Background
Gregor Strasser was born on 31 May 1892 at Geisenfeld, Lower Bavaria.
Gregor Strasser was born on 31 May 1892 at Geisenfeld, Lower Bavaria.
He was awarded the Iron Cross (First and Second Classes) for his service during World War I as a volunteer in the First Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment. An apothecary by profession, Strasser joined the Epp Freikorps, whose aim was to suppress communism in Bavaria, and was active in the Lower Bavarian storm battalion (his adjutant was the young Heinrich Himmler), placing it under General Ludendorffs military command. Strasser joined the NSDAP as a storm trooper and commanded an SA detachment during the 1923 Beer-Hall putsch, which led to a brief spell of imprisonment. His election in the spring of 1924 to the Bavarian legislature freed him from Landsberg prison and he became co-Chairman of the National Socialist Party together with Ludendorff, excluding ‘Old Fighters’ like Streicher and Esser and checking the influence of personal enemies like Goering and Rohm. During Hitler's imprisonment, Strasser’s indefatigable organizational talents enabled the Nazis for the first time to make headway in northern Germany and to found an organization independent from Munich headquarters. Together with his brother, Otto Strasser, he founded a weekly newspaper, the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung (Berlin Workers’ Paper), the fortnightly Nazi newsletter, NS-Briefe, for which he hired the young Joseph Goebbels as editor, and his own independent party press, the Kampfverlag.
Between 1926 and 1932 Strasser was Reich Propaganda Leader of the NSDAP and in June 1932 Hitler made him Reichsorganisationsleiter of the Party. The rift between them grew, however, when on 7 December 1932 the new Chancellor, General von Schleicher, offered Strasser the post of Vice-Chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia.
Strasser, who did not want to split the Party, nonetheless advocated Nazi toleration of von Schleicher’s cabinet, which infuriated Hitler who had insisted that he refuse the offer. Strasser gave way and angrily resigned all his Party posts at the end of 1932, a defection which deeply shook Hitler, who feared he was losing his grip on the Party. Strasser left politics, living quietly as the Director of a chemical combine, and was not offered a post in the new Nazi government. On 30 June 1934 he was arrested and murdered on Hitler's orders by the Gestapo, during the Night of the Long Knives. His death and that of the SA leader, Ernst Rohm, symbolized the destruction of the Nazi left wing and the vague hopes for a second revolution in the direction of socialism.
As a member of the NSDAP Reichstag group, which he dominated at this time, Strasser utilized his freedom of action and parliamentary immunity to challenge what he regarded as Hitler’s abandonment of the ‘socialist’ ideals of the movement. In 1926 he opposed Hitler's proposals concerning a plebiscite about grants to deposed princes and, at the Bamberg Party Congress in the same year, the Strasser brothers argued that Nazism must devote itself to the destruction of capitalism, to social justice and the nationalization of the economy. Until his death Gregor Strasser was to insist on the expropriation of the banks and heavy industry and to oppose Hitler's alliance with the Junker nationalists, with the reactionary army leadership and conservative politicians like Hugenberg, von Papen and Schacht. Strasser’s proletarian anti-capitalism was, however, primarily a means to an end - to the establishing of an organic, völkisch community and of a new social order which he called ‘State feudalism' where the industrial estate would be at the top of the heap. His eclectic socialist programme, which also advocated an alliance with Bolshevik Russia and the anti-imperialist East against the western democracies, essentially aimed at precipitating the downfall of the existing social order.
Gregor Strasser once defined National Socialism as 'the opposite of what exists today’.