Bamberg Conference

The Bamberg Conference (‹See Tfd›German: Bamberger Führertagung) included some sixty members[1] 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.[2]

Hitler's purposes in convening the ad hoc conference embraced at least the following:

  1. ^ These 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.
  2. ^ 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.
  3. ^ The 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.
  4. ^ Hitler 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.
  5. ^ Considerable 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.
  6. ^ The 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.