by Ian Kershaw
Hitler had no need to involve himself in the violence of February 1933. Its deployment could be left safely to Göring, and to leading Nazis in other states. In any case, it needed only the green light to Nazi thugs, sure now of the protection of the state, to unleash their pent-up aggression against those well known to them as long-standing enemies in their neighbourhoods and work-places. The terror-wave in Prussia in February was the first sign that state-imposed constraints on inhumanity were now suddenly lifted. It was an early indicator of the ‘breach of civilization’ that would give the Third Reich its historical character.
But it was not that the brutality and violence damaged Hitler’s reputation in the population. Many who had been initially sceptical or critical were beginning, during February, to think that Hitler was ‘the right man’, and should be given a chance.108 A slight upturn in the economy helped. But the fervent anti-Marxism of much of the population was more important. The long-standing hatred of Socialism and Communism – both bracketed together as ‘Marxism’ – was played upon by Nazi propaganda and turned into outright anti-Communist paranoia. Pumped up by the Nazis, fear of a Communist rising was in the air. The closer the election came, the shriller grew the hysteria. The full-scale assault on the Left was, therefore, sure of massive popular support. One characteristic report from a Catholic area, where ‘Marxists’ were seen as the enemies of religion, order and the nation, lauded the strong-arm tactics in Prussia, and gave direct credit for them to Hitler himself. ‘Hitler’s clearing up nicely in Prussia. He’s throwing the parasites and spongers on the people straight out on their ear. He should follow it up in Bavaria, too, especially in Munich, and carry out a similar purge… If Hitler carries on the work as he has done so far, he’ll have the trust of the great proportion of the German people at the coming Reichstag election.’109
The violence and intimidation would probably have continued in much the same vein until the election on 5 March. Nothing suggests the Nazi leadership had anything more spectacular in mind.110 But on 27 February, Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag.
Marinus van der Lubbe came from a Dutch working-class family, and had formerly belonged to the Communist Party youth organization in Holland. He had eventually broken with the Communist Party in 1931. He arrived in Berlin on 18 February 1933. He was twenty-four years old, intelligent, a solitary individual, unconnected with any political groups, but possessed of a strong sense of injustice at the misery of the working class at the hands of the capitalist system. In particular, he was determined to make a lone and spectacular act of defiant protest at the ‘Government of National Concentration’ in order to galvanize the working class into struggle against their repression. Three attempts at arson on 25 February in different buildings in Berlin failed.111 Two days later he succeeded in his protest – though the consequences were scarcely those he had envisaged.112
On the evening of 27 February, Putzi Hanfstaengl should have been dining at Goebbels’s house, along with Hitler. But, suffering from a heavy cold and high temperature, he had taken to his bed in a room in Göring’s official residence, where he was temporarily accommodated, in the immediate vicinity of the Reichstag building. In mid-evening he was awakened by the cries of the housekeeper: the Reichstag was on fire. He shot out of bed, looked out of the window, saw the building in flames, and immediately rushed to ring up Goebbels, saying, breathlessly, that he urgently had to speak to Hitler. When Goebbels asked what it was about, and whether he could pass on a message, Hanfstaengl said: ‘Tell him the Reichstag is burning.’ ‘Is that meant to be a joke?’ was Goebbels’s reply.113 Goebbels thought it was ‘a mad fantasy report’ and refused at first to tell Hitler. But his inquiries revealed that the report was true. At that, Hitler and Goebbels raced through Berlin, to find Göring already on the scene and ‘in full flow’ (ganz groß in Fahrt). Papen soon joined them. The Nazi leaders were all convinced that the fire was a signal for a Communist uprising – a ‘last attempt’, as Goebbels put it, ‘through fire and terror to sow confusion in order in the general panic to grasp power for themselves’.114 Fears that the Communists would not remain passive, that they would undertake some major show of force before the election, had been rife among the Nazi leadership – and among non-Nazi members of the national government. A police raid on the KPD’s central offices in Karl-Liebknecht-Haus on 24 February had intensified the anxieties. Though they actually found nothing of note, the police claimed to have found vast amounts of treasonable material, including leaflets summoning the population to armed revolt. Göring added to this with a statement to the press. The police discoveries showed that Germany was about to be cast into the chaos of Bolshevism, he alleged. Assassinations of political leaders, attacks on public buildings, and the murder of wives and families of public figures were among the horrors he evoked. No evidence was ever made public.115 The fears – genuine and fabricated – were in some ways a direct continuation of the anxieties about a Communist-led general strike that had been the basis of the Reichswehr’s ‘war-games’ scenario which had brought down the Papen government at the beginning of December 1932. They were also fuelled by Hitler’s lasting phobia about November 1918. The anti-Communist hysteria of late February 1933 gave such fears an altogether sharper edge.116 The panic reaction of the Nazi leadership to the Reichstag fire, and the rapidity with which the draconian measures against the Communists were improvised, derived directly from those fears.
The first members of the police to interrogate van der Lubbe, who had been immediately apprehended and had straight away confessed, proclaiming his ‘protest’, had no doubt that he had set fire to the building alone, that no one else was implicated.117 But Göring, whose first reactions to learning of the fire appear to have been concern for the precious tapestries in the building, took little convincing from officials on the spot that the fire must have been the product of a Communist plot.118 Hitler, who arrived towards 10.30p.m., an hour or so after Göring, was rapidly persuaded to draw the same conclusion. Göring told him that the fire was unquestionably the work of the Communists. One arsonist had already been arrested and several Communist deputies had been in the building only minutes before the blaze.119 It was the beginning of the Communist uprising, claimed Göring. Not a moment must be lost.120 Hitler told Papen: ‘This is a God-given signal, Herr Vice-Chancellor! If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist!’121 When Rudolf Diels, later to become the first head of the Prussian Gestapo, tried to tell Hitler about the interrogation of van der Lubbe, he found the Reich Chancellor in a near-hysterical state. Diels tried to say that the fire was the work of a ‘madman’ (einen Verrückten). But Hitler brusquely interrupted, shouting that it had been planned long in advance. The Communist deputies were to be hanged that very night, he raged. Nor was any mercy to be shown to the Social Democrats or Reichsbanner.122 Hitler’s furious tirades, intent on terroristic revenge against the Communists, dominated a hastily convened consultation, involving Göring, Goebbels and Frick, in Göring’s official residence. Good actor though he was, Hitler was not feigning. Nor was he sufficiently in control of himself to give clear orders.123 It was Göring who emitted a frenzied stream of confused directions to Diels, ordering a full-scale police alert, unsparing use of firearms, and mass arrests of Communists and Socialists. Diels thought the whole atmosphere resembled that of a madhouse.124
Hitler then went to an improvised meeting around 11.15p.m. in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, dealing mainly with security implications for Prussia, and from there accompanied Goebbels to the Berlin offices of the Völkischer Beobachter, where an inflammatory editorial was rapidly prepared and a new front page of the party newspaper made up.125
At the meeting in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, it was the German National State Secretary Ludwig Grauert, firmly convinced himself that the Communists had set the Reichstag alight, who proposed an emergency decree for the State of Prussia aimed at arson and
acts of terror.126 By the following morning, however, Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick had come up with the draft of a decree ‘For the Protection of People and State’ which extended the emergency measures to the whole of the Reich – something attributed by Blomberg to Hitler’s presence of mind – and gave the Reich government (in the initial draft it was the Reich Minister of the Interior) powers of intervention in the Länder. Frick could use as his basis draft schemes for a state of emergency prepared at the time of the Papen coup against Prussia the previous July and the ‘war-games’ of Colonel Ott in December.127 But a crucial difference was that under Frick’s draft decree emergency executive power was placed not in the hands of the Reichswehr, but given to the Reich Minister of the Interior (later altered to the Reich Government). A military state of emergency would have limited Hitler’s power. It might also have jeopardized the holding of the elections on which the Chancellor was relying. As it was, with one move, the improvised emergency decree had decisively strengthened Hitler’s hand. The road to dictatorship was now wide open.128
The emergency decree ‘For the Protection of People and State’ was the last item dealt with by the cabinet at its meeting on the morning of 28 February.129 With one brief paragraph, the personal liberties enshrined in the Weimar Constitution – including freedom of speech, of association and of the press, and privacy of postal and telephone communications – were suspended indefinitely. With another brief paragraph, the autonomy of the Länder was overridden by the right of the Reich government to intervene to restore order.130 This right would be made ample use of in the immediate aftermath of the election to ensure Nazi control throughout all the German states. The hastily constructed emergency decree amounted to the charter of the Third Reich.
By the time of the cabinet meeting, Hitler’s near-hysterical mood of the previous evening had given way to colder ruthlessness. The ‘psychologically correct moment for the showdown’ with the KPD had arrived. It was pointless to wait longer, he told the cabinet. The struggle against the Communists should not be dependent on ‘juristical considerations’.131 There was no likelihood that this would be the case. The rounding up of Communist deputies and functionaries had already been set in train by Göring during the night in raids carried out with massive brutality.132 Communists were the main targets. But Social Democrats, trade unionists, and left-wing intellectuals such as Carl Ossietzky were also among those dragged into improvised prisons, often in the cellars of SA or SS local headquarters, and savagely beaten, tortured, and in some cases murdered.133 By April, the number taken into ‘protective custody’ in Prussia alone was some 25,000.134
The violence and repression were widely popular. The ‘emergency decree’ that took away all personal liberties and established the platform for dictatorship was warmly welcomed. A provincial newspaper from the alpine out-reaches of Bavaria – though long sympathetic towards the Nazis almost certainly reflecting feelings extending beyond the immediate support for the NSDAP – declared that the ‘Emergency Decree’ had ‘finally got to the centre of the German disease, the ulcer which had for years poisoned and infected the German blood, Bolshevism, the deadly enemy of Germany… This Emergency Decree will find no opponent despite the quite draconian measures which it threatens. Against murderers, arsonists, and poisoners there can only be the most rigorous defence, against terror the reckoning through the death penalty. The fanatics who would like to make a robbers’ cave out of Germany must be rendered harmless.’ The whole of western culture, resting on Christianity, was at stake, the leading article concluded. ‘And for this reason we welcome the recent Emergency Decree.’135 The tone directly reflected Göring’s account of the supposed findings in the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus.136
From the other end of the country, the Hamburg former schoolteacher Luise Solmitz also swallowed Göring’s story in its entirety: ‘They wanted to send armed gangs into the villages to murder and and start fires. Meanwhile, the terror was to take over the large cities stripped of their police. Poison, boiling water, all tools from the most refined to the most primitive, were to be used as weapons. It sounds like a robbers’ tale – if it were not Russia that had experienced asiatic methods and orgies of torture that a Germanic mind, even if sick, cannot imagine, and if healthy cannot believe.’137
Luise Solmitz, like her friends and neighbours, was persuaded to cast her vote for Hitler. ‘Now it’s important to support what he’s doing with every means,’ an acquaintance who had up to then not supported the NSDAP told her.138 ‘The entire thoughts and feelings of most Germans are dominated by Hitler,’ Frau Solmitz commented. ‘His fame rises to the stars, he is the saviour of a wicked, sad German world.’139
On 4 March, Hitler made a final, impassioned plea to the electorate in a speech broadcast from Königsberg. At the end, he stated with great pathos that the Reich President, the liberator of East Prussia, and he, the ordinary soldier who had done his duty on the western front, had joined hands. As the speech ended, the sounds of the ‘Niederländisches Dankgebet’, the ‘chorale of Leuthen’ associated with Frederick the Great’s victory over the Austrians in 1757, blended with the bells of Königsberg Cathedral. Goebbels had left nothing out in the suggested uniting of the old and the new Germany. Loudspeakers stationed in the streets allowed those marching in the torchlight processions all over Germany on the ‘Day of the Awakening Nation’ to listen to their Leader.140
When the results were declared the next day, the Nazis had won 43.9 per cent of the vote, giving them 288 out of 647 seats in the new Reichstag. Their nationalist coalition partners had gained 8.0 per cent. Despite the draconian terror, the KPD had still managed an astonishing 12.3 per cent, and the SPD 18.3 per cent – together the parties of the Left, even now, gaining almost a third of all votes cast. The Zentrum received only a marginally smaller proportion of the vote (11.2 per cent) than it had done the previous November. Support for the remaining parties had dwindled almost to nothing.141 Goebbels claimed the result as a ‘glorious triumph’.142 It was rather less than that. Substantial gains had been certain. They had undoubtedly been assisted by a late surge following the Reichstag fire. Hitler had hoped for an absolute majority for the NSDAP. As it was, the absolute majority narrowly attained by the government coalition left him dependent on his conservative allies. He would now not be rid of them at least as long as Hindenburg lived, he was reported as saying on hearing the results.143 Still, even allowing for the climate of intense repression against the Left, 43.9 per cent of the vote was not easy to attain under the Weimar electoral system. The NSDAP had profited above all from the support of previous non-voters in a record turn-out of 88.8 per cent.144 And though the heaviest support continued to come from Protestant parts of the country, sizeable gains had this time also been made in Catholic areas which the NSDAP had earlier found difficult to penetrate. In Lower Bavaria, for instance, the Nazi vote rose from 18.5 per cent in November 1932 to 39.2 per cent; in Cologne-Aachen from 17.4 to 30.1 per cent.145 Not least: leaving aside the Left, not all those who voted for parties other than the NSDAP were opposed to everything that Hitler stood for. Once Hitler, the pluralist system liquidated, was able to transform his public image from party to national leader, a potentially far larger reservoir of support than that given to him in March 1933 would be at his disposal.
IV
The election of 5 March was the trigger to the real ‘seizure of power’ that took place over the following days in those Länder not already under Nazi control. Hitler needed to do little. Party activists needed no encouragement to undertake the ‘spontaneous’ actions that inordinately strengthened his power as Reich Chancellor.146
The pattern was in each case similar: pressure on the non-Nazi state governments to place a National Socialist in charge of the police; threatening demonstrations from marching SA and SS troops in the big cities; the symbolic raising of the swastika banner on town halls; the capitulation with scarcely any resistance of the elected governments; the imposition of a Reich Commissar un
der the pretext of restoring order. The ‘coordination’ process began in Hamburg even before the election had taken place. In Bremen, Lübeck, Schaumburg-Lippe, Hessen, Baden, Württemberg, Saxony, and finally Bavaria – the largest state after Prussia – the process was repeated. Between 5 and 9 March these states, too, were brought in line with the Reich government. In Bavaria, in particular, long-standing acolytes of Hitler were appointed as commissary government ministers: Adolf Wagner in charge of the Ministry of the Interior, Hans Frank as Justice Minister, Hans Schemm as Education Minister. Even more significant were the appointments of Ernst Röhm as State Commissar without Portfolio, Heinrich Himmler as commander of the Munich police, and Reinhard Heydrich – the tall, blond head of the Party’s Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, SD), a cashiered naval officer, still under thirty, in the early stages of his meteoric rise to command over the security police in the S S empire – as head of the Bavarian Political Police. The weakening of Prussia through the Papen coup and the effective Nazi takeover there in February provided the platform and model for the extension of control to the other Länder. These now passed more or less completely into Nazi hands, with little regard for their German Nationalist partners. Despite the semblance of legality, the usurpation of the powers of the Länder by the Reich was a plain breach of the Constitution. Force and pressure by the Nazi organizations themselves – political blackmail – had been solely responsible for creating the ‘unrest’ that had prompted the alleged restoration of ‘order’. The terms of the emergency decree of 28 February provided no justification since there was plainly no need for defence from any ‘communist acts of violence endangering the state’. The only such acts were those of the Nazis themselves.147