by Ian Kershaw
In Prussia, Hitler reserved the position of Reich Governor for himself. This effectively removed any purpose in retaining Papen as Reich Commissioner for Prussia.185 Possibly Hitler was contemplating reuniting the position of head of government in Prussia with that of Reich Chancellor, as had been the position under Bismarck. If so, he reckoned without Göring’s own power ambitions. Since Papen’s coup the previous July, there had been no Minister President in Prussia. Göring had expected the position to become his following the Prussian Landtag elections on 5 March. But Hitler had not appointed him. Göring therefore engineered the placing on the agenda of the newly-elected Prussian Landtag, meeting on 8 April, the election of the Minister President. Though he had only the previous day taken over the rights of Reich Governor in Prussia himself, Hitler now had to bow to the fait accompli. On 11 April, Göring was appointed Prussian Minister President (retaining his powers as Prussian Minister of the Interior), and on 25 April the rights of Reich Governor in Prussia were transferred to him. The ‘Second Coordination Law’ had indirectly but effectively led to the consolidation of Göring’s extensive power-base in Prussia, built initially on his control over the police in the most important of the German states. It was little wonder that Göring responded with publicly effusive statements of loyalty to Hitler, whom he served as his ‘most loyal paladin’.186 The episode reveals the haste and confusion behind the entire improvised ‘coordination’ of the Länder. But at the price of strengthening the hand of Göring in Prussia, and the most thrusting Gauleiter elsewhere, Hitler’s own power had also been notably reinforced across the Länder.
During the spring and summer of 1933, Hitler stood between countervailing forces. The dilemma would not be resolved until the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. On the one hand, the pressures, dammed up for so long and with such difficulty before Hitler’s takeover of power, had burst loose after the March elections. Hitler not only sympathized with the radical assault from below on opponents, Jews, and anyone else getting in the way of the Nazi revolution; he needed the radicals to push through the upturning of the established political order and to intimidate those obstructing to fall in line. On the other hand, as the creation of the Reich Governors had shown, he was aware of the dangers to his own position if the radical upheaval got out of hand. And he was sensitive to the fact that the traditional national-conservative bastions of power, not least sceptics about National Socialism in the army and important sectors of business, while having no objections to violence as long as it was directed at Communists and Socialists, would look differently upon it as soon as their own vested interests were threatened. Hitler had no choice, therefore, but to steer an uncomfortable course between a party revolution which he could by no means fully control and the support of the army and business which he could by no means do without. Out of these inherently contradictory forces, the showdown with the SA would ultimately emerge. In the meantime, however, there were clear signs of what would become a lasting trait of the Third Reich: pressure from party radicals, encouraged and sanctioned at least in part by Hitler, resulting in the state bureaucracy reflecting the radicalism in legislation and the police channelling it into executive measures. The process of ‘cumulative radicalization’ was recognizable from the earliest weeks of the regime.187
Hitler’s call for discipline on 10 March had itself been half-hearted, encouraging the immediate breaking of resistance to orders of the state leadership wherever encountered and exhorting his followers not to lose sight for a second of the task of the ‘annihilation of Marxism’.188 The order, perhaps not surprisingly, had been widely ignored, as had subsequent attempts by Göring and Frick to ban ‘individual actions’ (Einzelaktionen) and impose harsh sentences on ‘excesses’ (Übergriffe) by party members.189
Apart from the all-out assault on the Left in the first weeks of Nazi rule, many of the ‘individual actions’ had been outrages perpetrated by Nazi radicals against Jews. Since antisemitism had been the ‘ideological cement’ of the National Socialist Movement from the beginning, offering at one and the same time a vehicle for actionism and substitute for revolutionary leanings threatening the fabric of society, this was scarcely surprising. The takeover of power by the arch-antisemite Hitler had at one fell swoop removed constraints on violence towards Jews. Without any orders from above, and without any coordination, assaults on Jewish businesses and the beating-up of Jews by Nazi thugs became commonplace. As one of many such incidents, the Frankfurter Zeitung reported on 12 March how a Jewish theatre director in Breslau had been hustled into a car in broad daylight by five SA men before having his clothes removed and being beaten by rubber truncheons and thrashed with a dog-whip. He later suffered a nervous breakdown.190 A Jewish eye-witness in the same city recounted groups of six to eight SA men, carrying coshes and revolvers, breaking into the houses of wealthy Jews, and extorting large sums of money from them. They even interrupted court proceedings to throw Jewish lawyers and judges out on to the streets, beating them up as they did so.191 Some Jews suffered an even worse fate. The German correspondent of the Manchester Guardian described on 16 March how four men with guns had broken into the house of a Jewish businessman and money-lender in Straubing (Lower Bavaria), who had won a libel suit two years earlier against a Bavarian Landtag deputy, dragged him out of bed, forced him into a car, and driven him away. He was later found shot dead.192 Countless such atrocities took place in the weeks following Hitler’s assumption to power.
Many were carried out by members of the so-called Fighting League of the Commercial Middle Class (Kampfbund des gewerblichen Mittelstandes), in which violent antisemitism went hand in hand with equally violent opposition to department stores (many of them Jewish owned).193 The extent of the anti-Jewish violence prompted Jewish intellectuals and financiers abroad, especially in the USA, to undertake attempts to mobilize public feeling against Germany and to organize a boycott against German goods – a real threat, given the weakness of the German economy. Beginning in mid-March, the boycott gathered pace and was extended to numerous European countries. The reaction in Germany, led by the Kampfbund des gewerblichen Mittelstandes, was predictably aggressive. A ‘counter-boycott’ of Jewish shops and departmental stores throughout Germany was demanded. The call was taken up by leading antisemites in the party, at their forefront and in his element the Franconian Gauleiter and pathological antisemite Julius Streicher. They argued that the Jews could serve as ‘hostages’ to force a halt to the international boycott.194
Hitler’s instincts favoured the party radicals. But he was also under pressure to act. On the ‘Jewish Question’, on which he had preached so loudly and so often, he could scarcely now, once in power, back down in the face of the demands of the activists without serious loss of face within the party. When, on 26 March, it was reported through diplomatic contacts that the American Jewish Congress was planning to call the next day for a world-wide boycott of German goods, Hitler was forced into action.195 As usual, when pushed into a corner Hitler had no half-measures. Goebbels was summoned to the Obersalzberg. ‘In the loneliness of the mountains,’ he wrote, the Führer had reached the conclusion that the authors, or at least beneficiaries, of the ‘foreign agitation’ – Germany’s Jews – had to be tackled. ‘We must therefore move to a widely framed boycott of all Jewish bsinesses in Germany.’196 Streicher was put in charge of a committee of thirteen party functionaries who were to organize the boycott. The party’s proclamation of 28 March, prompted by the Reich Chancellor himself and bearing his imprint, called for action committees to carry out a boycott of Jewish businesses, goods, doctors and lawyers, even in the smallest village of the Reich.197 The boycott was to be of indefinite duration. Goebbels was left to undertake the propaganda preparations. Behind the entire operation stood pressure from the Kampfbund des gewerblichen Mittelstandes.198
Led by Schacht and Foreign Minister Neurath, counter-pressures began to be placed on Hitler to halt an action which was likely to have disastrous effects on the German economy a
nd on Germany’s standing abroad. Hitler at first refused to consider any retreat. Even doubts about the boycott which the Reich President was said to have expressed met only the response from Hitler that ‘he had to carry out the boycott and was no longer in a position to hold up history’.199 But by 31 March, Neurath was able to report to the cabinet that the British, French, and American governments had declared their opposition to the boycott of German goods in their country. He hoped the boycott in Germany might be called off.200 It was asking too much of Hitler to back down completely. The activists were by now fired up. Abandonment of the boycott would have brought not only loss of face for Hitler, but the probability that any order cancelling the ‘action’ would have been widely ignored.201 However, Hitler did indicate that he was now ready to postpone the start of the German boycott from 1 to 4 April in the event of satisfactory declarations opposing the boycott of German goods by the British and American governments. Otherwise, the German boycott would commence on 1 April, but would then be halted until 4 April.202 A flurry of diplomatic activity resulted in the western governments and, placed under pressure, Jewish lobby groups distancing themselves from the boycott of German goods. Hitler’s demands had largely been met. But by now Hitler had changed his mind, and was again insisting on the German boycott being carried out. Further pressure from Schacht resulted in the boycott being confined to a single day – but under the propaganda fiction that it would be restarted the following Wednesday, 5 April, if the ‘horror agitation’ abroad against Germany had not ceased altogether.203 There was no intention of that. In fact, already on the afternoon of the boycott day, 1 April, Streicher announced that it would not be resumed the following Wednesday.204
The boycott itself was less than the success that Nazi propaganda claimed.205 Many Jewish shops had closed for the day anyway. In some places, the SA men posted outside ‘Jewish’ department stores holding placards warning against buying in Jewish shops were largely ignored by customers. People behaved in a variety of fashions. There was almost a holiday mood in some busy shopping streets, as crowds gathered to see what was happening. Groups of people discussed the pros and cons of the boycott. Not a few were opposed to it, saying they would again patronize their favourite stores. Others shrugged their shoulders. ‘I think the entire thing is mad, but I’m not bothering myself about it,’ was one, perhaps not untypical, view heard from a non-Jew on the day.206 Even the SA men seemed at times rather half-hearted about it in some places. In others, however, the boycott was simply a cover for plundering and violence.207 For the Jewish victims, the day was traumatic – the clearest indication that this was a Germany in which they could no longer feel ‘at home’, in which routine discrimination had been replaced by state-sponsored persecution.208
Reactions in the foreign press to the boycott were almost universally condemnatory. A damage-limitation exercise had to be carried out by the new Reichsbank President Schacht immediately after the boycott to assure foreign bankers of Germany’s intentions in economic policy.209 But within Germany – something which would repeat itself in years to come – the dynamic of anti-Jewish pressure from party activists, sanctioned by Hitler and the Nazi leadership, was now taken up by the state bureaucracy and channelled into discriminatory legislation. The exclusion of Jews from state service and from the professions had been aims of Nazi activists before 1933. Now, the possibility of pressing for the implementation of such aims had opened up. Suggestions for anti-Jewish discriminatory measures came from various quarters. Preparations for overhauling civil service rights were given a new anti-Jewish twist at the end of March, possibly (though this is not certain) on Hitler’s intervention. On the basis of the notorious ‘Aryan Paragraph’ – there was no definition of a Jew – in the hastily drafted ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ of 7 April Jews as well as political opponents were dismissed from the civil service. An exception was made, on Hindenburg’s intervention, only for Jews who had served at the front. The three further pieces of anti-Jewish legislation passed in April – discriminating against the admission of Jews to the legal profession, excluding Jewish doctors from treating patients covered by the national insurance scheme, and limiting the number of Jewish schoolchildren permitted in schools – were all hurriedly improvised to meet not simply pressure from below but de facto measures which were already being implemented in various parts of the country. The legislation against Jews entering the legal profession followed steps already undertaken by the Prussian and Bavarian Justice Ministers, Hans Kerrl and Hans Frank, adopted by the Reich Justice Ministry, and passed on for Hitler’s approval. That against doctors was pushed forward by Reich Labour Minister Franz Seldte after Hitler had in fact indicated that there was no immediate necessity for legal regulation of the ‘doctor question’. The restrictions on numbers of places for Jewish schoolchildren represented an attempt by Reich Interior Minister Frick to give some legislative unity to the quite varied position which had arisen through arbitrary discriminatory measures being imposed even within different parts of the same state. Hitler’s role was largely confined to giving his sanction to the legalization of measures already often illegally introduced by party activists with vested interests in the discrimination running alongside whatever ideological motivation they possessed. These had shown themselves on occasion unprepared to recognize the Reich Chancellor’s tactical readiness to accept for the time being less than the most radical discriminatory measures.210
The seismic shift in the political scene which had taken place in the month or so following the Reichstag fire had left the Jews fully exposed to Nazi violence, discrimination, and intimidation. It had also totally undermined the position of Hitler’s political opponents. Following the ruthless demolition of the KPD, which was never formally banned, the main blocks of potential resistance were those of the SPD and Free Trade Unions, political Catholicism (focused on the Zentrum), and the conservatives (still with their majority in the cabinet). In May and June, each of the blocks was eliminated. Intimidation certainly played its part. But there was now little fight left in oppositional parties. The readiness to compromise soon became a readiness to capitulate.
Already in March, Theodor Leipart, the chairman of the trade union confederation, the ADGB, had tried to blow with the wind, distancing the unions from the SPD and offering a declaration of loyalty to the new regime.211 By then, there had been frequent incidents in which union functionaries had been beaten up by squads of S A or NSBO men, and union offices ransacked. But, keen above all to protect the organization, and tempted by the prospect held out of a single, unified trade union for all sectors of the working class, the ADGΒ was ready to cooperate with the still relatively insignificant NSBO to have ‘Marxist’ functionaries thrown off works councils.212 The planning of the destruction of the unions was undertaken by the NSBO boss Reinhold Muchow and, increasingly, by Robert Ley, the NSDAP’s Organization Leader. Hitler was initially hesitant, until the idea was proposed of coupling it with a propaganda coup.213 Along the lines of the ‘Day of Potsdam’, Goebbels prepared another huge spectacular for 1 May, when the National Socialists usurped the traditional celebration of the International and turned it into the ‘Day of National Labour’. The ADGΒ took a full part in the rallies and parades. Over 10 million people altogether turned out – though for many a factory work-force attendance was scarcely voluntary. Hitler spoke, as on so many occasions, to the half million assembled on the Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin, the wide expanse of open land adjacent to the aerodrome, of the need to leave the divisions of class struggle behind and come together in a united national community.214 Many who were far from sympathetic to National Socialism were moved by the occasion.215
The following day, the razzmatazz over, SA and NSBO squads occupied the offices and bank branches of the Social Democratic trade union movement, confiscated its funds, and arrested its functionaries. Within an hour, the ‘action’ was finished. The largest democratic trade union movement in the world had been destroye
d. In a matter of days, its members had been incorporated into the massive German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF), founded on 10 May under Robert Ley’s leadership.216 By the autumn, the DAF had itself been emasculated as a trade union – even a Nazi one – and been turned into little more than a gigantic propaganda machine to organize the activities of the German work-force in the interests of the regime. Behind the propaganda, by then, the reordering of relations in the work-place was firmly under the direction of the bureaucracy of the Reich Labour Ministry. Workers now faced the reality of harsher, more aggressive industrial management, backed by the power of the state.217
The once-mighty Social Democratic Party of Germany, the largest labour movement that Europe had known, was also at an end. It had been forced during the last years of Weimar into one unholy compromise after another in its attempts to uphold its legalistic traditions while at the same time hoping to fend off the worst. When the worst came, it was ill-equipped. The Depression years and internal demoralization had taken their toll. Otto Wels’s speech on 23 March had shown courage. But it was far too little, and far too late. Support was haemorrhaging away. During March and April, the SPD’s paramilitary arm, the huge Reichsbanner, was forced into dissolution. Party branches were closing down. Activists were under arrest, or had fled abroad. Some already began preparations for illegality. Optimists – there still were a few – expected the fascist hurricane quickly to blow itself out. The party had survived Bismarck’s repression in the 1880s. It would survive this. Most party members were more pessimistic, realizing it was high time to keep their heads below the parapet. Alongside the fear, there was wide disillusionment with Social Democracy. The flight into exile of many party leaders – necessary safety measure that it was – enhanced a sense of desertion. The SPD was by now a rudderless ship. Divisions in the party leadership over the decision – taken under duress – to back Hitler’s ‘peace speech’ on 17 May, in which the Reich Chancellor renounced war as the solution to Europe’s problems and demanded disarmament of the western powers,218 led now to Otto Wels and other party leaders leaving for Prague, where a party headquarters in exile had already been established. The first publication in Prague of the exiled party’s weekly, Neuer Vorwärts, on 18 June was the pretext four days later for all party activities within the Reich to be banned, its parliamentary representation abolished, its assets confiscated.219