Hitler’s name barely appears in the surviving diaries. On 19 February 1924 Himmler notes that he reads aloud to some friends from a pamphlet called Hitlers Leben, but with the departure of Roehm he had to find another leader to whom he might offer his services and from whom, if possible, also obtain paid work.
He rejoined the Nazi Party on 2 August 1925; it was during this period that he also joined the staff of Gregor and Otto Strasser, the Bavarian brothers who were among the principals in the reconstruction of the Nazi movement. The Strassers had a family druggist establishment in Landshut. They remained uneasy partners to Hitler who, after his release from Landsberg on 20 December 1924, began at the age of thirty-five to gather once more the reins of leadership into his own hands. While the Strassers were for compromise with other nationalist groups, Hitler was determined to lay the foundation of a new and vigorous political party over which he had full personal control. In the very month of his release from prison, the Nazi-Völkische alliance lost all but fourteen of its thirty-two seats in the Reichstag after the second election of the year, but Hitler, to the exasperation of the Strassers and Roehm, did not seem to care. Once he had obtained the removal of the ban on the Nazi Party, he was prepared to lose the support of the anti-Catholic Völkische groups. All that concerned him was to make a new start, to reform the Nazi Party under his own undisputed leadership. This he announced at the end of February 1925, and his platform included a virulent campaign against the Marxists and the Jews.
Himmler had obtained his appointment nominally as a secretary, but actually as a general assistant prepared to undertake any duties assigned to him. According to Otto Strasser, his brother welcomed Himmler because, as he put it, ‘the fellow’s doubly useful — he’s got a motor-bike and he’s full of frustrated ambition to be a soldier’.9 He was responsible for surveying the secret arms dumps which were kept concealed in the country districts away from the eyes of the Inter-allied Control Commission. Himmler, aged twenty-four, enjoyed this underground activity; it filled him, says Otto Strasser, with nationalistic pride, and he preferred it to the office work which he had to carry out for Gregor Strasser who, as well as being a Reichstag Deputy, was in charge of Party activities in the district of Lower Bavaria, a position he had held since 1920. Gregor Strasser was a vigorous orator and a tireless organizer. At this stage Hitler could not spare him and, in spite of the growing differences between them, it was by mutual consent that the Strassers finally moved the main sphere of their activities to the north. Otto Strasser, whose particular flair was for journalism, moved to Berlin and founded there the northern Party newspaper, the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung.
During 1925 Goebbels and Himmler met at Landshut during the course of their work for the Strassers. It soon became apparent that while Goebbels was the brilliant speaker and potential journalist, Himmler’s talent lay rather in desk-work and other, more pedestrian, activities. It has been assumed, based largely on loose statements made by Otto Strasser, that Himmler was displaced in the Strassers’ service by the vain and volatile young man from the Ruhr.10 This was far from the case. Goebbels, during his frequent visits south, became increasingly fascinated by Hitler, who soon recognized his talents and, during 1926, flattered him into accepting the difficult post of Gauleiter, or party organizer, in Berlin. Previously, however, Goebbels had spent the greater part of his time in the Ruhr when he had not been engaged in special conference work for Strasser or Hitler in other parts of the country. Himmler, on the other hand, consolidated his own position in Lower Bavaria during 1925 to a sufficient extent to be able to write as follows at the end of the year to Kurt Lüdecke, one of Hitler’s supporters who was soon to leave for America:
‘Dear Herr Lüdecke,
Excuse my bothering you with this letter and taking the liberty of addressing a question to you. Perhaps you know that I am now working in the management of the district of Lower Bavaria for the Party. I also help with editing the local “folk” journal, the Kurier für Nieder-Bayern.
‘For some time I have entertained the project of publishing the names of all Jews, as well as of all Christian friends of the Jews, residing in Lower Bavaria. However, before I take such a step I should like to have your opinion, and find out whether you consider such an undertaking rich in prospects and practicable. I would be very indebted to you if as soon as possible you would give me your view, which for me is authoritative, thanks to your great experience in the Jewish question and your knowledge of the anti-Semitic fight in the whole world.’11
According to Lüdecke, Gregor Strasser laughed when he was told of the letter, saying in effect that Himmler was getting fanatical about the Jews. ‘He’s devoted to me, and I use him as secretary’, he added. ‘He’s very ambitious, but I won’t take him along north — he’s no world-beater, you know.’
Himmler’s ambitious diligence, however, won him the position of Strasser’s deputy as district organizer in Lower Bavaria, working of course under Hitler’s shadow in Munich. He also became second-in-command of a small corps numbering some two hundred men and known as the Schutzstaffel, or S.S. The S.S. was originally a group formed in 1922 before the Munich putsch and called the Adolf Hitler Shock Troops, a special bodyguard of tough men who kept close to Hitler on public occasions and guarded him from attack. According to his official record Himmler had joined the S.S. in 1925, receiving the S.S. number 168. The reformed S.S. marched past Hitler at the second Party gathering in Weimar in 1926, and they were given a special ‘blood-flag’ for their services to their leader in the November putsch. These services had been to wreck the printing presses of the Social Democrat newspaper in Munich.
The main task for Himmler in the Party offices at Landshut, where a portrait of Hitler frowned down on his activities, was to increase the Party’s supporters. His initial salary was 120 marks a month, and the local S.S. were sent out to collect subscriptions and canvas advertisements for the Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. In 1926 he was made Deputy Reich Propaganda Chief, and this gradual accretion of subordinate offices led to a modest increase in his salary. Yet he seems to have made little impression at this stage other than by being a willing and dutiful administrator. There are glimpses of him in Goebbels’s excited diary during the period of Party expansion before he went to Berlin — on 13 April 1926, for example, during a speaking tour, he writes: ‘with Himmler in Landshut; Himmler a good fellow and very intelligent; I like him’. On 6 July, ‘ride on the motor-bike with Himmler’; and, on 30 October, ‘Zwickau. Himmler, gossip, slept.’12 Goebbels, aged twenty-eight and eaten up with vanity, regarded Himmler as the local manager of his star speaking tours.
He did, however, travel to Berlin, and it was during one of these visits to the capital in 1927 that he finally became involved with the woman whom he was later to marry. She was a nurse seven years older than himself; she was of Polish origin and her name was Margarete Concerzowo. Marga, as she was called, owned a small nursing-home in Berlin, and had unorthodox ideas about medicine which appealed to Himmler and excited afresh the discussions of his student days. She was interested in herbal cures and homoeopathic treatments, and their discussions set up a longing in Himmler to work once more in the open air. These two seemed at this stage in their relationship to be made for each other, in spite of the difference in their ages. Both worshipped efficiency, thrift and the rigorous neatness of a parsimonious life. Both felt they needed the comforts of marriage and domesticity, and both believed that their common interests in such matters as medicine and herbs amounted to love. Marga sold her nursing-home and decided to use the money to acquire a property in the country.