Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than a religion: it is the w… - Hermann Rauschning

Nationalists were gratified by [ Franz von Papen’s ] policy of making an end of party politics and of liberalism; the state began to be authoritarian, despotic… All that united it was the negative purpose of breaking with the past system. Its two main sections, representing the industrialists and the big landowners, were directly opposed to one another on first principles: the industrialists were for free trade and unrestricted capitalist competition; the landowners were for ‘autarchy,” neo-mercantilism. ‘Enlightened capitalism’ on one side, pre-capitalist patriarchalism or post-capitalist economic planning on the other. But the great new forces of the Nationalism and Socialism were unrepresented.

Gregor Strasser, Hitler's dangerous rival in the party, was out to gain control of the whole of the party formations, the organs of public administration, and those of social and economic life, particularly the trade unions, which he proposed to form into a great and comprehensive force of Workers' Guards of the revolution. This brought him into conflict with Roehm's similar ambitions for the S.A.

Nobody took it [Mein Kampf] seriously, nobody could, for nobody could make head or tail out of it.