Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

Après la révolution il se pose toujours la question des révolutionnaires.

  Mussolini to Oswald Mosley

  No one watches more closely over his revolution than the Führer.

  Rudolf Hess, June 25, 1934

  The tactics of legal revolution developed by Hitler made possible a relatively bloodless seizure of power, and avoided that deep rent in the body politic with which every nation emerges from a revolutionary period. But those same tactics had the drawback that the old leaders could infiltrate the revolution by adaptation and thus could contantly threaten the existence of the new regime, at least theoretically. Overrun and for the time being carried along, the former ruling class was by no means eliminated, by no means paralyzed. At the same time, the militant advance guard of the SA, who had fought for the movement and cleared the obstacles from the path to power, found themselves cheated of the wages of their wrath. Scornfully, and with some bitterness, the brown pretorians watched the way “reaction”—the capitalists, generals, Junkers, conservative politicians and others in the “cowardly bunch of philistines”—clambered onto the reviewing stands at the victory celebrations for the national revolution and sedulously moved their black tailcoats in among the brown uniforms. If everyone enrolled in the party, where would the revolutionaries find their enemies?

  An old-fashioned, straightforward roughneck like Röhm could not help being furious at the way things were going. And he let his displeasure be known quite early, in repeated public statements. By May, 1933, he had thought it appropriate to issue an order warning the storm troopers against all the false friends and false celebrations, and reminding them of unfulfilled goals: “We have celebrated enough. I wish that from now on the SA and SS visibly withdraw from the endless succession of celebrations…. Your task is to complete the National Socialist Revolution and to bring about the National Socialist Reich. That still remains to be done.” Hitler, craftier than the clumsy Röhm, regarded the revolution as a pseudolegal process of undermining the established order. It operated by demagoguery, attrition, and deception; force was merely an auxiliary instrument handy for purposes of intimidation. Röhm, on the other hand, could not conceive of a revolution without an insurrectionary phase, a storming of the citadels of the former powers, culminating in the classical “night of the long knives.” Nothing of the kind had taken place, and Röhm was deeply disappointed.

  After a short period of tactical uncertainty he tried to keep his storm troops out of the great national smelting process. He emphasized the need for a martial posture and hailed the special mentality of the SA: “It alone will win and preserve the victory of pure, unadulterated nationalism and socialism.” He warned his subleaders against taking posts and positions of honor in the new government. While his rivals Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ley, and countless followers of the third rank extended their influence by acquiring bastions of political power, Röhm tried to go the opposite way. By consistently building up his forces, which soon increased to between 3.5 million and 4 million men, he was preparing the way for the SA government, which one day would be superimposed right on top of the existing order, crushing it.

  Under these circumstances the old antagonisms between the SA and the Political Organization inevitably flared once again. There was the natural resentment of militant revolutionaries against the thick-necked, middle-class egotists of the Political Organization, who were apt to win out in the petty skirmishes for sinecures and jobs. The rancor increased after Hitler demanded, with growing insistence, the end of revolutionary activities. As early as June, 1933, the government had begun breaking up the many unauthorized camps for protective custody set up by the SA. Soon afterward, the SA’s auxiliary police squads were disbanded. In vain, Röhm’s followers pointed to the sacrifices they had made, the battles they had endured; they felt that they had been passed over. They were the forgotten revolutionaries of the unconsummated revolution. More and more often word went out that the seizure of power was over, and the tasks of the SA had been fulfilled. Röhm sharply retorted to such pronouncements in June, 1933. Those who were now calling for abatement of revolutionary fervor, he declared, were betraying the revolution; the workers, peasants, and soldiers who were marching under the banners of his storm troops would finish their job without consideration for the “co-ordinated philistines and gripers.” He added, “Whether they like it or not, we shall continue our struggle. Along with them, if they at last grasp what is at stake! Without them, if they don’t want to grasp it. And against them, if so it must be.”

  That was also the meaning of the slogan “The Second Revolution,” which henceforth began to circulate through the barracks and headquarters of the SA. This slogan implied that the seizure of power in the spring of 1933 had bogged down in a thousand wretched halfway measures and compromises, had been altogether betrayed and must be pushed on to the point of total revolution, to a taking possession of the entire state. Many have pointed to this as proof that there was indeed some kind of constructive social concept, no matter how sketchy, within the brown formations. But no such definable concept ever arose out of the fog of phrases about the “sacred socialist seeking-the-whole,” and no one attempted to describe how the SA state would be made up. This socialism never went beyond a crude, unconsidered soldier’s communism—even more radicalized in Röhm’s case by the cliquishness of homosexuals against a hostile world. The gist of it was that the SA state would be the kind of state that would solve the desperate social problem of so many unemployed storm troopers. There were also the cheated expectations of political adventurers who had masked their nihilism in the ideology of the Nazi movement and refused to understand why, now, after the victory had been won at last, they should bid adieu to excitement, fighting, and turmoil.

  The very aimlessness of the SA’s revolutionary fervor had in the meantime aroused anxieties in much of the public. No one knew against whom Röhm was planning to turn the enormous force that he flaunted in a furious series of parades, inspections, and spectacular demonstrations throughout Germany. Ostentatiously he set about reviving the old military tendencies within the SA, but he also sought connections and suppliers of funds in industry. He set up a task force of his own, the SA field police, and was likewise beginning to build up the SA’s own judiciary. The latter set extremely severe penalties for unwarranted beatings, robbery, theft, or plundering by the SA; but it also ruled that “as retribution for the killing of an SA man the SA leader in charge of the case can require that up to twelve members of the enemy organization which prepared the murder may be condemned.” The language was just sufficiently ambiguous to suggest that “condemned” meant “executed.” At the same time, Röhm tried to secure a footing in the administration of the states, in academic and publishing fields, and in general to project the special claims of the SA everywhere. He was continually criticizing the regime, its foreign policy, its attacks on the unions, and its repression of freedom of opinion. He denounced Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, and Hess in the bitterest terms. As for his opinion of Hitler, he was personally outraged by the Fuhrer’s deviousness and would freely air his grievances when among friends:

  Adolf is rotten. He’s betraying all of us. He only goes around with reactionaries. His old comrades aren’t good enough for him. So he brings in these East Prussian generals. They’re the ones he pals around with now…. Adolf knows perfectly well what I want. I’ve told him often enough. Not a second pot of the Kaiser’s army, made with the same old grounds. Are we a revolution or aren’t we?… Something new has to be brought in, understand? A new discipline. A new principle of organization. The generals are old fogies. They’ll never have a new idea….

  But Adolf is and always will be a civilian, an “artist,” a dreamer. Just leave me be, he thinks. Right now all he wants to do is sit up in the mountains and play God. And guys like us have to cool our heels, when we’re burning for action…. The chance to do something really new and great, something that will turn the world upside down—it’s a chance in a lifetime. But
Hitler keeps putting me off. He wants to let things drift. Keeps counting on a miracle. That’s Adolf for you. He wants to inherit a ready-made army all set to go. He wants to have it knocked together by “experts.” When I hear that word I blow my top. He’ll make it National Socialist later on, he says. But first he’s turning it over to the Prussian generals. Where the hell is revolutionary spirit to come from afterwards? From a bunch of old fogies who certainly aren’t going to win the new war? Don’t try to kid me, the whole lot of you. You’re letting the whole heart and soul of our movement go to pot.37

  What Röhm most wanted was to absorb the numerically smaller Reichswehr into his brown mass army and thereby create a National Socialist militia. It seems that Hitler had no intention whatever of letting him do this. The disagreement on the purpose of the SA was old, and Hitler continued to hold that the brown formations should carry out a political, not a military function. They were to be an enormous “Hitler shock troop,” not the cadres of a revolutionary army. Outwardly, however, he faked indecisiveness, obviously hoping to hit upon some compromise between Röhm’s ambitions and the claims of the Reichswehr. Undoubtedly he shared with Röhm a profound aversion, reinforced by his experiences of 1923, for the arrogant, stiff, monocle-wearing “old fogies,” and Himmler once heard him remark about the generals, “One day they’ll take a shot at me.”38 But their backing was indispensable if he were to consolidate his power. He kept in mind the great lesson of the November putsch, never again to get involved in open conflict with the armed forces. He attributed his defeat at that time to the opposition of the army, just as he attributed his success in 1933 to the support or at least the benevolent neutrality of the army leadership. Moreover, he would need their technical expertise for the rearmament program which he had already launched in the summer of 1933. In view of his expansionist plans, he knew there was no time to lose. Moreover, only the regular army possessed the offensive power that he required—a militia such as Röhm had in mind was, strictly speaking, an instrument of defense.

  Yet Hitler must have been pleasantly surprised by the way top army men behaved toward him. In Defense Minister von Blomberg and in the new chief of staff, Colonel Walther von Reichenau, he found two partners who, for different reasons, were entirely amenable to his wishes.

  Blomberg was an enthusiast by temperament. He had in turn subscribed to democracy, anthroposophy, the idea of a Prussian socialism, then “something close to Communism”—this after a trip to Russia—and finally been drawn more and more to authoritarian ideas until he succumbed to Hitler’s blandishments. In 1933, Blomberg later avowed, he had been vouchsafed things he no longer could have hoped for: faith, veneration for a man, and complete dedication to an idea. A friendly remark of Hitler’s, a contemporary source tells us, could bring tears to his eyes; and Blomberg used to say that a cordial handshake of the Fuhrer’s could cure him of colds.39

  Reichenau was of a different stamp: a sober man with a Machiavellian turn of mind who kept his ambitions free from emotion. He quickly decided that he could make use of Nazism to further his personal career and the power of the army. At the proper moment the Nazis could be tamed, he thought. As intelligent as he was coolheaded, by nature decisive, sometimes to a fault, he was the almost perfect embodiment of the modern, technically trained and socially unbiased army officer who unfortunately carried his lack of prejudices to moral categories also. At a meeting of army commanders in February, 1933, he opined that the general breakdown could be stemmed only by dictatorship. This thesis so well suited Hitler’s purposes that he must have asked himself why he should turn down the proffered allegiance of the military experts in favor of the troublesome Röhm. Among his intimates he tended to make fun of these “bandylegged SA men who think they’re the material for a military elite.”

  Hitler’s usual way of handling his enemies was to play them off against each other and let them fight it out between them. But in this case he was fairly frank about which side he favored. It is true that he constantly whipped up the SA’s militant activism and would, for example, exhort the storm troopers: “Your whole life will be nothing but struggle. From struggle you came; do not hope for peace today or tomorrow.” His appointment of Röhm to the cabinet on December 1 and his remarkably cordial letter of thanks to the chief of staff at the end of the year were widely interpreted, within the SA, as an official blessing. Nevertheless, he repeatedly assured the army that it was and would remain the sole armed force in the nation. And his decision at the beginning of the new year to reintroduce compulsory military service within the framework of the army ran counter to all Röhm’s plans for a vast militia. But Röhm continued to believe that Hitler was, as always, playing some deep game and secretly agreed with him now as he supposedly had in the past.

  Consequently, Röhm decided that he was being blocked by some of Hitler’s advisers. Accustomed to overcoming all difficulties by frontal assault, he resorted to noisy invective and heavy pressure. He called Hitler a “weakling” who had fallen into the hands of “stupid and dangerous creatures.” But he, Röhm, was going to “free him from those fetters.” And while the SA began posting armed guards around its headquarters, Röhm sent a memorandum to the Ministry of Defense declaring the defense of the country was the “domain of the SA” and leaving the army the sole task of military training. Incessantly speechmaking and fulminating, he thus gradually set the stage on which his destiny was to be played out. At the beginning of January, 1934, only a few days after Hitler had thanked his chief of staff and intimate friend in such warm words for his services, the Chancellor ordered Rudolf Diels, chief of the secret state police office (the incipient Gestapo) to gather incriminating documents on “Herr Röhm and his friendships” and also on the SA’s terroristic activities. “This is the most important assignment you have ever received,” he told Diels.

  Meanwhile, the army had not been idle. Röhm’s memorandum had made it plain to the Reichswehr leaders that there was no midcourse: Hitler would have to choose between themselves and the SA. Ostentatiously meeting the Nazis halfway, early in February Blomberg directed that the “Aryan clause” be applied to the officer corps and made the swastika the official symbol of the armed forces. Army Commander in Chief General von Fritsch justified this step on the grounds that it would “give the Chancellor the necessary impetus against the SA.”40

  In fact, Hitler now found himself forced to take an unambiguous position. On February 2 he delivered an address to the gauleiters assembled in Berlin. The speech both reflected his perplexities at the time and constituted a noteworthy statement of principles. The minutes of the meeting record:

  The Führer stressed… that those who go on saying the Revolution isn’t over yet are fools… and continued that in the movement we have people who by revolution mean nothing but a permanent state of chaos….

  The Führer said that the most crucial task at the moment was the selection of people who on the one hand are competent, on the other hand can carry out the measures of the administration in blind obedience. The party must act as a kind of monastic order, assuring the necessary stability for the entire future of Germany…. The first Leader had been chosen by Destiny; the second must from the start have a loyal, sworn community behind him. No one may be selected who has a private power base!

  Only one man can be the Leader…. An organization with such a hard core and strength will endure forever; nothing can overthrow it. The community within the movement must be incredibly loyal. There must not be any internecine struggles; we must never allow differences to be bared to outsiders! The people cannot trust us with blind faith if we ourselves destroy this trust. Even if wrong decisions are made, the effects can be mitigated by our unconditionally sticking together. We must never allow one authority to be played off against the other.

  Therefore: no superfluous discussions! Problems which the various headquarters have not yet clarified may under no circumstances be discussed in public, for that would entail involving the masses of the people
in the decisionmaking process. That was the insanity of democracy, whereby the value of all leadership is lost.

  We must never engage in more than a single fight at a time. Fights in single file. Not “Many enemies, much honor,” but “Many enemies, much stupidity.” Moreover, the people cannot wage or understand twelve struggles going on at once. Consequently we must always present the people with only a single idea, make them concentrate on one single idea. In questions of foreign policy it is crucial to have the entire people hypnotically behind one; the whole nation must be literally filled with a sporting spirit, be following this struggle with the passion of gamblers. This is essential. If the whole nation takes part in the struggle, the whole nation is the loser. If it is indifferent, only the leadership loses. In the one case the people are roused to fury against the opponent, in the second case only against the leader.41

  These principles were in fact to obtain deep into the war years. The practical conclusions were not long in coming. As early as February 21, 1934, Hitler confided to Anthony Eden that he intended to reduce the SA by two thirds and insure that the remaining formations received neither weapons nor military training. A week later he summoned the commanders of the army and the leaders of the SA and SS, headed by Röhm and Himmler, to the Ministry of Defense, on Bendlerstrasse. In a speech that the army officers received with applause and the SA leaders heard with horror, he sketched the basic lines of an agreement between the Reichswehr and the SA. The duties of the brown-shirted storm troops would be limited to a few minor military functions; their chief assignment was to be the political education of the nation. Hitler begged the SA leadership not to obstruct him in such grave times—and added menacingly that he would crush anyone who tried to.

  Röhm failed to note these warnings or regarded them as mere verbal maneuvers. For the time being he kept his composure and invited everyone present to a “reconciliation breakfast.” But as soon as the generals had left, he freely vented his anger. He is said to have called Hitler an “ignorant corporal” and declargd bluntly that he “had no intention of keeping the agreement.” He is also alleged to have said that Hitler was “disloyal and badly in need of a vacation.” Subsequently SA Obergruppenführer Lutze went to see Hitler at Obersalzberg and in a conversation lasting several hours reported Röhm’s insults and veiled threats.