With every day that passed the Nazis were penetrating deeper into the administrative apparatus. Hitler’s script for legal revolution had assigned a special role to Göring, whose fatness lent a jovial note to outright brutality. According to the new arrangements, von Papen held governmental authority in Prussia; but the real power was in Göring’s hands. While the Vice-Chancellor continued to hope that his “educational work in the cabinet” would succeed, Göring was installing a number of so-called honorary commissioners in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Such men as SS Oberfuhrer Kurt Daluege at once took hold in this ministry, which constituted the largest administrative apparatus in Germany. By a massive series of personnel shifts, dismissals, and appointments “the System bigwigs are being thrown out one after the other,” as a contemporary report put it. “From high-ranking official down to doorkeeper, this ruthless purge is going on.”
Göring kept his eye particularly on the police chiefs; within a short time he replaced most of them by high-ranking SA leaders. On February 17 he issued a decree ordering the police to “establish the finest concord with the nationalist associations (SA, SS, and Stahlhelm),” but in dealing with the Left the police were “to make free use of their weapons whenever necessary.” In a later speech he explicitly confirmed these instructions: “Every bullet that is now fired from the barrel of a police pistol is my bullet. If that is called murder, then I have committed murder, for I have ordered it all; I take the responsibility for it.”
Out of an inconspicuous minor department in Berlin police headquarters, which had been detailed to keep watch on anti-Constitutional activities, Göring began building the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), soon to become notorious as the Gestapo. Within four years, its budget had increased forty times. It had 4,000 men in Berlin alone. In order to “relieve the burden on the ordinary police in special cases,”’ on February 22 Göring set up an auxiliary police force approximately 50,000 strong, consisting chiefly of SA and SS men. This amounted to dropping the fiction of police neutrality and openly admitting the link between the party toughs and the forces of law and order. Henceforth, Nazi excesses became governmental action. “My measures,” Göring boasted, “will not be sicklied o’er by any legal scruples. My measures will not be sicklied o’er by any bureaucracy. It’s not my business to do justice; it’s my business to annihilate and exterminate, that’s all!”
This challenge was directed chiefly against the Communists. Not only were they the main enemy; they also would hold the balance in the next Reichstag. Three days after the formation of the cabinet, Göring had already banned all Communist meetings in Prussia in response to the Communist Party’s call for a general strike and demonstrations. Nevertheless, the muffled civil war continued; in the first few days of February there were clashes costing fifteen lives and ten times that number of wounded. On February 24 the police made a large-scale raid on the Communist Party headquarters, Karl Liebknccht House on Bülow Platz in Berlin. It had long since been abandoned by the Communist Party leadership, but the very next day the press and radio reported sensational finds of “tons of treasonous materials.” Subsequently these documents—which were never published—provided Nazi electioneering with atrocity stories of a projected Communist revolution: “The populace is to be terrified and cowed by preliminary measures involving murderous attacks etc. upon leaders of the nation and government, assaults upon vital factories and public buildings, poisoning of entire groups of especially feared persons, the taking of hostages, the kidnapping of wives and children of prominent men,” the police report stated. Nevertheless, the Communist Party was not banned, for that might have driven its voters into the arms of the Social Democratic Party.
The Nazis intensified their propaganda to make this campaign the noisiest and wildest of all the electoral battles of recent years. Hitler himself, who again made the greatest impact, had opened the campaign with a major speech in the Berlin Sportpalast. In it he verbosely repeated the old cry of fourteen years of shame and misery, the old denunciations of the November criminals and the parties of the “system,” and the old formulas for salvation. He ended on a pseudoreligious note. He had, he cried, the “rock-hard conviction that sooner or later the hour will come in which the millions who hate us today will stand behind us and together with us will hail what we have jointly created, toilsomely struggled for, bitterly paid for: the new German Reich of greatness and honor and power and glory and justice. Amen!”
Once again all technical media were utilized—this time with the prestige and support of the government. The country was inundated with appeals, slogans, parades, displays of banners. Once again Hitler was flying over Germany. Goebbels had hit on a new propaganda tool—radio. “Our opponents did not know what to do with its possibilities,” the propaganda chief wrote. “We must learn all the better how to handle it.” As Hitler visited city after city, the local radio station was to report on his appearance. “We will have our broadcasts held in the midst of the people and so give the listener a vivid picture of what goes on at our meetings. For each of the FUhrer’s speeches I myself will give an introduction in which I mean to try to convey to the listener the magic and the atmosphere of our mass demonstrations.”
A considerable portion of the expenses for the election campaign was obtained at an affair in the palace of the Reichstag President, to which Göring invited a number of leading businessmen on February 20. Among the participants were Hjalmar Schacht, Krupp von Bohlen, Albert Vogler of Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel), Georg von Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, the banker Kurt von Schroder, and other representatives of heavy industry, mining, and banking. In his speech to these notables Hitler once again emphasized the difference between the authoritarian ideology of employers and the democratic Constitution, which he derided as the political expression of weakness and decadence. He hailed the tightly organized ideological state as the sole possible means for combating the Communist menace, and lauded the supreme right of the great individual. He had refused to be merely tolerated by the Center, he continued. Hugenberg and the German Nationalists were only holding him back. To vanquish the enemy once and for all, he must have full control of the state. In language that abandoned even the sham of legality, he called upon his listeners for financial assistance: “We now are facing the last election. Whatever its outcome, there is no going backward…. One way or another, if the election does not decide, the decision will have to be taken in another way.” Göring followed up the appeal with a few remarks. The contribution, he said, “would surely come all the more easily to industry if it knew that the election on March 5 would surely be the last for ten years, or even for a hundred years.” Thereupon Schacht turned to the company, saying, “And now, gentlemen, to the cashier!” He proposed the creation of an “election fund” and promptly collected from the leading industrial firms at least 3 million marks, possibly more.1
In his campaign speeches, too, Hitler abandoned a good deal of his restraint. “The period of international babble, the promise of reconciliation among nations, is over and done with; its place will be taken by the German People’s Community,” he declared in Kassel. In Stuttgart he promised to “burn out the symptoms of rottenness and eliminate the poison.” He was determined, he said, “under no circumstances to let Germany fall back into the past regime.” He carefully avoided defining his program in detail (“We do not want to lie and we do not want to deceive… and give cheap promises”); his only specific statement was his pledge “never, never… to depart from the task of exterminating Marxism and everything connected with it” in Germany. The “first point” in his program would be to notify the adversary: “Away with all illusions!” Four years hence he would give the German people another chance to vote for him, but he would give no such opportunity to the parties of disintegration. Then let the German people judge, he exclaimed, falling into that messianic tone to which he was so prone at that period. He would admit no other judge, but “for my part the people may crucify me if t
hey think that I have not done my duty.”2
One of the stratagems of legal revolution was not to openly crush the adversary, but instead to provoke him to acts of violence so that he himself provided the pretext for legal measures of repression. Goebbels described these tactics in a diary note dated January 31: “For the present we intend to refrain from direct countermeasures [against the Communists], First the Bolshevist attempt at revolution must flare up. Then we will strike at the proper moment.” This was Hitler’s old dream: to be called in at the climax of a Communist uprising, and annihilate the great foe in a single dramatic clash. Then he would be hailed by the nation as the restorer of order and granted legitimacy and respect. As early as the first cabinet meeting of January 30, therefore, he had dismissed Hugenberg’s proposal that the Communist Party be banned outright, its seats in the Reichstag withdrawn, thus assuring a parliamentary majority by doing away with the need for new elections.
He was worried, however, that the Communists might be in no position for a full-scale, vigorous act of rebellion. At various times he had expressed doubts of their revolutionary impetus—which, incidentally, Goebbels had also done early in 1932 when he said he could no longer see them as a danger. As a matter of fact, Nazi propaganda had to work hard to create the necessary bogey man. The revelations about the tons of seditious material found in Communist Party headquarters served this purpose along with a flock of rumors, obviously inspired by the Nazis themselves from the middle of February on, concerning a plan to assassinate Hitler. Rosa Luxemburg’s vain question of 1918, “Where is the German proletariat?” remained unanswered this time as well. To be sure, a few street battles occurred during the early weeks of February, but these were all local clashes. There was no sign of a centrally directed attempt at a major uprising of the sort that could stimulate full-blown anxiety complexes. Partly, the reason for this was the Depression and the depleted energies of the working class. But the principal reason was the grotesque error of the Communist leadership in its estimate of the historical situation. In spite of persecution and torture, the flight of many comrades and the mass defections of their followers, the Communists clung to their doctrine that the real enemy was Social Democracy, that there was nothing to choose between Fascism and parliamentary democracy, and that Hitler was merely a puppet whose installation in power was only bringing the victory of Communism closer. In this stage of history, the Communist leaders preached, patience was the supreme revolutionary virtue.
These tactical errors evidently expressed an underlying shift in the realities of power. One of the strange aspects of the seizure of power was the disappearance of the enemy at the moment of confrontation. For a long time the Communists had provided Nazism with psychological nourishment. The Red menace had been the crucial inspiration, had sparked the growth of National Socialism into a mass movement. Now a Communist following numbering millions, forming a powerful and effective threat, terrifying the bourgeoisie, had evaporated without even token resistance, without dramatic action, without so much as sounding the trumpet blast for “the final conflict.” If we accept the principle that we cannot speak of Fascism without mentioning both capitalism and Communism, the historical links to both were snapped at this time. Henceforth Fascism was neither an instrument nor a negation nor a mirror image of anything. During those days of the seizure of power it came into its own. And from then on, right to the end, Communism would not again emerge as a counterforce provoking a Fascist reaction.
The dramatic Reichstag fire of February 28, 1933, must be seen against this background, as well as the years of discussion that followed over the authorship of this deed. The Communists always passionately denied any connection with the fire, and in fact they had no motive whatsoever for it. For this very reason it was possible to paint a convincing picture of Nazi responsibility, since the fire fitted so neatly into the pattern of Hitler’s strategy. For a long time the argument that the Nazis themselves were the incendiaries went almost unchallenged, although details remained unclarified.
In the early sixties Fritz Tobias published a study of the Reichstag fire which analyzed the many crude partisan fictions and myths that had grown up around the subject. Tobias came to the conclusion that the Nazis did not set fire to the Reichstag, that the act was in fact committed by the half-naked Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe who was caught in the burning building, dripping with sweat and triumphantly babbling, “Protest! Protest!” Tobias mustered a good deal of convincing evidence for his thesis. But considerable doubts remain, and the controversy has continued.3 We need not go into it ourselves, since the question of what individual set the fire is a criminological one, with only small bearing on our understanding of the political currents. By instantly taking advantage of the fire to further their plans for dictatorship, the Nazis made the deed their own and manifested their complicity in a sense that is independent of “whodunit” questions. In Nuremberg Göring admitted that the wave of arrests and persecutions would have been carried out in any case, that the Reichstag fire only accelerated those steps.4
The first measures were taken at once, right on the spot. Hitler had been spending the evening of February 27 in Goebbels’s apartment on Reichskanzlerplatz. A telephone call from Hanfstaengl informed Goebbels that the Reichstag was in flames. Goebbels at first assumed that this report was a “wild fantasy” and forbore to tell Hitler. But, shortly afterward, the news was confirmed, and he then passed it on. Hitler’s spontaneous exclamation, “Now I have them,” indicated how he meant to use the event tactically and propagandistically. Immediately afterward, the two raced “at sixty miles an hour” down Charlottenburger Chaussee to the Reichstag. Clambering over fire hoses, they finally reached the grand lobby. Here they met Göring, who had arrived first and was “going great guns.” He had already issued the obvious statements about an organized political action by thé Communists, statements that immediately prejudiced political, journalistic, and criminological opinion. One of Gôring’s associates of that period, Rudolf Diels, who later became first chief of the Gestapo, has provided a description of the scene:
When I entered, Göring strode forward to meet me. His voice rang with all the fateful emotions of that dramatic hour: “This is the beginning of the Communist uprising. Now they are going to strike. Not a minute must be lost!”
Göring was unable to continue. Hitler turned to the assemblage. Now I saw that his face was flaming red from excitement and from the heat which had accumulated under the dome. As if he were going to burst, he screamed in an utterly uncontrolled manner such as I had never before witnessed in him: “Now there can be no mercy; whoever gets in our way will be cut down. The German people will not put up with leniency. Every Communist functionary will be shot wherever we find him. The Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. Everyone in alliance with the Communists is to be arrested. We are not going to spare the Social Democrats and members of the Reichsbanner either!
Meanwhile, Göring ordered the entire police force on maximum emergency footing. That night some 4,000 functionaries were arrested; most of them were members of the Communist Party, but included in the bag were some writers, doctors, and lawyers whom the Nazis disliked, among them Carl von Ossietzky, Ludwig Renn, Erich Mühsam, and Egon Erwin Kisch. Several Social Democratic Party headquarters and newspaper offices were occupied. “If resistance is offered,” Goebbels threatened, “then clear the streets for the SA.” And although most of those arrested had to be fetched out of their beds, and the Reichstag faction leader of the Communist Party, Ernst Torgler, voluntarily surrendered to the police in order to demonstrate the untenability of the charges, the first official account—dated that very February 27!—stated:
The burning of the Reichstag was intended to be the signal for a bloody uprising and civil war. Large-scale pillaging in Berlin was planned for as early as four o’clock in the morning on Tuesday. It has been determined that starting today throughout Germany acts of terrorism were to begin against prominent individuals, again
st private property, against the lives and safety of the peaceful population, and general civil war was to be unleashed….
Warrants have been issued for the arrest of two leading Communist Reichstag deputies on grounds of urgent suspicion. The other deputies and functionaries of the Communist Party are being taken into protective custody. Communist newspapers, magazines, leaflets and posters are banned for four months throughout Prussia. For two weeks all newspapers, magazines, leaflets and posters of the Social Democratic Party are banned….
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