The intertwining of the aristocracy and the Nazi movement in the countryside had an important counterpart in the big cities in the form of a number of salons. The “colourful mixture of cuts and SS uniforms” and the scenes known from mocking descriptions, in which Hitler awkwardly kisses hands and excitedly chops at members of the German aristocracy close to the Nazis, had been rehearsed in these places long before 1933.
Hitler’s own contacts with aristocratic and upper-class members of the bourgeoisie had already been established in the homes of individual patrons at the beginning of his political career. In addition to the family of the piano manufacturer Bechstein, Hitler made such connections, including the momentous meeting with Emil Kirdorf, in the parlour of Elsa Bruckmann. The wife of Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann was Princess Cantacuzène by birth and came from a family of Romanian high nobility. When the Bruckmanns’ parlour became “worried about the psychological impact of the success on Hitler”, he had long since withdrawn from the control that they had wished for. Karl Prinz zu Löwenstein, the chairman of the radical right-wing National Club, had played a role as an intermediary for the contact between Hitler and Kirdorf. The Bechsteins’ Berlin house remained important until the transfer of power – Helene Bechstein, who had also supported Hitler financially during his years as a “drummer boy”, hosted the aforementioned meeting in January 1931, at which Hitler met a circle of fifteen people with large landowners from renowned Prussian families.
Prominent National Socialists created further connections to the nobility, including Hermann Göring, who as the former commander of the famous Richthofen fighter squadron had contacts to the aristocracy up to the Prussian crown prince, which were considerably increased by his first wife. In August 1931, a two-hour lecture by Hitler at Göring’s home fascinated the audience of Rüdiger Graf v. d. Goltz, Leopold v. Kleist, Hjalmar Schacht and Magnus v. Levetzow to such an extent that “the circle remained in silence for a while, moved and impressed. Göring and the Strasser brothers again socialised in the salon that Oskar v. Amim-Burow ran with his bourgeois wife from a wealthy Frankfurt family in Berlin’s Dahlmannstrasse.
By 1930 at the latest, the salon of a new aristocrat became the perhaps most important “social” interface between the old aristocracy and National Socialism: the v. Dirksen house in Berlin-Tiergarten. Viktoria Auguste v. Dirksen, daughter of a noble Danzig family, was the second wife of the envoy Willibald v. Dirksen, who died in 1928, and mother-in-law of the antisemite diplomat Herbert v. Dirksen, who held ambassadorial posts in Moscow, Tokyo and London between 1928 and 1939. The salon in the pompous palace that the family owned in Berlin’s Margaretenstrasse was a meeting place for Potsdam and Berlin court society even before 1918. After the war, a significant proportion of the “old society” gathered in this salon, which always retained a political, fiercely anti-republican orientation. In the late 1920s, the widow, who had already supported Hitler in 1923, opened her house to the leaders of the NSDAP, who successfully wooed prominent representatives from the lower and higher nobility there. “The old lady has taken a special fancy in me and wants me to convert the whole world,” noted Joseph Goebbels in February 1930. These endeavours were not without success. The minutes of a meeting held in November 1931 give an impression of the unification achieved here.
Among those present were Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Marie Adelheid Princess zur Lippe (NSDAP member since 1 May 1930), Viktor Prinz zu Wied and his wife (party members since 1 January 1932), the DAB leader Walther Eberhard Frhr. v. Medem, the party comrades August Wilhelm Prinz v. Preußen, the banker August Frhr. v. d. Heydt and retired Colonel Leopold v. Kleist as representatives of Wilhelm II. Members of the old aristocracy met with the most prominent Nazi leaders in this salon, which insiders in Berlin society regarded as the “social centre of the National Socialist movement”. Hitler, Göring and Goebbels spoke here with the Berlin SA chief Wolf Heinrich Graf v. Helldorf and members of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Prince “Auwi” presented himself at the Dirksen house in his brown uniform; where he and his son Alexander – also a party comrade – were “introduced to Hitler’s teachings”.
For years, the widow, whose brother Karl August v. Laffert was a member of the SS, mediated “between the National Socialists and the old court party”. By the end of 1933, the salon of the “old witch”, as she was now called, had evidently lost its former significance, which had grown again in the crucial months of the transfer of power between August 1932 and January 1933. Salons of this kind provided a suitable forum for the chess moves of individuals in the proverbial “camarilla” around Hindenburg. The Dirksens’ house still played a role in linking individuals, for example in the arrangement of the momentous meeting between Hitler and the “son of the Reichspresident not provided for in the constitution” on 22 January 1933.
In addition to their function of connecting two socially largely separate worlds, the Nazi salons also fulfilled another function. Bella Fromm describes the attempt to sound out and pass on the moods and knowledge of the ruling elite via mostly female Nazi supporters in the salon discussions as “salon espionage”. It is quite obvious that aristocratic confidants were often chosen for this task.
A “mobile” interface was created by the activities of Wilhelm II’s second wife, Princess Hermine v. Reuß, who socialised in the most important circles of the political right during her visits to Germany. She apparently made contact with the NSDAP leadership in 1929, on the fringes of the Nuremberg Party Congress. The date of her first meeting with Hitler is unclear, but a meeting with Hitler in the salon of Baroness Tiele-Winckler in November 1931 is well documented. In the presence of the “Empress”, Göring and the aristocratic chief advisors of Wilhelm II, Hitler held a monologue lasting several hours in which he explained his intention to have “all November criminals […] publicly strangled”. The lecture delighted the hostess and guests alike, and the Kaiser’s wife spoke favourably of the “likeable” Hitler, “also about his good and straight facial expression and his good eyes and their expression without falseness.” Pleased with the outcome of the meeting, Magnus v. Levetzow summarised his impressions of Hitler in a letter to Prince v. Donnersmarck: “He was good on the plate, by golly.”
The places where the entre-nous milieu of society opened up politically and stylistically to the far right became more numerous and larger. In December 1932, Bella Fromm described a “more colourful than distinguished society” that came together at the “Cecilenwerk” charity ball and brought together the aristocracy with Magdalena Goebbels. Fromm, who as a society columnist with an upper-class background knew her way around Berlin society very well, had personal contacts on the right as far as Schleicher and Papen and, as a Jew, observed the changes in the social fluid with particular acuity, captured the major upheavals in her diary in the form of vivid miniatures and snapshots. Alongside Count Helldorf and Prince “Auwi” in SA uniforms, members of the old aristocracy walked through the discussion groups of foreign diplomats and the old Potsdam society in an increasingly offensive display of their National Socialist sympathies. In her sketch of a collection of “small repulsions”, Fromm recorded in December 1932: “It was disheartening to see how many new friends National Socialism had made from the ranks of the old aristocracy.” Fromm’s descriptions are reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s account of the receptions in the Paris salons at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. For the French capital of the fin-de-siecle, Arendt describes a pattern that “became the rule after the world war: The hero worship of gangsters on the part of the elite, the admiration of all cruelty, the alliance finally of all the declassed on the basis of resentment or despair” The external characteristics of this alliance included kowtowing, which was still being carried out in all aristocratic associations in 1933.
Parallel to the wave of people joining the NSDAP, which will be discussed in more detail later, a flood of aristocratic appeals to the new rulers swept across the country in 1933. Here too, the DAG provided the symbolic pinnacle of aristocratic ingratiation. The kowtowing that Prince Bentheim staged in the name of the DAG leadership was early and unconditional. The DAG leadership’s hope of being able to integrate the DAG as a state-recognised ‘elite’ formation into the leading bodies of the new state was presented to Hitler personally by Prince Bentheim in June 1933. Bentheim wanted the DAG to be recognised as a public corporation. State bodies were to exert pressure on non-members of the nobility and DAG membership was to be legally established as an indispensable prerequisite for membership of the nobility. Hitler had raised Bentheim’s hopes by making extremely vague promises, which Bentheim later presented to the “state leaders” and Prince Löwenstein in an embellished form, and which were later repeated by his state secretaries.
Bentheim believed that “[the great] goal that has been lost to us for a hundred years” was within reach: “that the nobility would once again become a political status.” Bentheim solemnly promised Hitler that after a major “cleansing operation” he would make the “purified German nobility” “available to the Nazi state without restriction”
The tightening of the Aryan paragraph described above came into force on 12 September 1933 with an amendment to the statutes and led to the “expulsion” of well over 100 members from the ranks of the DAG. At the same time, five prominent National Socialists who held high and top SA ranks were added to the DAG main board. The DAG thus formed the symbolic tip of a broad movement among the nobility, which in turn became part of the attempt to “work towards the Führer”, which was now gaining momentum everywhere. For the DAG leadership, the speed and radicalism of this self-alignment was no more surprising than the sycophantic notes that Bentheim sent to Hitler after the Röhm murders and the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944. The naivety with which the men of the DAG leadership “licked Hitler’s boots”, as Erwein Frhr. v. Aretin put it, was the consistent continuation of the course that had been steered for years – the only astonishing thing here is that this attitude did not undergo any recognisable correction until 1945.
