he spoke in the Berlin National Club and only the cloakroom women understood him. "

President

Presidium from 1919

Board of Directors from 1919

Members

See also

literature

  • Gerhard Feldbauer: National Club 1919–1943. In: Dieter Fricke (Hrsg.): The bourgeois parties in Germany, manual of the history of the bourgeois parties and other bourgeois interest organizations from the Vormärz to 1945 . Volume 2, Leipzig 1968, p. 341 f.
  • Heidrun Holzbach: The "System Hugenberg": the organization of bourgeois collection policy before the rise of the NSDAP (=  studies on contemporary history . Volume 18 ). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-421-01986-X , p. 138 ff .
  • Stephan Malinowski : From King to Leader. German nobility and National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 448 ff.
  • Joachim Petzold : National Club (NK) 1919–1943 . In: Dieter Fricke (Hrsg.): Lexicon for the history of parties. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties and associations in Germany (1789–1945) Volume 3. Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1985, pp. 399–402.
  • Gerhard Schulz: The "National Club of 1919" in Berlin - On the political collapse of a society. In: Yearbook for the history of Central and Eastern Germany . Volume 11, 1962, pp. 207-237.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Malinowski, p. 450.
  2. ↑ Heidrun Holzbach: The “System Hugenberg”: the organization of bourgeois collection policy before the rise of the NSDAP (=  studies on contemporary history . Volume 18 ). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-421-01986-X , p. 139 .
  3. ^ Joachim Petzold : The demagoguery of Hitler fascism . Berlin 1982, p. 124.
  4. ^ Petzold, p. 126.
  5. ^ Kurt Gossweiler : Capital, Reichswehr and NSDAP 1919–1924 . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1984, p. 345.
  6. ^ Report on the political situation in the Free State of Saxony No. 33040/4/30 of May 30, 1930; StA Dresden, min. Inside No. 11126/4. Printed in: Institute for Contemporary History (Hrsg.): Hitler. Speeches, writings, orders . Saur, Munich 1995, part 3, volume 3, p. 158. (The text of the speech was not determined.)
  7. ↑ Elke Fröhlich: The diaries of Joseph Goebbels . Munich 1998, Part I, Volume 8, p. 236.