Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  When the storm of applause after Hitler’s speech had subsided, the representatives of the other parties took the floor. One after another they gave their reasons for consenting. Kaas, however, spoke with some embarrassment, and only after Frick, in response to another inquiry, had “solemnly assured him that the messenger had already delivered Hitler’s letter to his office in the Kroll Opera House.” The requisite three readings of the bill took only a few minutes. The result of the vote was 441 to 94; only the Social Democrats stuck to their nays. That was far more than the required two-thirds majority; it would have been sufficient even if the 81 Communist and the 26 Social Democratic deputies who had been detained by arrest, flight, or sickness had likewise voted no. As soon as Göring announced the result, the Nazis rushed to the fore. Arms raised in the Hitler salute, they gathered in front of the government bench and began singing the Horst Wessel song. That same evening the bill passed the already “co-ordinated” Reichsrat by unanimous vote. The promised letter from Hitler never reached any member of the Center.

  With the passage of the “Law for the Removal of the Distress of People and Reich,” as the Enabling Act was officially called, the Reichstag was eliminated from any active role in German politics, and the administration had won unlimited freedom of action. The infamy lay not in the fact that the parties of the Center capitulated to a stronger opponent and bowed to a more unscrupulous will but that they actually collaborated to bring about their own exclusion from government. To be sure, the bourgeois parties were not altogether wrong when they pointed out that the so-called Reichstag fire decree of February 28 had decisively opened the way to dictatorship and that the Enabling Act was actually only a formality, the seizure of power having taken place already. But even so, the vote offered them a chance to bear witness to their objections by a memorable gesture. Instead, they chose to set the seal of legality upon the revolutionary actions of those weeks. If the decree of February 28 represented the actual downfall of the Weimar Republic, the Enabling Act meant its moral collapse. The act sealed the process of abdication by the political parties, a process that had started in 1930 when the Great Coalition was shattered.

  The Enabling Act concluded the first phase of the seizure of power. It made Hitler independent of the alliance with his conservative partners. That in itself thwarted any chance for an organized power struggle against the new regime. The Völkische Beobachter was completely right when it commented: “A historic day. The parliamentary system has capitulated to the new Germany. For four years Hitler will be able to do everything he considers necessary: negatively, the extermination of all the corrupting forces of Marxism; positively, the establishment of a new people’s community. The great undertaking is begun. The day of the Third Reich has come!”

  Actually, Hitler had needed less than three months to outmaneuver his partners and checkmate almost all the opposing forces. To realize the swiftness of the process we must keep in mind that Mussolini in Italy took seven years to accumulate approximately as much power. Hitler’s purposefulness and his feeling for the statesmanlike style had made their impression on Hindenburg from the start and soon prompted the President to drop his former reservations. The affirmative vote in the Reichstag now reinforced him in his change of attitude. The cold, self-centered old man ignored the persecutions which, after all, affected a good many of his own former voters. Hindenburg felt that at last he was once more in the right camp. If Hitler was doing away with that “wretched undisciplined party nonsense,” wasn’t that to his credit?

  Only two days after the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor, Ludendorff had written to the aged field marshal reproaching him for having “delivered the country to one of the greatest demagogues of all time.” The man who had marched with Hitler in 1923 added: “I solemnly prophesy to you that this damnable man will plunge our Reich into the abyss and bring inconceivable misery down upon our nation. Coming generations will curse you in your grave because of this action.”11 But Hindenburg appeared to be well pleased with his decision. He had “taken the leap over the hurdle and would now have peace for a considerable time.” As part of his program for withdrawing personally from the business of government, he had State Secretary Meissner explain, during the cabinet conference on the Enabling Act, that presidential collaboration on the laws issued as a result of this Enabling Act would be “not requisite.” He was glad to be relieved of the responsibility that had long been oppressive to him.

  Papen’s insistence on attending all meetings between the President and the Chancellor was soon dropped. Hindenburg himself asked Papen “not to insult” Hitler, as he put it. And when Prime Minister Held of Bavaria came to the presidential palace to protest against the terrorism and violations of the Constitution committed by the Nazis, the doddering old man told him to speak to Hitler himself. In the cabinet, too, Goebbels noted, “the authority of the Führer has now been wholly established. Votes are no longer taken. The Führer decides. All this is going much faster than we dared to hope.”

  For the time being the slogans and open challenges of the Nazis were almost all directed against the Marxists, but the thrust was aimed equally at their German Nationalist partner in the government. In their own shortsighted zeal against the Left, Papen, Hugenberg, and their following entirely overlooked the fact that elimination of the Left would leave Hitler in command of the means to liquidate them also. Instead, Carl Goerdeler, the conservative mayor of Leipzig, cheerfully asserted that they would soon be sending Hitler back to his hobby of architecture and resume the conduct of the state themselves. Hitler himself, his old resentments again aroused, called his bourgeois coalition partners “ghosts” and declared: “The reactionaries think they have put me on a leash. They are going to set traps for me, as many as they can. But we will not wait until they act…. We are ruthless. I have no bourgeois scruples! They think I am uncultured, a barbarian. Yes, we are barbarians! We want to be. That is an honorable epithet. We are the ones who will rejuvenate the world. This old world is done for….”12

  But leverage against both the Left and Right was not all of the profit Hitler derived from the Enabling Act. By virtue of the act, the entire apparatus of the government bureaucracy was at Hitler’s disposal. This included the judiciary, which was indispensable to his far-reaching plans. The act offered a basis that satisfied both the consciences and the craving for security of the bureaucrats. Most government officials were pleased to note the legal nature of this revolution, which in spite of the many isolated outrages contrasted so favorably with the chaos of 1918. This legality, even more than the antidemocratic traditions of the civil service made them ready to co-operate. Moreover, a special decree had been issued, which made no acquiescent civil servants liable to punishment. What is more, resistance would have equaled illegal action.

  There are those who to this day maintain that there was no definite break, that the parliamentary republic glided by degrees into totalitarian dictatorship. But examination of all the facts reveals that within the process of the legal revolution the revolutionary elements far outweighed the legal ones. The public was duped by the brilliant trick of having the change of scene take place on the uncurtained stage, so to speak. But the real drama consisted in a revolutionary seizure of power confirmed by the Enabling Act. As the act itself provided, it was formally extended in 1937, 1941, and once again in 1943. But it remained an emergency measure promulgated in a state of emergency. Nor did the language of the regime attempt to hide its revolutionary intentions. Even in his speech on the Enabling Act Hitler constantly spoke of “national revolution” when he might have used the safer euphemism of “national rising.” And two weeks later Göring in a speech explicitly repudiated this formula, replacing it by the concept “national socialist revolution.”

  There remained only a rounding off of power positions already achieved. Within a few weeks the centralist Gleichschaltung of the states had been completed, and in tandem with that action the complete shattering of all political groups and associa
tions. The collapse of the Communists took place almost silently, in an atmosphere of muffled terrorism. Some members of the Communist Party retreated into the underground; others opportunistically deserted to the National Socialists. The Nazis then turned upon the unions, which had already exposed their dismay and weakness during the early March days. They seemed to think they could buy off the impending doom by a series of placating gestures. Although the harassment and arrests of leading union members were steadily increasing throughout the Reich and the SA was staging a series of raids on local union offices, on March 20 the labor federation’s executive committee addressed a kind of declaration of loyalty to Hitler. It spoke of the purely social tasks of the unions, “no matter what the nature of the political regime.” When Hitler took over an old demand of the labor movement and declared May 1 a national holiday, the union leadership called upon the rank and file to participate in the demonstrations. Everywhere, thereupon, the unionized blue-collar and white-collar workers marched under alien banners in huge holiday parades. They listened bitterly to the speeches of Nazi functionaries but were nevertheless forced to applaud, and found themselves suddenly lined up in the very ranks they had so recently faced with fierce enmity. This confusing experience contributed more than anything else to shattering the will to resist of a movement numbering millions of workers. And while the labor-union paper, following the line of the union leadership, hailed May 1 as a “day of victory,” on May 2 the SA and SS occupied union headquarters throughout Germany. They also took over the businesses and the banks belonging to the labor federation, arrested the leading officials, and shipped a good many of them off to concentration camps. The unions went ingloriously down to destruction.

  The end of the Social Democratic Party took place in an equally undramatic fashion. Isolated appeals to resistance on the part of some leaders evoked at best contrary appeals from others, revealing the impotence of a mass party that had petrified in its traditional forms. Ever since January 30 the Social Democratic Party had constantly upheld the Constitution, which had already been undermined by the Nazis, and the Social Democrats kept on pledging that their party would never take the first step away from the solid ground of the law. Literal-minded Marxists that they were, they insisted on seeing Nazism as “the last card of reaction,” which by the laws of historical determinism could never win. The party leadership therefore justified its immobility on the grounds of a tactical slogan: “Readiness is all!” This passivity had a profoundly demoralizing effect upon many of the lower branches of the organization, which were urging action.

  On May 10, without a sign of resistance, all party headquarters, newspapers, and all the property of the Social Democratic Party and the Reichsbanner were confiscated on orders from Göring. After violent disagreements within the leadership, the advocates of appeasement won out: they thought they could force the government to moderation by conciliatory tactics. Following the same logic, the Social Democratic Reichstag faction decided that they would approve Hitler’s major statement on foreign policy of May 17, though they would frame their consent in a special, independent statement. But this position was much too subtle for Hitler, who was already determined to annihilate them. Blackmailed by Frick’s threat to kill the Social Democrats imprisoned in concentration camps, the party hurried to vote unconditionally for the government statement. With a mocking glance to the left, Göring could declare at the end of the Reichstag session: “The world has seen that the German people are united where their fate is at stake.” The Social Democratic Party had been so crushed and humiliated that no one expected so much as a gesture of resistance when, on June 22, it was at last banned and its seats in the Reichstag invalidated.

  All other political groupings were now likewise “co-ordinated”—sucked into the whirlpool of Gleichschaltung. Almost every day the newspapers reported liquidations or voluntary dissolutions. The Stahlhelm and the German Nationalist militias led the procession (June 21). There followed all remaining employee and employer organizations (June 22). Then came the German National People’s Party, which as a fellow fighter in the national rising had vainly insisted on its right to continue in existence; its members could not see why they now had to run with the hares after they had for so long hunted with the hounds. Then came the dissolution of the State Party (June 28), of the German National Front (June 28), of the Center Association (July 1), of the Young German Order (July 3), of the Bavarian People’s Party (July 4), of the German People’s Party (July 4), and finally of the Center itself—which was tactically paralyzed by the ongoing negotiations on a concordat and then forced to capitulate (July 5).

  Co-ordination of the various industrial, commercial, artisan, and agricultural associations ran parallel to the breakup of the political and paramilitary groups. But in no case was there any act of resistance. Scarcely an incident of more than local importance occurred. On June 27 Hugenberg was forced to resign, and not one of his conservative friends lifted a finger. He had just attended the World Economic Conference in London, where he had tried once more to outbid the Nazis in demagoguery by making excessive demands for a colonial empire and German economic expansion into the Ukraine. But he had succeeded only in providing Hitler with an easy opportunity to stand up for common sense and peace among nations against the Pan-German mischief-maker.

  Hugenberg had held cabinet posts in the Reich and in Prussia, which now fell vacant. Two days later Hitler assigned economics to Kurt Schmitt, general manager of the Allianz Insurance Company, and food and agriculture to Walter Darre. At the same time, he ordered the permanent participation of Rudolf Hess, the “Führer’s deputy,” in cabinet meetings. In April Franz Seldte, the leader of the Veterans’ Organization, joined the National Socialist Party; this meant that the proportions of Nazis to German Nationalists in the cabinet had been nearly reversed (eight to five). Since the German Nationalist ministers no longer had the backing of a party, they were essentially demoted to mere technicians without political pull. The regime fastened its grip on what had already been achieved by issuing, on July 14, a whole catalogue of decrees. The chief of these declared the National Socialist Party the sole legal party.

  This rapid, unopposed extinction of all political forces from Left to Right remains the most striking feature of the Nazi take-over. If anything could have demonstrated the sapped vitality of the Weimar Republic, it was the ease with which the institutions that had sustained it let themselves be overwhelmed. Even Hitler was astonished. “One would never have thought so miserable a collapse possible,” he declared in Dortmund at the beginning of July. Actions that only a short time before would have unleashed riots close to civil war were now met with a shrugging fatalism. The great capitulation of these months cannot be understood in political terms alone. We must consider its intellectual and psychological causes also. For over and above the illegality and violence of those weeks, the capitulation provides a certain historical justification for Hitler. Brüning, as he marched with the deputies to the Garrison Church on the day of Potsdam, felt as if he “were being led to the execution ground”—and that feeling was more prophetic than he himself imagined. One of the keen observers of the period noted that as the unanswered blows “into the face of truth, of freedom” went on, as the elimination of the other parties and of the parliamentary system progressed, there was a growing feeling “that all the things being abolished no longer concerned people very much.”

  In fact all these inglorious downfalls meant that the nation was inwardly bidding good-bye to the Weimar Republic. From now on the political order of the past was no longer a concept in whose name some hope, let alone opposition, might have gathered. The feeling of a great change, which had affected people vaguely, as a kind of euphoric expectation, when Hitler entered the government, now overcame wider and wider sectors of the population. Hitler had moved rapidly from the status of demagogue to that of a respected statesman. The craving to join the ranks of the victors was spreading like an epidemic, and the shrunken minority of those
who resisted the urge were being visibly pushed into isolation. Faced with a defeat apparently imposed “by history itself,” they concealed their bitterness and their lonely disgust. The past was dead. The future, it seemed, belonged to the regime, which had more and more followers, which was being hailed everywhere and suddenly had sound reasons on its side. “The only ones who give the impression of resolute refusal to accept it all, although they say nothing, are the servant girls,” Robert Musil ironically noted in March, 1933. But he, too, admitted that he lacked any alternative for which to fight; he was unable, he wrote, to imagine the new order being replaced by a return of the old or of a still older state of affairs. “What this feeling probably signifies is that National Socialism has a mission and that its hour has come, that it is no puff of smoke, but a stage of history.” Kurt Tucholsky on the Left implied much the same thing when he wrote, with that brash resignation peculiar to him: “You don’t go railing against the ocean.”

  Such moods of fatalism, of cultural resignation, speeded the success of Nazism. Only a few were able to resist the swelling current of the triumphant cause. Not that the terrorism and the injustices went unnoticed. But in the old European dichotomy d’être en mauvais ménage avec la conscience ou avec les affaires du siècle, more and more people swung over to those who seemed to have history and business as well on their side. Now that it had conquered power, the regime set about conquering people.

  On the Way to the Führer State

  I did not become Chancellor in order to act otherwise than I have preached for fourteen long years.