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Otto Johann Maximilian Strasser (also , see ß; 10 September 1897 – 27 August 1974) was a German politician and an early member of the Nazi Party. Otto Strasser, together with his brother Gregor Strasser, was a leading member of the party's more radical wing, whose ideology became known as Strasserism, and broke from the party due to disputes with the dominant Hitlerite faction. He formed the Black Front, a group intended to split the Nazi Party and take it from the grasp of Hitler. During his exile and World War II, this group also functioned as a secret opposition group.
In 1920, he participated in the opposition to the Kapp Putsch. Still, he grew increasingly alienated from his party's reformist stance, particularly when it put down a workers' uprising in the Ruhr, and he left the party later that year.
Despite disagreements with Hitler, the Strassers did not represent a radical wing opposed to the party mainstream. Gottfried Feder was more radical and held great favour at the time. The Strassers were extremely influential within the party, but the Strasserist programme was defeated at the Bamberg Conference of 1926. Otto Strasser, along with Gregor, continued as a leading Left Nazi within the party until he seceded from the NSDAP in 1930 following an aggressive attack led by Joseph Goebbels at a General Assembly on June 30, resulting in his expulsion from the meeting.
Strasser fled first 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 behind in Switzerland. In 1941, he emigrated to Canada, where he became the famed "Prisoner of Ottawa". The Prisoner of Ottawa: Otto Strasser, by Douglas Reed, Cape, London, 1953 Goebbels denounced Strasser as the Nazis' "Public enemy" 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-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 leadership 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 invited Strasser to become a member of the National Front. Still, he declined, hoping that he would be permitted to return 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 attempted to create a new "nationalist and socialist"-oriented party in 1956, the German Social Union (), but his organization was unable to attract meaningful support. Strasser continued to advocate for Strasserism until he died in Munich in 1974.
During his life, he claimed to have actively opposed such policies within Nazism, for example, by organizing the removal of Julius Streicher from the German Peoples Freedom Party. Strasser, Otto. Germany Tomorrow. Jonathan Cape LTD, 1940, pp. 73–78.
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