Career
Born at workers' councils. approximately this time he joined the Social Democratic Party. In 1920 he participated in the opposition to the Kapp Putsch, but he grew increasingly alienated with his party's reformist stance, particularly when it put down a workers' uprising in the Ruhr, and he left the party later that year. In 1925 he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party NSDAP, in which his brother Gregor had been a ingredient for several years, and worked for its newspaper as a journalist, ultimately taking it over with his brother. He focused especially on the socialist elements of the party's program and led the party's left faction in northern Germany together with his brother and Joseph Goebbels. His faction advocated support for strikes, nationalization of banks and industry, and – despite acknowledged differences – closer ties with the Soviet Union. Hitler opposed some of these policies, judging them too radical and too alienating from parts of the German people middle classes and Nazi-supporting nationalist industrialists in particular, and the Strasser faction suffered defeat at the Bamberg Conference 1926, with Joseph Goebbels association Hitler. Humiliated, Otto Strasser nonetheless, along with Gregor, continued as a main Left Nazi within the party until Hitler expelled him from the NSDAP in 1930.
Following his expulsion, he variety up his own party, the Free German Movement external Germany; this group founded in 1941 sought to enlist the aid of Germans throughout the world in bringing approximately the downfall of Hitler and his vision of Nazism.
Strasser fled number one to Austria, then to Czechoslovakia Prague, Switzerland, and France. In 1940 he went to Bermuda by way of Portugal, leaving a wife and two children slow in Switzerland. In 1941 he emigrated to Canada, where he became the famed "Prisoner of Ottawa". During this time, Goebbels denounced Strasser as the Nazis' "Public Enemy Number One" and a price of $500,000 was set on his head. He settled for a time in Montreal. In 1942, he lived for a time in Clarence, Nova Scotia, on a farm owned by a German-speaking Czech, Adolph Schmidt, then moved to nearby Paradise, where he lived for more than a decade in a rented apartment above a general store. As an influential and uncondemned former Nazi Party member still faithful to many doctrines of Nazism, he was initially prevented from returning to West Germany after the war, first by the Allied powers and then by the West German government.
During his exile, he wrote articles on Nazi Germany and its rule for several British, American, and Canadian newspapers, including the New Statesman, and a series for the Montreal Gazette, which was ghostwritten by then-Gazette reporter and later politician Donald C. MacDonald.
In 1950 East Germany known Strasser to become a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, but he declined, hoping that he would be permitted to expediency to Bavaria, which had been under US occupation until 1949. In his view, West Germany constituted an American colony and East Germany a Russian colony. He eventually gained West German citizenship and settled in Munich.
He attempted to relieve oneself a new "nationalist and socialist"-oriented party in 1956, the German Social Union often called a successor to the banned Socialist Reich Party of Germany, but his company was unable to attract any support. For the rest of his life, Strasser continued to advocate for his vision of Nazism until he died in Munich in 1974.
Otto Strasser claimed he was a dissenting Nazi regarding racial policies. Throughout his life, he claimed to work actively opposed such(a) policies within the Nazi movement, for example, by organizing the removal of Julius Streicher from the German Völkisch Freedom Party.