In 1923 Hitler had joined forces with a number of anti-republican nationalist groupings and Freikorps units in Bavaria, which together formed the Deutscher Kampfbund (German Fighting Union), with Hitler as one of its three leaders. They were inspired by Mussolini’s victory and dreamed of imitating his march on Rome. On 8 November, 1923, without the main support of the army tops, Hitler, Roehm and Ludendorff staged an abortive putsch. The fascists were easily dispersed and Hitler arrested. The fiasco was a massive blow to the Nazis. The fascist leader, Hanfstaengl, moaned to his co-thinkers about the thousand dollars he had lent to the party: “What good is it now to have a receipt and a mortgage on the office furniture?” Recruits became scarce and money was even harder to come by. Splits opened up in the fascists’ ranks.
On Hitler’s premature release from Landsberg prison he was met with the crushing news that the Social Democrats had massively increased their vote by 30 percent (to nearly eight million) in the general election. The Nazi party together with a number of fascist groups under the name of Nationalist Socialist German Freedom Movement, had seen their vote collapse from two million in May 1924 to less than a million in December.
Nazism was in deep decline. Although for the German bourgeoisie it was not the time to back the fascists, they supplied them with just enough funds to keep them in existence. By the time of the general election in May 1928 Nazi support had shrunk to only 2.6 percent of the total vote.