Adalbert Volck (27 June 1868 – 1948) was a lawyer of Baltic German extraction who headed the North German Directory, a Nazi faction that existed when the Nazi Party was outlawed and Adolf Hitler was incarcerated in Landsberg Prison in the wake of the Beer Hall Putsch.
Early life
Volck was born in Dorpat (today, Tartu, Estonia) in what was then the Russian Empire. He was the son of , a professor of theology, and the nephew of Adalbert J. Volck, a dentist and caricaturist. Not much is known of his early years other than he became a lawyer. During the First World War, he emigrated via Japan and the United States and, in 1919, settled in Lüneburg in the Weimar Republic. He worked there as a lawyer and a bank official. A proponent of the Völkisch movement, he met Adolf Hitler and Dietrich Eckart in Coburg in October 1922. In December 1922, Volck helped found the nationalist and anti-Semitic German Völkisch Freedom Party (DVFP) in Berlin. By the spring of 1924, however, he was expelled from the DVFP over differences with other party leaders Albrecht von Graefe, Reinhold Wulle and Wilhelm Henning. From that point on, he became a staunch supporter of Hitler and the Nazi Party.
North German Directory
With Hitler in prison and the Party outlawed, the Nazi movement was in disarray and several front organizations arose to fill the void. In Bavaria in southern Germany, this took the form of the Greater German People's Community (GVG), organized in January 1924. This was headquartered in Munich and first headed by Alfred Rosenberg and then by Hermann Esser and Julius Streicher. In northern Germany, a rival organization, the National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP), was organized in April 1924 by von Graefe and Erich Ludendorff from some former adherents of the outlawed Nazi Party and the DVFP, which remained the dominant influence.
Volck, though based in northern Germany, strenuously disagree with one of the central elements of the NSFP platform, namely, participation in parliamentary elections at the state (Landtag) and national (Reichstag) levels. He still clung to the original revolutionary orientation of the Nazi Party and viewed the NSFP as just another bourgeois party associated with the hated Weimar Republic. Refusing to join the NSFP, Volck assembled a coalition of like-minded individuals on 3 June 1924 in Hamburg and established an arbeitsgemeinschaft (working group) headed by a three-person Directorate. For this reason it was referred to as the North German Directory. His two deputies in the triumvirate were Ludolf Haase of Göttingen and Reinhard Sunkel of Griefswald. Volck immediately issued instructions establishing a very tight chain of command flowing from the Directory to state, provincial, regional and local Party organizations. However, citing previous business commitments, on 6 June he turned over the day-to-day running of the Directory to Haase for two months.
A nationwide conference for Nazi Party leaders had been scheduled for 20 July at Weimar. On the agenda was formulation of the Party's position on Ludendorff's anticipated plan for a unification of all Nazi elements throughout Germany with the NSFP. Haase, intent on getting Hitler's backing for the Directory's anti-unification position, wrote to him on 14 June 1924 through a friend, Hermann Fobke, who was jailed along with Hitler in Landsberg and was acting as his correspondence secretary. Haase pressed Hitler for a commitment not to sanction a merger of the Nazi Party elements with the NSFP. On 16 June, Hitler responded by refusing to intervene in the factional dispute or to allow his name to be used in support of any political position. He essentially withdrew from the leadership of the Party until such time as he was released from prison and regained his freedom of action.
In preparation for the upcoming conference, Volck, now back at the head of the Directory, issued directives in mid-July reiterating his opposition to any merger or acceptance of electoral participation. He categorically refused to accept any decision to merge the programs of the two parties, stating that on "fundamental questions of conscience, we bow to no majority decision" and that, should such a resolution be passed, he would expect his followers to bolt the meeting. He summarized his philosophy by declaring: "Our program is summarized in two words: 'Adolf Hitler'."