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Gregor Strasser, variant German spelling Straßer (May 31, 1892 in Geisenfeld - June 30, 1934 in Berlin) was a German politician of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP).
Life
Descent, Training and Military Service
Like his younger brother, Otto Strasser, Gregor was born into the family of a Catholic judicial officer who lived in Upper Bavarian market town Geisenfeld. He attended grammar school and after his final examinations served his apprenticeship as a druggist in Marien-Apotheke in Lower Bavarian village Frontenhausen from 1910 until 1914. In 1914 he began to study pharmacy at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, which he suspended in the same year to enlist as a volunteer in the Imperial Army. Strasser took part in World War I, held eventually the rank of a First Lieutenant and was decorated with Iron Cross, First and Second Class.
In 1918 he continued his interrupted studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg and in 1919 he joined the rightist Freikorps of Franz Ritter von Epp (1968-1946) together with his brother Otto. Also in 1919 he passed his state examination successfully. In 1920 Strasser started his activity as apothecary in Landshut. Moreover he became commander of Sturmbataillon Niederbayern (English: Storm battalion Lower Bavaria) which was established by himself. Young Heinrich Himmler served as his adjutant. In the middle of March 1920 Strasser's Freicorps was ready for participitation in the failed Kapp Putsch. At the same time his brother Otto commanded a Rote Hundertschaft (Red Group of a Hundred) to battle against this right wing coup d'état.
Career in early NSDAP
In 1921 Gregor Strasser and his "völkischer Wehrverband" ("folkish defence union") - how nationalist paramilitarian groups called themselves in Germany in the 1920s - joined forces with NSDAP that had been founded in Munich one year earlier. In November 1923 he took an active part in the miscarried Beer Hall Putsch. In a special part of the high treason trial against Adolf Hitler he was sentenced to one and a half years of Festungshaft (confinement in a fortress was regarded as an "honorable detention" in German Empire) in Landsberg Prison by Volksgericht München I in April 1924. Already after few weeeks Strasser was released because he had been elected member of Bavarian Landtag for the Nazi-associated Völkischer Block on May 4, 1924. On December 7, 1924 he achieved a seat in 3. Reichstag of Weimar Republic. He had run for the Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei (German Folkish Freedom Party) that served as substitute organization for NSDAP which had been banned temporarily from November 1923 until February 1925. Strasser kept this mandate until December 1932.
After the official refoundation of NSDAP by Adolf Hitler in Munich Bürgerbräukeller on February 26, 1925 Strasser became the first Gauleiter of Lower Bavaria/Upper Palatinate and after the partition of this Gau Lower Bavarian Gauleiter from October 1, 1928 until 1929. From June 30, 1926 until early 1928 he filled the position of NSDAP Reichspropagandaleiter (NSDAP Reich Leader for Propaganda) and from January 1928 until December 1932 he was Reichsorganisationsleiter (Reich Organization Leader) of the Nazi Party. Gregor Strasser reorganized the whole NSDAP structure, both concerning its regional formation and its vertical management hierarchy. The Nazi Party became a strictly centralist organization with Party's own control machinery and high propaganda capability. Strasser's ideas for restructuring Reich Organization Leadership had been carried into effect by service regulations called Politische Organisation - P.O. - of NSDAP (Political Organization - P.O.) on July 15, 1932.
Strasser's Organizational Reforms
NSDAP made a big step from a marginal South German splinter party to a großdeutsche (Greater German) mass party as from 1925 by Strasser's outstanding organizational skill. Its membership increased from ca. 27.000 (1925) to more than 800.000 in 1931. Strasser established NSDAP in Northern an West Germany as a strong political association which disposed quickly of a bigger membership basis than Hitler's southern party section. Moreover he arranged for the foundation of Berlin SA (Stormtroopers) under Upper Silesian Nazi activist Kurt Daluege in March 1926. The party's own Foreign Organization (see NSDAP/AO) was formed on Strasser's initiative and Dr. Hans Nieland was appointed its first leader on May 1, 1931. Together with his brother Otto he founded the Berlin Kampf-Verlag (Combat Publishing) in March 1926 which published amongst others the programmatic weekly journal Der Nationale Sozialist (The National Socialist) from 1926 until 1930.
The Strasser brothers ruled unchallenged Berlin party organization and developed an independent ideological profile compared with the South German party wing around Adolf Hitler. They advocated - at first together with Gregor Strasser's close collaborator in Rhineland and Westphalia Joseph Goebbels - an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary course of NSDAP, that was heavily affected by anti-Semitism and anti-Marxism at the same time. With the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Nordwest (Syndicate Northwest), founded in September 1925, a federation of North- and West-German NSDAP Gauleiters under his leadership (managing director was Joseph Goebbels), Gregor Strasser had initially created an instrument to enforce the sociopolitical and economic ideas of left NSDAP wing. But on February 14, 1926 Hitler asserted himself successfully against the National Bolshevist faction during the Bamberg Leader Conference. This earned him absolute leadership within NSDAP. The disbandment of the syndicate had been decreed by directive from Munich on July 1, 1926.
Conflict with Hitler and Perdition
The programmatic and personal rivalry with Adolf Hitler got worse dramatically when Reichskanzler Kurt von Schleicher offered Gregor Strasser vice-chancellorship and the office of the Prussian prime minister in December 1932. He hoped to disunite NSDAP with Strasser's help and to pull the "left Nazis" over to his national conservative side. The plan failed because of Hitler's intervention and resulted in Strasser's resignation from all party positions. He continued acting as a publicist as he did before his disempowerment. From June 1931 until its ban on February 4, 1933 he published the weekly newspaper "Die schwarze Front" ("The black front") that made just little impact on contemporaries because of its humble issue (10.000 copies).
In the course of the Nazi Party purge, which was initiated by Adolf Hitler against his former rivals under the propaganda term "Röhm-Putsch" (see Night of the Long Knives), Gregor Strasser was assassinated by Berlin Gestapo on June 30, 1934.
The Strasser brothers' "national revolutionary" political theses exert a big influence on modern Neo-Nazism.
Literature
- Diebow, Hans: Gregor Strasser und der Nationalsozialismus. - Berlin : Tell-Verl., 1932/33. - 65 p.
- Dixon, Joseph Murdock: Gregor Strasser and the organization of the Nazi Party, 1925-32. - V, 251 folios - (Stanford University, Calif., Phil. Diss., 1966)
- Geismaier, Michael: Gregor Strasser. - Leipzig : Kittler, 1933. - 95 p. - (Maenner und Maechte)
- Goderbauer-Marchner, Gabriele: Gregor Straßer und die Anfänge der NSDAP in Bayern, insbesondere in Niederbayern und Landshut. - (Munich University,thesis, 1986)
- Kissenkoetter, Udo: Gregor Strasser und die NSDAP . - Stuttgart : Dt. Verl.-Anst., 1978. - 219 S. - (Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte ; 37) . - ISBN 3-421-01881-2. - (at the same time: Düsseldorf University, Diss., 1975)
- Richardi, Hans-Günter: Hitler und seine Hintermänner : neue Fakten zur Frühgeschichte der NSDAP. - München : Süddeutscher Verl., 1991. - 446 p. - ISBN 3-7991-6508-8
- Stachura, Peter D.: Der Fall Strasser : Gregor Strasser, Hitler and national socialism ; 1930 - 1932. - pp. 88-130 in: The shaping of the Nazi state. - London : Croom Helm, 1978. - 304 p. - ISBN 0-06-496492-2
- Stachura, Peter D.: Gregor Strasser and the rise of Nazism. - London : Allen & Unwin, 1983. - XIV, 178 p. - ISBN 0-04-943027-0
- Straßer, Bernhard: Gregor und Otto Strasser : Kurze Darst. ihrer Persönlichkeit u. ihres Wollens, hrsg. zum 20. Jahrestag d. dt. Bartholomäusnacht vom 30. Juni 1934. - Külsheim: Harald Stössel, 1954. - 16 p.
External links
- Literature by and about Gregor Strasser in the catalogues of British Library (see), Library of Congress (see), National Library of Germany (see)
- Strasser, Gregor; and Strasser, Otto, article from Encyclopædia Britannica, Premium Service, 2006
- John Simkin: Gregor Strasser, Spartacus Schoolnet, London
- Gregor Strasser, CBS mini-series "Hitler: The Rise of Evil", 2003, directed by Christian Duguay (born 1957 in Montreal)
- tabular curriculum vitae of Gregor Strasser on the Berlin German Historical Museum website (in German)