Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris
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By the mid-1930s, Hitler paid little attention to the workings of the party. ‘His personal participation in the life of the party was limited from now on in essence to his appearance at the major representative occasions in Munich, Nuremberg etc., and to the speeches which he regularly held in November and February before his “old guard”,’ commented Otto Dietrich.31 The dualism of party and state was never resolved – and was not resolvable. Hitler himself welcomed the overlaps in competence and lack of clarity. Sensitive as always to any organizational framework which might have constrained his own power, he undermined all attempts at ‘Reich reform’ by Frick, aimed at producing a more rational authoritarian state structure.32
Hitler’s approach to the state, as to all power-relations, was purely exploitative and opportunistic. It was for him, as he had expressly stated in Mein Kampf, purely a means to an end – the vague notion of ‘upholding and advancing a community of physically and mentally similar beings’, the ‘sustaining of those racial basic elements which, as bestowers of culture, create the beauty and dignity of a higher type of human being’.33 It followed that he gave no consideration to forms and structures, only to effect. His crude notion was that if a specific sphere of policy could not be best served by a government ministry, weighed down by bureaucracy, then another organization, run as unbureaucratically as possible, should manage it. The new bodies were usually set up as directly responsible to Hitler himself, and straddled party and state without belonging to either. The Organisation Todt, the Hitler Youth, and, from 1936, the Four Year Plan, were such institutions. In reality, of course, this process merely erected new, competing, sometimes overlapping bureaucracies and led to unending demarcation disputes. These did not trouble Hitler. But their effect was at one and the same time to undermine still further any coherence of government and administration, and to promote the growing autonomy within the regime of Hitler’s own position as Führer.
The most important, and ideologically radical, new plenipotentiary institution, directly dependent on Hitler, was the combined SS-police apparatus which had fully emerged by mid-1936. Already before the ‘Röhm-Putsch’, Himmler had extended his initial power-base in Bavaria to gain control over the police in one state after another, culminating in his nomination in April 1934 as ‘Inspector of the Gestapo’, accompanied by Reinhard Heydrich as head of the Office of the Prussian Secret State Police (Gestapa). After the SS had played such a key part in breaking the power of the SA leadership at the end of June, Himmler had been able to push home his advantage until Göring conceded full control over the security police in the largest of the states. Attempts by Reich Minister of the Interior Frick and Justice Minister Gürtner to curb autonomous police power, expanding through the unrestricted use of ‘protective custody’ (Schutzhaft) and control of the growing domain of the concentration camps, also ended in predictable failure. Where legal restrictions on the power of the police were mooted, Himmler could invariably reckon with Hitler’s backing. When, in 1935, Gürtner complained about the number of deaths occurring in concentration camps and demanded the presence of lawyers in cases of ‘protective custody’, Himmler went to Hitler and won his support for a ban on consultation of lawyers and a block on any ‘special measures’ owing to ‘the conscientious direction of the camps’.34 Frick had no greater success with his protests at abuses of ‘protective custody’.35 Indeed, Himmler gained Hitler’s authorization to expand the concentration camp system at a time, in summer 1935, when, with 3,500 internees, it was smaller than at any other period throughout the Third Reich and appeared to have exhausted its prime purpose. This was followed, in October 1935, by Hitler’s backing for the Gestapo as the decisive agent in the ‘struggle against the internal enemies of the nation’.36
Himmler’s concessions in the Prussian Gestapo Law of 10 February 1936 were purely nominal. While one clause of the Law subordinated the Gestapo to the Ministry of the Interior, another emphasized that it was ultimately responsible to the Gestapa.37 There was no doubt which would prevail in case of conflict. The next step was not long in coming. On 17 June, Hitler’s decree created a unified Reich police under Himmler’s command.38 The most powerful agency of repression thus merged with the most dynamic ideological force in the Nazi Movement. Himmler’s subordination to Frick through the office he had just taken up as Chief of the German Police existed only on paper. As head of the SS, Himmler was personally subordinate only to Hitler himself. With the politicization of conventional ‘criminal’ actions through the blending of the criminal and political police in the newly formed ‘security police’ a week later, the ideological power-house of the Third Reich and executive organ of the ‘Führer will’ had essentially taken shape.
The instrument had been forged which saw the realization of the Führer’s Weltanschauung as its central aim. Himmler saw the prime task of the merged police and SS as ‘the internal defence of the people’ in ‘one of the great struggles of human history’ against ‘the universally destructive force of Bolshevism’.39 For Werner Best, Heydrich’s deputy, the police were a ‘fighting formation’, existing to root out all symptoms of disease and germs of destruction that threatened the ‘political health’ of the nation.40 No directions from Hitler were needed to encourage a police force starting from such premisses to expand the target-groups of those dubbed ‘enemies of the state’ or ‘harmful to the people’. The list could be extended almost at will. Alongside the prime racial victims, the Jews, and the foremost ideological and political enemies, Communists and Socialists, or the freemasons (a secret society held in deep suspicion for its alleged international power network and links with Jews engaged in world conspiracy), assiduous police careerists and SS ideologues blended their efforts to find new internal ‘enemies’ to combat. Most were weak, unpopular and marginalized social groups such as gypsies, homosexuals, beggars, ‘antisocials’, ‘work-shy’, and ‘habitual criminals’.41 In addition, the drive to eliminate any ‘institutional space’ turned persecution not only against those unprepared to yield to the total claim of the Nazi state – Jehovah’s Witnesses or ‘politically active’ representatives of the main Christian denominations – but also against small Christian sects which bent over backwards to accommodate National Socialism (such as the Mormons, or the Seventh Day Adventists).42
Intensification of radicalism was built into the nature of such a police force which combined ruthlessness and efficiency of persecution with ideological purpose and dynamism. Directions and dictates from Hitler were not needed. The SS and police had individuals and departments more than capable of ensuring that the discrimination kept spiralling. The rise of Adolf Eichmann from an insignificant figure collecting information on Zionism, but located in what would rapidly emerge as a key department – the SD ‘s ‘Jewish Desk’ in Berlin – to ‘manager’ of the ‘Final Solution’ showed how initiative and readiness to grasp opportunities not only brought rewards in power and aggrandizement to the individual concerned, but also pushed on the process of radicalization precisely in those areas most closely connected with Hitler’s own ideological fixations.
In the mid-1930s this process was still in its early stages. But pressures for action from the party in ideological concerns regarded as central to National Socialism, and the instrumentalization of those concerns through the expanding repressive apparatus of the police, meant that there was no sagging ideological momentum once power had been consolidated, as was the case in Mussolini’s Italy or Franco’s Spain. And as initiatives formulated at different levels and by different agencies of the regime attempted to accommodate the ideological drive, the ‘idea’ of National Socialism, located in the person of the Führer, thus gradually became translated from Utopian ‘vision’ into realizable policy objectives.
II
The beginnings of this process were also visible in Germany’s foreign relations. Nothing did more to bolster Hitler’s self-confidence than his successful coups in Europe’s ‘diplomatic revolution’.43 Most spectacular were the re
introduction of conscription in March 1935 and the reoccupation of the Rhineland almost exactly a year later. The results abroad were to destroy the remnants of the post-war diplomatic settlement, upturn the European order, seal the fatal division and weakening of the western powers, and drastically loosen the constraints on the build-up of German military might. At home, Hitler’s immense popularity and acclaim attained untouched levels. The triumphs of boldness over caution, as it seemed, strengthened his hand over the more restrained and circumspect among the military and foreign-policy advisers. As Otto Dietrich detected, they also enhanced Hitler’s belief in his own infallibility. Hitler’s own greatest contribution to events with such momentous consequences lay in his gambling instinct, his use of bluff, and his sharp antennae for the weak spots of his opponents. He took the key decisions; he alone determined the timing. But little else was Hitler’s own work. The broad aims of rearmament and revision of Versailles – though each notion hid a variety of interpretations – united policy-makers and power-groups, whatever the differences in emphasis, in the military and the foreign office.
Apart from the drama surrounding Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in October 1933, the first two years of Hitler’s Chancellorship had been largely dominated by internal affairs. Given German defensive weakness (on both eastern and western borders) and diplomatic isolation, there was no alternative to wariness in foreign affairs in these early years. The dangers of military intervention by either the Poles or the French were taken seriously. As Bernhard von Bülow, State Secretary in the Foreign Office, put it in his memorandum of 13 March 1933, Germany’s ‘dangerous weakness’ compelled a policy of ‘avoiding foreign-policy conflicts for as long as possible, until we are strong again’.44 Rearmament in secret had to go along with public readiness to appear conciliatory. Repeated emphasis on the unfair treatment of Germany in the post-war settlement would continue to probe the obvious divisions between the French and British, arising from their differing views on the harshness of Versailles, their divergent foreign-policy interests (more obviously global in Britain’s case), and the corresponding variation on the likely dangers of a resurgent Germany and the ways of containing rearmament and any revisionist claims.45 Meanwhile, once Germany’s diplomatic isolation was sealed by its withdrawal from the League of Nations, any opportunity of bilateral agreements in eastern Europe which would prevent German ambitions being contained by the multilateral pacts striven for by the French was to be seized.46
The first indicator of such a move was the non-aggression pact with Poland. Germany’s departure from the League of Nations had intensified the mutual interest in an improved relationship. The pact benefited Germany in undermining French influence in eastern Europe (thereby removing the possibility of any combined Franco-Polish military action against Germany). For the Poles, it provided at least the temporary security felt necessary in the light of diminished protection afforded through the League of Nations, weakened by the German withdrawal.47
The first moves had come from the Poles. Bülow had recorded traditional Foreign Office animosity towards Poland when, in his March tour d’horizon of foreign-policy options, he had remarked that an understanding with the Poles was ‘neither possible nor desired’.48 Pilsudski’s government had, however, put out feelers towards a better relationship the following month. It was, as Hitler realized, also in Germany’s interests, whatever the official Foreign Office view, to lessen tension on its eastern borders. Diplomatic activity over the summer of 1933 succeeded in improving relations between Danzig (where National Socialists now dominated the government) and Poland.49 Danzig had been a point of friction between Germany and Poland since the post-war peace settlement. Offering an outlet to the sea demanded by the new Polish state, and surrounded by territory taken from Germany and handed to Poland, Danzig’s overwhelming German population had meant that the Versailles principles of territorial integrity and national self-determination could not be reconciled. The result was the compromise to make Danzig a ‘free city’, autonomous under League of Nations supervision. The Poles had access to the sea, but no harbour of their own. The Germans had not ceded Danzig to Poland, but had not retained it for the Reich. No one was happy, least of all the people of Danzig. It was a solution unlikely to stand the test of time. But, for the moment, despite the almost inevitable upsurge of support in Danzig for a stridently nationalist government in the Reich, relations were improving between the Free City and the Polish government, prompted by the need for détente felt both in Berlin and in Warsaw.50 Steps were also taken towards ending the long-standing trade war between Germany and Poland.51 Hitler himself pressed for the trade agreement, which was being painstakingly worked out between the two countries, to be extended to a non-aggression treaty. From his point of view, treaties were matters of expediency. They were to be held to as long as they served their purpose.
He was prepared to appear generous in his dealings with the Poles. There was a new urgency in negotiations. Neurath and the Foreign Office, initially set for a different course, swiftly trimmed their sails to the new wind. ‘As if by orders from the top, a change of front toward us is taking place all along the line. In Hitlerite spheres they talk about the new Polish-German friendship,’ noted Józef Lipski, Polish minister to Berlin, on 3 December 1933.52 In conditions of great secrecy, a ten-year non-aggression treaty was prepared and sprung on an astonished Europe on 26 January 1934.53 This early shift in German foreign policy plainly bore Hitler’s imprint. ‘No parliamentary minister between 1920 and 1933 could have gone so far,’ noted Ernst von Weizsäcker, at that time German ambassador in Bern.54
The rapprochement with Poland meant, inevitably, a new course towards the Soviet Union. Initially, little or nothing had altered the modus vivendi based on mutual advantage, which, despite deteriorating relations during the last years of the Weimar Republic, and despite ideological antipathy, had existed since the treaties of Rapallo in 1922 and Berlin in 1926. Soviet worries about the Hitler regime were soothed by the German ambassador Herbert von Dirksen, whose own expressed anxieties met with the reassurance of State Secretary Bülow: ‘The National Socialists faced with responsibility are naturally different people and follow a policy other than that which they have previously proclaimed.’ ‘That’s always been so and is the same with all parties,’ he complacently added.55 From summer onwards, however, contrary to the wishes of the Foreign Office and (despite mounting concern) of its Soviet equivalent though in line with the clamour of the Nazi Movement, diplomatic relations worsened significantly. In autumn 1933, Hitler himself ruled out any repair of relations.56 During 1934, despite the efforts of the German ambassador Rudolf Nadolny (who had replaced Dirksen in autumn the previous year) and Soviet overtures for better relations, the deterioration continued. Hitler himself blocked any improvement, leading to Nadolny’s resignation.57 The inevitable consequence was to push the Soviet Union closer to France, thus enlarging the spectre of encirclement on which Nazi propaganda so readily played.
In early 1935, the Soviet Union was still little more than a side issue in German foreign policy. Relations with the western powers were the chief concern. The divisions, weakness, and need to carry domestic opinion of the western democracies would soon play into Hitler’s hands. But before taking any steps in foreign policy, or in addressing the increasingly pressing issue of the expansion of the armed forces, it was becoming imperative for Hitler to calm the internal tensions which had developed between the army and the Nazi Movement, overshadowing the last months of 1934 and threatening his relations with the military leadership. Underlying the tension were the promises Hitler had made to the SS at the time of the Röhm affair for the military arming of SS units – the origins of the later Waffen-SS – thus immediately breaking the promise he had made to the army that it alone would be the bearer of arms in the Reich.58 The SS were then at the forefront of a wave of scarcely veiled attacks on the military leadership, also involving the SA and other sections of the Movement, which pu
nctuated the autumn of 1934, doing little for the confidence of army leaders in Hitler or his party. Domestic unrest – continued criticism of local party leaders in the wake of intense disappointment at the failure to undertake a more drastic purge of the party following the murder of the SA leaders, and, not least, the damaging effects of the Church struggle on popular morale – also contributed. The military leadership plainly felt its position under threat by what it saw as the ‘total claim’ of the Nazi Movement.59 For their part, Nazi activists were resentful of the power of what they took to be a bastion of reaction with protected status.