The Strasser Brothers and the Ideological Conflict in the Nazi Movement in the Context of Political Events at the End of the Weimar Republic

The National Socialist movement, after the unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch and set course for a legal rise to power, was in the process of searching for a successful ideological platform capable of providing mass social support. The “socialist” initiative of Gregor and Otto Strasser, who were part of the party’s leadership, allowed the party to increase the influence of the Nazis in the industrial regions of the north and west of Germany in the second half of the 1920s. As the Munich center drew closer to industrial and financial circles, the contradictions between the two wings of the party, located at opposite ends of the political spectrum, became increasingly apparent. This article focuses on the issue of the involvement of the NSDAP in the political vicissitudes of the last crisis years of the Weimar Republic, when the role of the figure of Gregor Strasser became no less important than during the second birth of the party. Given the impossibility of the negotiation process with the communists, the grey eminence of German politics, Kurt von Schleicher, was impressed by the opportunity to enlist the support of the workers by strengthening and then dominating the influence of the left among the Nazis. His policy of splitting/subordinating the NSDAP and creating a “cross-cutting front” based on trade unions and party cells was to become the basis of a policy of economic recovery through a large-scale program of public works and military construction.