by Ian Kershaw
The levels of hero-worship had never been witnessed before in Germany. Not even the Bismarck cult in the last years of the founder of the Reich had come remotely near matching it. Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday on 20 April 1933 saw an extraordinary outpouring of adulation as the entire country glutted itself with festivities in honour of the ‘Leader of the New Germany’.255 However well orchestrated the propaganda, it was able to tap popular sentiments and quasi-religious levels of devotion that could not simply be manufactured. Hitler was on the way to becoming no longer the party leader, but the symbol of national unity.
And it became more and more difficult for bystanders who were less than fanatical worshippers of the new god to avoid at least an outward sign of acquiescence in the boundless adoration. The most banal expression of acquiescence, the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, now rapidly spread. For civil servants, it was made compulsory a day before Hitler’s party was established as the only one permissible in Germany. Those unable to raise the right arm through physical disability were ordered to raise their left arm.256 The ‘German Greeting’ – ‘Heil Hitler!’ – was the outward sign that the country had been turned into a ‘Führer state’.257
By the summer, the sense that recovery was under way, the new impressions of activity, energy, dynamism after years of Depression and hopelessness, the feeling that the government was doing something to tackle the problems and restore national pride all accrued directly to Hitler’s benefit. ‘Since the man has taken history into his hands, things work… At last things are happening,’ was how one provincial newspaper put it.258 The Obersalzberg, when Hitler took up residence in his house there during the summer, became ‘a sort of pilgrimage place’. Such were the crowds of admirers trying to glimpse the Reich Chancellor that Himmler, as Commander of the Bavarian Political Police, had to lay down special traffic restrictions for the Berchtesgaden area and to warn against the use of field-glasses by those trying to observe ‘every movement of the people’s Chancellor’.259
What of the man at the centre of this astonishing idolization? Putzi Hanfstaengl, by now head of the Foreign Press Section of the Propaganda Ministry, though not part of the ‘inner circle’, still saw Hitler at that time frequently and at close quarters. He later commented how difficult it was to gain access to Hitler, even at this early period of his Chancellorship. Hitler had taken his long-standing Bavarian entourage – the ‘Chauffeureska’ as Hanfstaengl called it – into the Reich Chancellery with him. His adjutants and chauffeurs, Brückner, Schaub, Schreck (successor to Emil Maurice, sacked in 1931 as chauffeur after his flirtation with Geli Raubal), and his court photographer Heinrich Hoffmann were omnipresent, often hindering contact, frequently interfering in a conversation with some form of distraction, invariably listening, later backing Hitler’s own impressions and prejudices. Even Foreign Minister Neurath and Reichsbank President Schacht found it difficult to gain Hitler’s attention for more than a minute or two without some intervention from one or other member of the ‘Chauffeureska’. Only Göring and Himmler, according to Hanfstaengl, could invariably reckon with a brief private audience on request with Hitler. Goebbels, at least, should be added to Hanfstaengl’s short list. Hitler’s unpredictability and lack of any form of routine did not help. As had always been the case, he tended to be late in bed – often after relaxing by watching a film (one of his favourites was King Kong) in his private cinema. Sometimes he scarcely appeared during the mornings, except to hear reports from Hans Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, and to look over the press with Goebbels’s right-hand man in the Propaganda Ministry, Walther Funk. The high-point of the day was lunch. The chef in the Reich Chancellery, who had been brought from the Brown House in Munich, had a difficult time in preparing a meal ordered for one o’clock but often served as much as two hours later, when Hitler finally appeared. Otto Dietrich, the press chief, took to eating in any case beforehand in the Kaiserhof, turning up at 1.30p.m. prepared for all eventualities. Hitler’s table guests changed daily but were invariably trusty party comrades. Even during the first months, conservative ministers were seldom present. Given the company, it was obvious that Hitler would seldom, if ever, find himself contradicted. Any sort of remark, however, could prompt a lengthy tirade – usually resembling his earlier propaganda attacks on political opponents or recollections of battles fought and won.
Plainly, in such circumstances, it would have been impossible for Hitler to have avoided the effects of the fawning sycophancy which surrounded him daily, sifting the type of information that reached him, and cocooning him from the outside world. His sense of reality was by this very process distorted. His contact with those who saw things in a fundamentally different light was restricted in the main to stage-managed interviews with dignitaries, diplomats or foreign journalists. The German people were little more than a faceless, adoring mass, his only direct relationship to them in now relatively infrequent speeches and radio addresses. But the popular adulation he received was like a drug to him. His own self-confidence was already soaring. Casual disparaging comments about Bismarck indicated that he now plainly saw the founder of the Reich as his inferior.260 What would turn into a fatal sense of infallibility was more than embryonically present.261
How much of the adulation of Hitler that spread so rapidly throughout society in 1933 was genuine, how much contrived or opportunistic, is impossible to know. The result was in any case much the same. The near-deification of Hitler gave the Chancellor a status that left all other cabinet ministers and all other party bosses in the shade. Possibilities of questioning, let alone opposing, measures which Hitler was known to favour were becoming as good as non-existent. Already in April, Goebbels could note that the authority of the Führer was now fully established in the cabinet.262 Hitler’s authority now opened doors to radical action previously closed, lifted constraints, and removed barriers on measures that before 30 January 1933 had seemed barely conceivable. Without direct transmission of orders, initiatives imagined to be in tune with Hitler’s aims could be undertaken – and have good chances of success.
One such case was the ‘sterilization law’ – the ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) – approved by the cabinet on 14 July 1933.263 As we have noted in earlier chapters, medical opinion had become strongly influenced by prevailing notions of ‘eugenics’ long before Hitler came to power. However, recommendations, including proposals for a draft Reich Sterilization Law presented to the Prussian government in July 1932, had never gone beyond the voluntary sterilization of those with hereditary illnesses. But now, within months of Hitler becoming Chancellor, the newly appointed special commissioner for medical affairs within the Prussian government, Dr Leonardo Conti – an arch-Nazi – placed a previous outsider in the medical profession, Dr Arthur Gütt, in an influential post in the medical department of the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Gütt, already a Nazi district leader in 1923 and author of ‘race-policy guidelines’ on ‘the sterilization of ill and inferior persons’, which he had sent to Hitler the following year, surrounded himself with a committee of ‘experts’ on population and race questions.264 By early July he and his committee had come up with the draft prepared in the Prussian Health Office the previous year, but now vitally amended to establish as its keystone the compulsory sterilization of those suffering from a wide array of hereditary illness, physical or mental (stretching to chronic alcoholism). Hitler had nothing directly to do with the preparation of the law (which was portrayed as having benefits for the immediate family as well as for society in general). But it was prepared in the knowledge that it accorded with his expressed sentiments. And when it came before the cabinet, it did meet with his outright approval in the face of the objections of Vice-Chancellor Papen, concerned about Catholic feeling regarding the law. Papen’s plea for sterilization only with the willing consent of the person concerned was simply brushed aside by the Chancellor. ‘All measures were justified which
served the upholding of nationhood (Volkstum),’ was his terse response. Not only, he remarked, were the envisaged measures small-scale, but – he added, with bizarre logic – they were ‘also morally incontestable if acknowledged that hereditarily ill people reproduced themselves in considerable quantity (in erheblichem Maße) while in contrast millions of healthy children remained unborn’.265
Though from a Nazi point of view a modest beginning in racial engineering, the consequences of the law were far from minor: some 400,000 victims would be compulsorily sterilized under the provisions of the act before the end of the Third Reich.266
If Papen was hinting at the cabinet meeting that the Catholic Church might cause difficulties over the sterilization law, he knew better than anyone that this was unlikely to be the case. Less than a week before, he had initialled on behalf of the Reich Government the Reich Concordat with the Vatican which he himself had done so much to bring about.267 The Concordat would be signed among great pomp and circumstance in Rome on 20 July.268 Despite the continuing molestation of Catholic clergy and other outrages committed by Nazi radicals against the Church and its organizations, the Vatican had been keen to reach agreement with the new government. Even serious continued harassment once the Concordat had been signed did not deter the Vatican from agreeing to its ratification on 10 September.269 Hitler himself had laid great store on a Concordat from the beginning of his Chancellorship, primarily with a view to eliminating any role for ‘political Catholicism’ in Germany. As we have already seen, this aim was achieved with the dissolution of the Zentrum and ΒVP in early July. If Papen’s account is to be trusted, Hitler overrode objections among party radicals to a rapprochement with the Church, emphasizing the need for ‘an atmosphere of harmony in religious matters’.270 He was also directly involved in formulating the German terms which Papen negotiated, and, with other ministers, in vetting the draft treaty.271 At the very same cabinet meeting at which the sterilization law was approved, he underlined the triumph which the Concordat marked for his regime. He rejected any debate on the detail of the treaty, emphasizing that it was necessary to keep in mind only its great success. It ‘gave Germany a chance’ and ‘created a sphere of trust which in the pressing struggle against international Jewry would be of especial significance’, he went on. Any defects in the treaty could be improved at a later date when the foreign-policy situation was better. Only a short time earlier, he remarked, he would not have thought it possible ‘that the Church would be ready to commit the bishops to this state. That this had happened, was without doubt an unreserved recognition of the present regime.’272
Indeed, it was an unqualified triumph for Hitler. The German episcopacy, which had changed course abruptly in its attitude towards the regime immediately after the passing of the Enabling Act, and had reinforced its positive stance – despite reservations about the anti-Catholic actions of the party – in a pastoral letter read out in most dioceses in early June 1933, now poured out effusive statements of thanks and congratulations to Hitler.273 Cardinal Faulhaber, the Catholic leader of Bavaria and long a thorn in the side of the National Socialists in Munich, congratulated Hitler in a handwritten letter: ‘What the old parliament and parties did not accomplish in sixty years, your statesmanlike foresight has achieved in six months.’ He ended his letter: ‘May God preserve the Reich Chancellor for our people.’274
Surprisingly, the Protestant Church turned out to be less easy to handle in the first months of Hitler’s Chancellorship. Hitler invariably assessed institutions, as he did individuals and social groups, in power-terms. And in contrast to his respect for the power of the unified international organization of the Catholic Church, and the strength of its hold over a third of the German population, he was little more than contemptuous of the German Evangelical Church. Though nominally supported by some two-thirds of the population, it was divided into twenty-eight separate regional Churches, with different doctrinal emphases. Theological and ideological rifts, opened up by the disarray within the Church following the 1918 Revolution, were wider than ever by 1933.
Perhaps Hitler’s scant regard led him to underestimate the minefield of intermingled religion and politics that he entered when he brought his influence to bear in support of attempts to create a unified Reich Church. His own interest, as always in such matters, was purely opportunistic. He was initially forced to intervene partly because of the actions of Nazi radicals in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who tried to take over Church affairs by the state in the province.275 Partly, too, the very divisions of the Church meant that the widespread desire for renewal and unification needed Hitler’s authority behind it if a centralized Church were to be brought about. From Hitler’s point of view, a national Church was of interest purely from the point of view of control and manipulation. Hitler’s choice – on whose advice is unclear – as prospective Reich Bishop fell on Ludwig Müller, a fifty-year-old former naval chaplain and head of the ‘German Christians’ in East Prussia, with no obvious qualifications for the position except a high regard for his own importance and an ardent admiration for the Reich Chancellor and his Movement. Hitler told Müller he wanted speedy unification, without any trouble, and ending with a Church accepting Nazi leadership.
Müller turned out, however, to be a disastrous choice. At the election of the Reich Bishop on 26 May by leaders of the Evangelical Church, he gained the support of the nazified German Christian wing but was rejected by all other sides. Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, director of the welfare centre in Bethel, Westphalia, and a strong upholder of the autonomy of the Church, was elected by fifty-two votes to eighteen instead of Hitler’s candidate.276 Hitler refused to meet Bodelschwingh, and expressed his extreme displeasure at the outcome. In the heated aftermath, the leaders of the Prussian Church (Altpreußische Union) resigned, and a heavy-handed takeover by the Prussian government – bringing the removal of Church administrators and forcing Bodelschwingh’s resignation as Reich Bishop-elect – resulted in direct intervention by Hindenburg, pressure from Hitler to have the state commissioners in Prussia removed, and announcement of Church elections to fill a range of vacancies of Church administrators. If occupied by the ‘right’ persons, these would, it was assumed, then provide the necessary backing for the restructuring of the Evangelical Church. Nazi propaganda supported the German Christians. Hitler himself publicly backed Müller and on the day before the election broadcast his support for the forces within the Church behind the new policies of the state.277
The German Christians swept to a convincing victory on 23 July. But it turned out to be a pyrrhic one. By September, Martin Niemöller, the pastor of Dahlem, a well-to-do suburb of Berlin, had received some 2,000 replies to his circular inviting pastors to join him in setting up a ‘Pastors’ Emergency League’, upholding the traditional allegiance to the Holy Scripture and Confessions of the Reformation.278 It was the beginning of what would eventually turn into the ‘Confessing Church’, which would develop for some pastors into the vehicle for opposition not just to the Church policy of the state, but to the state itself.
Ludwig Müller was finally elected Reich Bishop on 27 September. But by then, Nazi support for the German Christians – Müller’s chief prop of support – was already on the wane. Hitler was by now keen to distance himself from the German Christians, whose activities were increasingly seen as counter-productive, and to detach himself from the internal Church conflict. A German Christian rally, attended by 20,000 people, in the Sportpalast in Berlin in mid-November caused such scandal following an outrageous speech attacking the Old Testament and the theology of the ‘Rabbi Paul’, and preaching the need for depictions of a more ‘heroic’ Jesus, that Hitler felt compelled to complete his dissociation from Church matters. The ‘Gleichschaltung’ experiment had proved a failure. It was time to abandon it. Hitler promptly lost whatever interest he had had in the Protestant Church.279 He would in future on more than one occasion again be forced to intervene. But the Church conflict was for him no more than an irritation.<
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VIII
By autumn 1933, the discord in the Protestant Church was in any case a mere side-show in Hitler’s eyes. Of immeasurably greater moment was Germany’s international position. In a dramatic move on 14 October, Hitler took Germany out of the disarmament talks at Geneva, and out of the League of Nations. Overnight, international relations were set on a new footing. The Stresemann era of foreign policy was definitively at an end. The ‘diplomatic revolution’ in Europe had begun.280
Hitler had played only a limited role in foreign policy during the first months of the Third Reich. The new, ambitious revisionist course – aimed at reversion to the borders of 1914, re-acquisition of former colonies (and winning of some new ones), incorporation of Austria, and German dominance in eastern and south-eastern Europe – was worked out by foreign ministry professionals and put forward to the cabinet as early as March 1933.281 By the end of April, Germany’s delegate to the Geneva disarmament talks, Rudolf Nadolny, was already speaking in private about intentions of building a large army of 600,000 men. If Britain and France were to agree to only a far smaller army of 300,000 while minimally reducing their own armed forces, or if they agreed to disarm substantially but refused to allow any German rearmament, Nadolny held out the prospect of Germany walking out of the disarmament negotiations, and perhaps of the League of Nations itself.282 Meanwhile, the new, hawkish Reichswehr Minister, Blomberg, was impatient to break with Geneva without delay, and to proceed unilaterally to as rapid a rearmament programme as possible. Hitler’s own line at this time was a far more cautious one. He entertained real fears of intervention – the prospect he had held out to the military in his speech of 3 February – while German defences were so weak.283