Gregor Strasser - Strasser's Organizational Reforms

Strasser's Organizational Reforms

In January 1928, Strasser became leader of the NSDAP's national organisation. He reorganised the party's structure, both in its regional formation and its vertical management hierarchy. The Nazi Party became a strictly centralist organization with the party's own control machinery and high capability for propaganda. Strasser's ideas were put into effect by service regulations called Political Organization on 15 July 1932.

After 1925, Strasser's outstanding organizational skill helped the NSDAP to make a big step from a marginal South German splinter party to a nationwide mass party, appealing to the lower classes and their tendency towards socialism. Its membership increased from about 27,000 in 1925 to more than 800,000 in 1931. Strasser established the NSDAP in northern and western Germany as a strong political association which quickly attained a higher membership than Hitler's southern party section. Moreover he arranged for the foundation of the Berlin SA 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 1 May 1931. Together with his brother Otto, Strasser founded the Berlin Kampf-Verlag ("Combat Publishing") arm in March 1926, which published among others the programmatic weekly journal Der Nationale Sozialist ("The National Socialist") from 1926 until 1930.

The Strasser brothers ruled the Berlin party organization unchallenged and developed an independent ideological profile from 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 for the NSDAP that at the same time was also strongly antisemitic and anti-Communist.

In 1925, Strasser founded the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Nordwest ("Working Group Northwest"), a federation of north and west German NSDAP Gauleiters under his leadership (with Goebbels as managing director); it was an instrument to enforce the sociopolitical and economic ideas of the NSDAP left wing. But on 14 February 1926, Hitler asserted himself successfully against this "National Bolshevist" faction during the Bamberg Conference. This earned Hitler absolute leadership within the NSDAP. The disbandment of the Working Group was decreed by a directive from Munich on 1 July 1926.