by Ian Kershaw
The remaining parties now rapidly caved in, falling domino-style. The Staatspartei (formerly the DDP), which had entered into an electoral alliance with the SPD the previous March, dissolved itself on 28 June, followed a day later by the dissolution of the DVP. The Nazis’ conservative coalition partner, the DNVP – renamed in May the German National Front (Deutschnationale Front, DNF) – also capitulated on 27 June. It had been losing members to the NSDAP at an increasing rate; its grass-roots organizations had been subjected to repression and intimidation; the Stahlhelm – many of whose members supported the DNVP – had been placed under Hitler’s leadership in late April and was taken into the S A in June; and the party’s leader, Hugenberg, had become wholly isolated in cabinet, even from his conservative colleagues. Hugenberg’s resignation from the cabinet (which many had initially thought he would dominate), on 26 June, was inevitable after he had embarrassed the German government through his behaviour at the World Economic Conference in London earlier in the month. Without consulting Hitler, the cabinet, or Foreign Minister Neurath, Hugenberg had sent a memorandum to the Economic Committee of the Conference rejecting free trade, demanding the return of German colonies and land for settlement in the east. His departure from the cabinet signified the end for his party.220 Far from functioning as the ‘real’ leader of Germany, as many had imagined he would do, and far from ensuring with his conservative colleagues in the cabinet that Hitler would be ‘boxed in’, Hugenberg had rapidly become yesterday’s man. Few regretted it. Playing with fire, Hugenberg, along with his party, the DNVP, had been consumed by it.
The Catholic parties held out a little longer. But their position was undermined by the negotiations, led by Papen, for a Reich Concordat with the Holy See, in which the Vatican accepted a ban on the political activities of the clergy in Germany. This meant in effect that, in the attempt to defend the position of the Catholic Church in Germany, political Catholicism had been sacrificed. By that stage, in any case, the Zentrum had been losing its members at an alarming rate, many of them anxious to accommodate themselves to the new times. Its leader, Prälat Kaas, had already left Germany in April, and had taken a leading part in the Concordat discussions. Moreover the Catholic hierarchy, naïvely over-impressed by Hitler’s promises to uphold the position of the Church in his speech before the ‘Enabling Act’, had produced a rapid volte-face on 28 March, calling for loyal support of the new regime.221 Thereafter, the Catholic bishops had taken over from the Zentrum leaders as the main spokesmen for the Church in dealings with the regime, and were more concerned to preserve the Church’s institutions, organizations and schools than to sustain the weakened position of the Catholic political parties. Intimidation and pressure did the rest. The arrest of 2,000 functionaries in late June by Himmler’s Bavarian Political Police concentrated minds and brought the swift reading of the last rites for the Β VP on 4 July. A day later, the Zentrum, the last remaining political party outside the NSDAP, dissolved itself.222 Little over a week later, the ‘Law against the New Construction of Parties’ left the NSDAP as the only legal political party in Germany.223
VI
What was happening at the centre of politics was happening also at the grass-roots – not just in political life, but in every organizational form of social activity. Intimidation of those posing any obstacle and opportunism of those now seeking the first opportunity to jump on the bandwagon proved an irresistible combination. In countless small towns and villages, Nazis took over local government.224 Mayors and councillors who had belonged to the ‘Marxist’ parties were, of course, rapidly hounded out. With representatives from the bourgeois and Catholic parties there was often greater continuity in practice. Cases where a previous incumbent of the Bürgermeis-ter’s office was forcibly removed stood alongside instances where longstanding and respected local worthies, earlier members of one of the Catholic or bourgeois parties, turned coat and continued in office.225 Teachers and civil servants were particularly prominent in the rush to join the Nazis. So swollen did the NSDAP’s membership rolls become with the mass influx of those anxious to cast in their lot with the new regime – the ‘March Fallen’ (Märzgefallene) as the ‘Old Fighters’ cynically dubbed them – that on 1 May a bar was imposed on further entrants. Two and a half million Germans had by now joined the party, 1.6 million of them since Hitler had become Chancellor.226
‘Coordination’ – meaning nazification – extended deep into the social fabric of every town and village. Few corners of the rich panoply of clubs and societies that formed the social network of every town in the country were left untouched. ‘Coordination (Gleichschaltung): The Veterans’ Association was coordinated on 6.8.33, on 7.8.33 the Singing Association in Theisenort. With the Shooting Club in Theisenort this was not necessary, since the board and committee are up to 80 per cent party members,’ ran an ‘activity report’ from a tiny community of 675 souls in Upper Franconia.227 A few months earlier, members of the ‘Small Garden Association’ in Hanover were told that ‘also in the area of small gardens the true national community now has to emerge in accordance with the will of the government of the national uprising’.228 Business and professional associations, sports clubs, choral societies, shooting clubs, patriotic associations, and most other forms of organized activity were taken under – or more frequently hastened to place themselves under – National Socialist control in the first months of the Third Reich.229 ‘There was no more social life; you couldn’t even have a bowling club’ that was not ‘coordinated’, was how one inhabitant of Northeim in Lower Saxony remembered it.230
Beyond the former clubs and societies associated with the left-wing parties, which had been dissolved, smashed, or forcibly taken over, there was a good deal of quite voluntary ‘adjustment’ to the new circumstances. Opportunism intermingled with genuine idealism.
Much the same applied also to the broad cultural sphere. Goebbels took up with great energy and enthusiasm his task of ensuring that the press, radio, film production, theatre, music, the visual arts, literature, and all other forms of cultural activity were reorganized in line with Hitler’s promise in March.231 The aim, he had said in his first speech as Propaganda Minister, was ‘to work on people until they have capitulated to us’, ‘to unite the nation behind the ideal of the national revolution’ and to bring about a complete ‘mobilization of Spirit’.232
The reordering of German cultural life along Nazi lines was far-reaching indeed. But the most striking feature of the ‘coordination’ of culture was the alacrity and eagerness with which intellectuals, writers, artists, performers and publicists actively collaborated in moves which not only impoverished and straitjacketed German culture for the next twelve years, but banned and outlawed some of its most glittering exponents – fellow intellectuals, writers, artists, performers and publicists.
There were many illusions – in most cases rapidly to be shattered – and a good deal of misplaced idealism. But idealism often blended with careerism. Prominent actors like Gustav Gründgens, Werner Krauß or Emil Jannings felt flattered by the new regime’s favours – and put themselves at its disposal.233 The world-famous composer Richard Strauß, the leading conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, fèted by the regime, and the rising star conductor Herbert von Karajan continued to bestow distinction on German achievements in music; but the music of Arnold Schönberg or Kurt Weill was no longer acceptable, its composers forced into exile, as were leading conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, along with hundreds of other, mainly Jewish, musicians.234 The writer Gerhart Hauptmann had been honoured by the Weimar Republic on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1922. But he hastened to ingratiate himself with the new regime in 1933, openly giving the Nazi salute and joining in the singing of the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ at public gatherings.235 The brilliant essayist and poet Gottfried Benn, who had belonged to the Expressionist generation, also openly proclaimed his allegiance to National Socialism. High expectations, illusions and idealism played their part. ‘I declare myself quite pers
onally to be in favour of the new state, because it is my people that lays out its path here… My mental and economic existence, my language, my life, my human contacts, the entire sum of my brain I owe in the first instance to this people,’ he emotively explained.236 In a radio address in April 1933, Benn equated the intellectual freedom of Weimar (Geistesfreiheit) with ‘freedom to subvert’ (Zersetzungsfreiheit) and saw the marching columns of the ‘brown battalions’ as the dawn of a new cultural era.237 He was impressed by Nazi notions of ‘eugenics’ and ‘racial hygiene’. But he was also delighted to be elevated to the Prussian Academy of Arts, and played an active role in its ‘coordination’, showing himself willing to cast aside his fellow-writers who were no longer comfortable bedfellows.238
The example set by such ‘glitterati’ was followed by lesser lights, falling under the spell of the ‘national rebirth’ – and with careers to gain or lose. The ‘Oath of Loyalty of German Poets to the People’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler’ in spring 1933 was a characteristic expression of eager and enthusiastic ‘self-coordination’ (Selbstgleichschaltung),239
It was no different among the intellectual leaders in universities. The most eminent philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and the best-known constitutional lawyer, Carl Schmitt, placed themselves behind the regime. Heidegger spoke in his inaugural lecture as Rector of Freiburg University on 27 May 1933 of German students ‘On the march’, leaving behind negative academic freedom, and placing themselves in the service of the völkisch state. He also helped to instigate a manifesto of German professors declaring their allegiance to ‘Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State’, which had brought about not simply a change of government, but ‘the entire upturning of our German existence (Dasein)’.240 Lesser-known academics were probably more representative than Heidegger. But the tune was much the same. In a lecture on 3 May, the Germanist Ernst Bertram spoke of the ‘uprising against rationality (ratio) inimical to life (lebensfeindlich), destructive enlightenment, alien political dogmatism, every form of the “ideas of 1789”, all anti-germanic tendencies and excessive foreign influences (Überfremdungen)’. Failure of the ‘struggle’ against such tendencies, he went on, would lead to ‘the end of the white world, chaos, or a planet of termites’.241 The Berlin professor Julius Petersen declared, several months later, that ‘tomorrow had become today’, that the ‘end-of-the-world mood (Weltuntergangsstimmung) had been transformed into awakening (Aufbruch). The final goal moves into the vision of the present… The new Reich is planted. The Leader, yearned for and prophesied, has appeared.’242
Intellectuals were no exceptions in the rush to join the NSDAP after January 1933. But there were relatively few arch-Nazis among their ranks. For the most part, they were national-conservatives, steeped in the intellectual traditions of the ‘educated bourgeoisie’ (Bildungsbürgertum) formed in the Wilhelmine era. Widespread detestation for the Revolution of 1918 and for the ‘un-German’ form of parliamentary democracy imported from the West made them open to the allure of a new start in 1933, blind or oblivious to the intellectual castration of their own profession, to the persecution of those from within their ranks who were politically or racially unacceptable to the new masters. Even one so contemptuous of the Nazis as Thomas Mann admitted to some initial uncertainties about the new regime, and hinted at approval of the anti-Jewish legislation of April 1933. His antipathy towards Hitler and the boycott against the Jews on 1 April is plain.243 But on 9 April, he confided to his diary: ‘… For all that, might not something deeply significant and revolutionary be taking place in Germany? The Jews… It is no calamity after all that… the domination of the legal system by Jews has been ended.’244
The hopes long cherished of the coming great leader eradicated the critical faculties of many intellectuals, blinding them to the magnitude of the assault on freedom of thought as well as action that they often welcomed. ‘Since this leader, from wherever he comes, can only be national, his way will be the right one because it will be the way of the nation,’ the influential editor of the neo-conservative Tat journal had written in October 1931. ‘In this moment an order of things which liberalism has sought to portray to us as dismal servitude (dumpfe Knechtschaft) will be to us freedom, since it is order, has meaning and provides an answer to questions which liberalism cannot answer: why, to what end, for what reason?’245
Many of the neo-conservative intellectuals whose ideas had helped pave the way for the Third Reich were soon to be massively disillusioned. Hitler turned out for them in practice to be not the mystic leader they had longed for in their dreams. But they had helped prepare the ground for the Führer cult that was taken up in its myriad forms by so many others. And their way of thinking – rejection of ‘ideas of 1789’ and the rationality and relativism of liberal thought in favour of a deliberate plunge into conscious irrationalism, the search for meaning not in individuality but in the ‘national community’, the sense of liberation through a ‘national awakening’ – was the platform on which so much of the German intellectual élite bound itself to the anti-intellectualism and primitive populism of Hitler’s Third Reich.246
Hardly a protest was raised at the purges of university professors under the new civil service law in April 1933 as many of Germany’s most distinguished academics were dismissed and forced into exile. The Prussian Academy of Arts had by then already undertaken its own ‘cleansing’, demanding loyalty to the regime from all choosing to remain within its hallowed membership. Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin were among those refusing to do so.247 Lists were drawn up and published of scholars and writers whose works were to be struck from those acceptable in the new order. Einstein, Freud, Brecht, Döblin, Remarque, Ossietzky, Tucholsky, Hofmannsthal, Kästner and Zuckmayer were among those whose writings were outlawed as decadent or materialistic, as representative of ‘moral decline’ or ‘cultural Bolshevism’.
The symbolic moment of capitulation of German intellectuals to the ‘new spirit’ of 1933 came with the burning on 10 May of the books of authors unacceptable to the regime.248 ‘Here sinks the intellectual basis of the November Revolution to the ground,’ proclaimed Goebbels at the spectacular scene at the Opernplatz in Berlin, as 20,000 books of poets and philosophers, writers and scholars, were cast into the flames of the vast auto-da-fé.249 But the ‘Action against the Ungerman Spirit’ – the burning of books which took place at all Germany’s universities that night of shame – had not been initiated by Goebbels but prompted by the leadership of the German Students’ Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) in an attempt to outflank the rival National Socialist German Student Federation (NSDStB). Not just Nazi student organizations had taken part. Others on the nationalist Right had also been involved. Local authorities and police had voluntarily assisted in clearing out the books to be burned from public libraries. University faculties and senates had hardly raised a protest of note at the ‘Action’. Their members, with few exceptions, attended the bonfires.250 The poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), whose works were among those consumed by the flames, had written: ‘Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.’251
VII
Scarcely any of the transformation of Germany during the spring and summer of 1933 had followed direct orders from the Reich Chancellery. Hitler had rarely been personally involved. But he was the main beneficiary. During these months popular adulation of the new Chancellor had reached untold levels. The Führer cult was established, not now just within the party, but throughout state and society, as the very basis of the new Germany. Hitler’s standing and power, at home and increasingly abroad, were thereby immeasurably boosted.
Already in spring 1933, the personality cult surrounding Hitler was burgeoning, and developing extraordinary manifestations. ‘Poems’ – usually unctuous doggerel verse, sometimes with a pseudo-religious tone – were composed in his honour. ‘Hitler-Oaks’ and ‘Hitler-Lindens’, trees whose ancient pagan symbolism gave them special significance to völkisch nationalists and Nordic cultists, were plante
d in towns and villages all over Germany.252 Towns and cities rushed to confer honorary citizenship on the new Chancellor. Streets and squares were named after him. Hitler let it be known that he had nothing against this, except in the case of the traditional names of long-standing historic streets or squares. He refused, accordingly, to allow the 700-year-old Marktplatz in Strausberg to be renamed. On the other hand, he had agreed to the renaming of the historic Hauptmarkt in Nuremberg as Adolf Hitler-Platz before deciding that old and historic names could not be altered. A request from the Organization Leader of the Deutsch-Völkische Freiheitsbewegung (German Ethnic Freedom Movement) in Franconia to revert to the original name of ‘Hauptmarkt’ did not, therefore, meet with his approval. In one case, an entire village – Sutzken in East Prussia – sought, and was given permission, to rename itself after the hero, and became ‘Hitlershöhe’, while in Upper Silesia, near Oppeln, a lake was renamed ‘Hitlersee’. But the mayor of Bad Godesberg was not allowed to advertise the elegant Rhineland resort as the ‘favourite place to stay of the Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler’. Nor were canny traders, seeking to use the Hitler cult for their own ends, successful in their attempts to name a café or a rose after the Chancellor.253 Even so, commercial exploitation of the Führer cult created an entire industry of kitsch – pictures, busts, reliefs, postcards, figurines, penknives, badges, illuminated buttons, zinc plates – until its tastelessness forced Goebbels in May 1933 to ban the use of Hitler’s image on commercial products.254