by Ian Kershaw
Lacking, as he did, a grasp of even the rudiments of economic theory, Hitler can scarcely be regarded as an economic innovator.77 The extraordinary economic recovery that rapidly formed an essential component of the Führer myth was not of Hitler’s making. He showed no initial interest in the work-creation plans eagerly developed by civil servants in the Labour Ministry. With Schacht (at this stage) sceptical, Hugenberg opposed, Seldte taking little initiative, and industry hostile, Hitler did nothing to further the work-creation schemes before the end of May. By then, they had been taken up by the State Secretary in the Finance Ministry, Fritz Reinhardt, and put forward as a programme for action. Even at this stage, Hitler remained hesitant, and had to be convinced that the programme would not lead to renewed inflation. Wilhelm Lautenbach, a senior civil servant in the Economics Ministry whose own full-scale programme had had no chance of implementation under Brüning in 1931, persuaded him that, though he was the most powerful man in Germany, even he could not produce inflation in the prevailing economic circumstances.78 Finally, on 31 May, Hitler summoned ministers and economic experts to the Reich Chancellery, and heard that all but Hugenberg were in favour of the Reinhardt Programme. The following day, the ‘Law for Reduction of Unemployment’ was announced. Within a month or so, Schacht’s early scepticism had turned into enthusiasm. Through the device of exchange-bills underwritten by the government (an idea earlier developed under Papen by Lautenbach, and the forerunner of the Mefo-Bills, soon to be introduced as a way of funding the early stages of rearmament), Schacht now conjured up the necessary short-term credits.79 The rest was largely the work of bankers, civil servants, planners and industrialists.80 As we have noted, Hitler saw the work-creation programme (which simply extended the earlier schemes devised under Papen and Schleicher) merely in the context of rearmament plans. Otherwise, his main interest was in its propaganda value. And, indeed, as public works schemes initially, then increasingly rearmament, began to pull Germany out of recession and wipe away mass unemployment more quickly than any forecasters had dared speculate, Hitler garnered the full propaganda benefit.81
But indirectly Hitler did make a significant contribution to the economic recovery by reconstituting the political framework for business activity and by the image of national renewal that he represented. The ruthless assault on ‘Marxism’ and reordering of industrial relations which he presided over, the work-creation programme that he eventually backed, and the total priority for rearmament laid down at the outset, helped to shape a climate in which economic recovery – already starting as he took office as Chancellor – could gather pace. And in one area, at least, he provided a direct stimulus to recovery in a key branch of industry: motor-car manufacturing.
Hitler’s propaganda instinct, not his economic know-how, led him towards an initiative that both assisted the recovery of the economy (which was beginning to take place anyway) and caught the public imagination. On 11 February, a few days before his meeting with the industrialists, Hitler had sought out the opportunity to deliver – instead of Reich President Hindenburg, who was unwell – the opening address at the International Automobile and Motor-Cycle Exhibition on the Kaiserdamm in Berlin. That the German Chancellor should make the speech was itself a novelty: this alone caused a stir. The assembled leaders of the car industry were delighted. They were even more delighted when they heard Hitler elevate car manufacture to the position of the most important industry of the future and promise a programme including gradual tax relief for the industry and the implementation of a ‘generous plan for road-building’. If living-standards had previously been weighed against kilometres of railway track, they would in future be measured against kilometres of roads; these were ‘great tasks which also belong to the construction programme of the German economy’, Hitler declared.82 The speech was later stylized by Nazi propaganda as ‘the turning-point in the history of German motorization’.83 It marked the beginning of the ‘Autobahn-builder’ part of the Führer myth.
Hitler had, in fact, offered no specific programme for the car industry; merely the prospect of one.84 The ideas for tax relief for the industry had, not surprisingly, come from the car manufacturers themselves.85 The tax reductions actually implemented in spring 1933 did not represent a preconceived Nazi motorization programme, but were part of a wider framework of measures to stimulate the economy.86 What road-building plans were in Hitler’s mind were not made clear in his speech. In all likelihood they were those that the Munich road-engineer Fritz Todt had outlined in a brief memorandum composed in December 1932, and sent shortly afterwards to Hitler, arguing for the construction of 5–6,000 kilometres of motorway to be built within the framework of ‘a National Socialist construction programme’.87 It was conceived on a scale that could not rely on private companies, but had to have state planning and control. Moreover, Todt envisaged his scheme needing up to 600,000 unemployed workers – some 10 per cent of the total number of unemployed – and thus contributing to the combating of unemployment. Todt himself was, in fact, no outright innovator in his motorization schemes. Autostradas were already being built in Fascist Italy. And Todt was taking up and greatly expanding ideas for a north-south Autobahn of 881 kilometres advanced in the 1920s by the clumsily entitled ‘Association for the Preparation of the Motorway (Autostraße) Hansestädte-Frankfurt-Basel’ (HAFRABA for short).88 But Hitler was impressed – not least at the grandiosity of Todt’s scheme, and its implications for reducing unemployment. It made good propaganda in the election campaign.
Even so, the significance of Hitler’s speech on 11 February should not be underrated. It sent positive signals to car manufacturers. They were struck by the new Chancellor, whose long-standing fascination for the motor-car and his memory for detail of construction-types and – figures meant he sounded not only sympathetic but knowledgeable to the car bosses.89 The Völkischer Beobachter, exploiting the propaganda potential of Hitler’s speech, immediately opened up to its readers the prospect of car-ownership. Not a social élite with its Rolls-Royces, but the mass of the people with their people’s car (Volksauto), was the alluring prospect.90 It was an idea – a car for everyman, at a price of no more than 1,000 Reich Marks – that Hitler, with his eye on propaganda more than the automobile market, was already advancing early in 1933.91
In the weeks following his speech, there were already notable signs that the car industry was picking up. More than twice as many four-wheeled vehicles were produced in the second quarter of 1933 compared with the same period in the previous year.92 The removal of car licence tax for vehicles registered after 31 March gave the industry a further boost. The beginnings of recovery for the automobile industry had spin-off effects for factories producing component parts, and for the metal industry.93 The recovery was not part of a well-conceived programme on Hitler’s part. Nor can it be wholly, or even mainly, attributed to his speech. Much of it would have happened anyway, once the slump had begun to give way to cyclical recovery.94 It remains the case, however, that the car manufacturers were still gloomy about their prospects before Hitler spoke.
Hitler, whatever importance he had attached to the propaganda effect of his speech, had given the right signals to the industry. Car manufacturers and others with a vested interest lost no time in interpreting the signals to their own advantage – and to the advantage of the regime. Unsolicited, the business manager of HAFRABA provided Hitler already in March with detailed plans for a stretch of motorway in the Main-Neckar valley. Hitler took up the plan ‘with great enthusiasm’, called it ‘a gigantic idea’ which would open up a ‘new epoch’ and declared his readiness to ensure its implementation.95 After the ‘gigantic progamme’ of road-building he announced on 1 May had met substantial obstacles in the Transport Ministry (backed by the German Railways, the Reichsbahn), which argued that the ordinary road network should first be improved and indicated principled doubts about the virtues of a motorway programme, Hitler insisted that the ‘Enterprise Reich Motorways’ (Unternehmen Reichsautobahnen) be car
ried through. This was eventually placed at the end of June in the hands of Fritz Todt as General Inspector for German Roadways (Generalinspektor für das deutsche Straßenwesen). Further objections to Todt’s new powers raised by Interior Minister Frick and Transport Minister Eltz-Rübenach were swept aside by Hitler. By the end of November, Todt had been given wide-ranging powers, answering only to Hitler himself in the road-construction programme, and was provided by Reichsbank President Schacht with extensive funding credit.96
In the stimulus to the car trade and the building of the motorways – areas which, inspired by the American model, had great popular appeal and appeared to symbolize both the leap forward into an exciting, technological modern era and the ‘new Germany’, now standing on its own feet again – Hitler had made a decisive contribution.97
III
By the time Hitler addressed the leaders of the automobile industry on 11 February, the Reichstag election campaign was under way. Hitler had opened it the previous evening with his first speech in the Sportpalast since becoming Chancellor. The enormous hall was packed to the rafters. With the mass media now at his disposal, the speech was carried live on radio to the whole country. Under great banners attacking Marxism, Goebbels set the scene in graphic detail for radio listeners, numbering, he claimed, as many as 20 million. Skilfully, he built up the expectations of the massive radio audience:
I ask you to let your fantasy take hold [the Propaganda Minister told his listeners]. Imagine: this enormous building, down below a huge stalls arena, flanked with side aisles, the circle, the upper circle – all one mass of people! You can’t recognize individuals, you see only (shouts and choruses of voices rise up) people, people, people – a mass of people. You can hear how out of the masses the cries ‘Germany arise!’ ring out, how shouts resound of ‘Heil’ to the Leader of the Movement… to the Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler. The SA leader – Standartenführer Voß – now gives the signal for the entry of the flags and standards. Down there, from the end of the Sportpalast, the four Berlin standards are moved, followed by the hundreds of Berlin party banners. (The German anthem sounds out and is sung.)… Amid the tones of the German anthem the flags are borne through the wide hall. The entire mass is rapturously singing the German anthem… The Sportpalast offers a wonderful, imposing picture of the mass demonstration. The people stand and wait and sing with raised hands. You see only people, people, people. All around the galleries are decked with swastika flags. The mood intensifies, the expectancy is full of tension… Any moment the Reich Chancellor can arrive…
Then Hitler came. ‘A crescendo of shouts of “Heil” and rapturous cheering’ could be heard over Goebbels’s broadcast. ‘You can hear it,’ the Propaganda Minister exulted. ‘The Führer has arrived!’98
Hitler began quietly, almost hesitantly. For fourteen years the Weimar parties had ruined Germany. Rebuilding the country had to begin from the bottom. He promised a government that would not lie to and swindle the people as Weimar governments had done. Rebuilding could only be done by the people itself, by its own efforts, by its will, without any help from outside. Not class theories but ‘eternal laws’ would be the basis of the recovery: the struggle to sustain the German people’s existence was the goal. And only strength would bring world peace. He raised the tempo. Parties of class division would be destroyed. ‘Never, never will I depart from the task of eradicating from Germany Marxism and its accompaniments,’ he declared. ‘One must be the victor here: either Marxism or the German people. And Germany will be victorious.’ National unity, resting on the German peasant and the German worker – restored to the national community – would be the basis of the future society. The value of personality, the creative strength of the individual, would be upheld. All manifestations of a parliamentary democratic system would be combated. The end of corruption in public life would go hand in hand with a ‘restoration of German honour’. Not least, young people would have instilled in them the great traditions of the German past. It was, he declared, ‘a programme of national revival (Wiedererhebung) in all areas of life, intolerant towards anyone who sins against the nation, brother and friend to anyone willing to fight alongside for the resurrection of his people, of our nation’. Hitler reached the rhetorical climax of his speech. ‘German people, give us four years, then judge and sentence us. German people, give us four years, and I swear that as we and I entered into this office, I will then be willing to go.’ The pathos of his finale included an adaptation of the ending of the ‘Our Father’ (in its Protestant form). ‘I can’t free myself from belief in my people, can’t get away from the conviction that this nation will once again arise, can’t distance myself from the love of this, my people, and hold as firm as a rock to the conviction that some time the hour will come when the millions who today hate us will stand behind us and with us will welcome what has been created together, struggled for under difficulty, attained at cost: the new German Reich of greatness and honour and strength and glory and justice. Amen.’99
‘A fantastic speech’, Goebbels called it. ‘Wholly against Marxism. At the end great pathos. “Amen”. That has force and strikes home.’100 It was indeed a powerful piece of rhetoric. But it was little more than that. The ‘programme’ offered nothing concrete – other than the showdown with Marxism. National ‘resurrection’ to be brought about through will, strength, and unity was what it amounted to. Jews were not mentioned. For all nationalists – not just for Nazis – the sentiments Hitler expressed could not fail to find appeal. ‘Exactly the right mixture for his listeners: brutality, threats, display of strength, then again humility before the often cited “Almighty”. The masses in the Sportpalast go into a frenzy,’ commented one of the 20 million or so radio listeners, a cultured member of the Leipzig bourgeoisie, unsympathetic to the Nazis. ‘The man grows visibly through the task which has fallen on him,’ he remarked.101 For another listening to his speech over the radio, the Hamburg middle-class nationalist, not Nazi, Luise Solmitz, Hitler’s castigation of ‘the dirt of these dreadful fourteen years’ was ‘what we felt’. ‘Not a speaker, but leader of genius’ was how she described him.102
The accompaniment to the campaign (during which Hitler once more was tireless in his propaganda efforts, speaking to huge audiences in numerous cities) was a wave of unparalleled state-sponsored terror and repression against political opponents in states under Nazi control. Above all, this was the case in the huge state of Prussia, which had already come under Reich control in the Papen takeover of 20 July 1932. The orchestrator here was the commissary Prussian Minister of the Interior Hermann Göring. Under his aegis, heads of the Prussian police and administration were ‘cleansed’ (following the first purges after the Papen coup) of the remainder of those who might prove obstacles in the new wind of change that was blowing. Göring provided their successors with verbal instructions in unmistakably blunt language as to what he expected of police and administration during the election campaign. And in a written decree of 17 February, he ordered the police to work together with the ‘national associations’ of SA, SS, and Stahlhelm, support ‘national propaganda with all their strength’, and combat the actions of ‘organizations hostile to the state’ with all the force at their disposal, ‘where necessary making ruthless use of firearms’. He added that policemen using firearms would, whatever the consequences, be backed by him; those failing in their duty out of a ‘false sense of consideration’ had, on the contrary, to expect disciplinary action.103 Unsurprisingly in such a climate, the violence unleashed by Nazi terror bands against their opponents and against Jewish victims was uncontrolled. This was especially the case once the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm had been brought in on 22 February as ‘auxiliary police’ on the pretext of an alleged increase in ‘left-radical’ violence. Intimidation was massive. Communists were particularly savagely repressed. Individuals were brutally beaten, tortured, seriously wounded, or killed, with total impunity. Communist meetings and demonstrations were banned, in Prussia and in other states under Na
zi control, as were their newspapers. Bans, too, on organs of the SPD and restrictions on reporting imposed on other newspapers effectively muzzled the press, even when the bans were successfully challenged in the courts as illegal, and the newspapers reinstated.104
During this first orgy of state violence, Hitler played the moderate. His acting ability was undiminished. He gave the cabinet the impression that radical elements in the movement were disobeying his orders but that he would bring them under control, and asked for patience to allow him to discipline the sections of the party that had got out of hand. ‘We all agreed that there was no reason to doubt Hitler’s intentions, and hoped that experience in the Cabinet would have a beneficial effect on him,’ recalled Papen.105 When the Zentrum – which Hitler knew he might still need on his side – protested to Hindenburg and Papen at ‘the unbelievable conditions’, Hitler put out a party proclamation denouncing ‘provocatory elements’ who had broken up Zentrum meetings, and ordering ‘extreme discipline’. All the energies of the campaign had to be directed against Marxism, he added.106In actual fact, the violence directed at the Zentrum had been in no small measure attributable to Hitler’s own tirade against the head of the Zentrumrun state government of Württemberg a week earlier, a speech whose radio transmission – to Hitler’s fury – had been abruptly ended when unknown persons severed the radio cable.107