Strasser, Otto

(1897-1974)

   politician and journalist; formed a leftist opposition within the Nazi movement. Born to a judicial official in the Fran-conian town of Windsheim, he was a textile apprentice when he volunteered for the army at age sixteen in August 1914. Wounded and decorated on several occasions, he was a lieutenant when he joined the Freikorps* brigade of Franz von Epp* in January 1919. After taking part in the brutal liberation of Munich (see Bavaria), he began economic studies in Berlin.* Germany's postwar con-dition led him to the SPD, and he freelanced for Vorwarts.* But he abandoned the SPD when a workers' revolt was suppressed in the Ruhr subsequent to the Kapp* Putsch. While he was completing a doctorate, he took a position as an assistant with the Food Ministry. By the spring of 1923 he had forsaken the civil service* for a managerial position with an industrial firm.

   With his brother Gregor, Strasser met Hitler sometime in 1921. But while Gregor soon joined the NSDAP, Otto was under the spell of Arthur Moeller* van den Bruck and resisted Hitler's appeal until 1925. Only when the NSDAP was reestablished in 1925 did he assist Gregor in instituting a Nazi presence north of Bavaria. Through a small publishing firm and a journal, NS-Briefe,he became an ideological force in the Party, focusing his attention on the urban proletariat. Lacing his neoconservative socialism with nationalist sentiment, he addressed economic and anti-Semitic issues, but also devised a pro-Soviet, an-ticapitalist propaganda that slowly alienated his brother and much of the Nazi leadership; Hitler called him a "parlor Bolshevik." When he dramatically resigned from the Party in July 1930, the link between Otto and Gregor was severed. Although his attempt to split the NSDAP during 1930-1932 via the Nationalsozialiste Kampfgemeinschaft Deutschlands (National Socialist Fighting League of Germany, generally known as the Schwarze Front) found some re-sponse with Hermann Ehrhardt* and Walther Stennes (a former SA* leader), it enjoyed little broad-based appeal.

   When Hitler came to power, Strasser recast the Schwarze Front as a resistance organization and directed its efforts (radio broadcasts, pamphlets, and broad-sides) from Austria* and, after June 1933, Czechoslovakia. Still part of the radical Right, he accused Hitler of failing to live up to his promise of rooting out Germany's real enemies: clergymen and Western liberals. Sought by the Gestapo on a charge of high treason, he eluded arrest and even gained devotees among Ernst Rohm's* storm troops. His 1934 book Sozialistische Revolution oder Faschistischer Krieg? (Social revolution or fascist war?) aimed to uncover Hitler's "real" supporters: capitalists, fascists, and clerics. He fled Prague in 1938 and eventually made his way to Canada. The Bonn government blocked his return to Germany until 1955.

   REFERENCES:Donohoe, Hitler's Conservative (pponents; Kele, Nazis and Workers; Moreau, "Otto Strasser"; Reed, Nemesis?; Stachura, Gregor Strasser; Strasser, Flight from Terror and Hitler and I; Von Klemperer, Germany's New Conservatism.