The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  In spite of Hitler’s assurances of the party’s commitment to the path of legality, it proved difficult to keep the lid on the rambunctious SA. In the spring of 1931 the strains boiled over into open conflict when Walter Stennes, the disgruntled SA leader in Berlin who had been a source of trouble the previous August, attempted to lead a revolt of the eastern SA against Hitler and the party leadership. Fed up with Hitler’s “timidity” and outright “cowardice,” Stennes wrote a letter of complaint to SA headquarters in Munich, condemning Hitler’s orders to refrain from street battles and pointedly warning that no leader could expect to go unpunished in the long run if he acts “against the sentiments of the best element of the people, in this case against the sentiments of the SA.” Hitler saw this as a direct challenge to his leadership and immediately called a meeting of Nazi leaders in Weimar, where he proceeded to expel Stennes from the party.

  Stennes responded by declaring his withdrawal from the NSDAP and his “takeover of the movement” in Berlin and the eastern provinces. He seized the party’s Berlin headquarters and the offices of Der Angriff and published an edition on April 2, in which he launched a direct assault on Hitler’s “un-German and boundless party despotism and the irresponsible demagogy.” In the following days, he remained on the attack, picking up support among frustrated SA men in Silesia, Schleswig-Holstein, and Pomerania. Party leaders condemned Stennes’s treachery and his rhetoric as “socialist” and “revolutionary,” but it was clear that he was expressing a view widely shared in SA circles that the Storm Trooper was not a handmaiden of the party bosses in Munich and their local functionaries.

  Stennes’s actions represented, in Goebbels’s view, “the most serious crisis the party has had to go through,” and Hitler responded quickly to the threat. He published an emotional appeal to the SA in the Völkischer Beobachter, asking the Storm Troopers to choose between Stennes, “the retired police sergeant,” or “the founder of the National Socialist Movement and the Supreme Leader of your SA, Adolf Hitler.” There could be no separation between the National Socialist “idea” and the “person” of the Führer, Hitler insisted. Within days the rebellion began to unravel. Although many SA men shared Stennes’s dissatisfaction with the party’s insistence on a policy of legality, few were willing to follow his open break with Hitler. The short-lived rebellion ended in both a purge of some five hundred Storm Troopers and a renewed effort by the political leadership to bring the SA under tighter control. But the tensions that had surged to the surface in this second Stennes episode continued to simmer.

  Although Hitler had assumed leadership of the SA during the first Stennes revolt in the previous August, that move was little more than a dramatic gesture, a personal call for loyalty and obedience to his leadership. He was neither interested in nor capable of managing a growing, boisterous organization like the SA, and in an attempt to establish discipline among the Storm Troopers, Hitler turned to his old comrade Ernst Röhm. Röhm had been serving as a military advisor to the Bolivian government since 1925 when Hitler recalled him in December 1930. He assumed the post of chief of staff for the SA in January 1931, and began his work immediately. At first his appointment was met with grumbling by some SA leaders—and by Gregor Strasser. Röhm’s homosexuality was well known and a topic of considerable gossip, both inside the NSDAP and beyond. The objections became so insistent that in February, Hitler felt compelled to issue a defense of his appointment. “The top SA leadership has presented a number of charges against the SA chief,” Hitler wrote, “foremost among them attacks on his private life.” These were matters that did not pertain to Röhm’s leadership role in the party but that lay “entirely in the private realm.” The SA, he reminded Röhm’s detractors, was not “a moral establishment for the education of proper young ladies but a band of rough fighters.”

  Röhm repaid Hitler’s confidence with loyalty, energy, and a talent for organization that guided the SA through a period of stunning growth. Röhm did not support Stennes, although he shared the social revolutionary orientation of the rank and file and, like Stennes, viewed the SA primarily as an autonomous fighting force independent of the political leadership. He also saw himself primarily as a military man; the SA he envisioned was a disciplined military formation, the vital nucleus of a people’s army, which would work with the Reichswehr—at least for the time being. He was also apparently content to see the SA as an instrument of the political leadership, operating on the implicit assumption that as the membership grew, so, too, would its influence. He instituted far-reaching organizational reforms, established soup kitchens and barracks for unemployed SA men, and managed the integration of thousands of new recruits. Under his command, the SA grew dramatically during 1931. In January the SA counted 88,000 men; by April, 119,000; by year’s end, 260,000.

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  The economy meanwhile continued its free fall into the abyss. Between 1929 and 1932, industrial production plunged by almost 50 percent, the most precipitous drop coming in 1931. In roughly the same period, individual savings dwindled, bankruptcies soared, and unemployment lines grew steadily. In the winter of 1929–30, three million Germans had been out of work. During the following year that figure almost doubled, climbing to six million in early 1932. As grim as these official statistics appeared, they were certainly conservative. By 1932 perhaps as many as a million jobless men and women had exhausted their eligibility for unemployment benefits and in their despair no longer bothered to register at job referral agencies. In the midst of the prevailing economic gloom, a severe banking crisis battered the financial markets. In the summer of 1931, several major banks—among them the powerful Darmstädter and Dresdner, financial institutions thought too big to fail—teetered on the verge of collapse. The government moved to bail them out, avoiding runs on the banks like those that were occurring in the United States, but the already palpable crisis of public confidence in the beleaguered Weimar “system” only deepened. As joblessness increased, government expenditure on unemployment compensation and related benefits began an inexorable rise, while tax revenue continued to shrink.

  Afraid that growing government deficits would ignite a new inflation, Brüning introduced a series of stringent austerity measures that he believed to be the preconditions for recovery. The chancellor also hoped to score a major foreign policy success by forming a customs union with Austria—an initiative blocked by France—and by convincing the Allies to reduce or even terminate Germany’s reparations obligations. A balanced budget, he felt, was a necessary precondition to demonstrate Germany’s commitment to fiscal responsibility. Realizing that he would take political heat for these policies, he nonetheless produced a package of harsh deflationary measures that systematically slashed wages, prices, rents, pensions, and social services while raising some existing taxes and introducing new ones to cover government expenditures. The nation had to drink this bitter medicine, he argued, and all the parties knew it, but none was willing to take responsibility for administering it to the patient.

  Brüning proceeded to enact his grim austerity program by emergency decree, eliciting howls of indignation across the political spectrum. He issued emergency decrees that slashed salaries and wages in the public sector, amounting to a 20 percent reduction in pay for civil servants and public employees. He made painful cuts in pensions and other retirement benefits; he reduced public assistance for veterans and invalids, and subsidies for children and public housing. He encouraged state governments to enact similar austerity measures by dramatically reducing the level of national funding for the states. The resulting cuts were particularly harsh in the field of education, leading to significant layoffs of schoolteachers and university staff. To cut the national deficit still further, he introduced an emergency income tax for the self-employed and white-collar workers in the private sector, a blow that was felt keenly by small business. Even President Herbert Hoover’s moratorium on war debts and reparations payments in the summer of 1931—which only a year before would have been
viewed as a dramatic diplomatic and economic triumph for Brüning’s policies—produced hardly a ripple of support for his government. It was, quite simply, too little, too late.

  Exacerbating his problems, Brüning was incapable of selling his program, either to the parliament or to the public. Ramrod stiff in appearance, severe and aloof in his personal bearing, he seemed the very incarnation of the stern, forbidding German schoolmaster. Where Hitler thundered and inspired, Brüning lectured. While he had been a competent floor leader of the Zentrum in the Reichstag, operating smoothly with parliamentary colleagues, he never grew comfortable dealing with the public. He could not move audiences with his speeches or mingle with crowds or shake hands or pat children’s heads, and every day the contrast between this distant, dry, formal man and the energetic populist Nazi leader grew more glaring. Whether speaking on the radio or in public appearances, he seemed remote, out of touch with the suffering of ordinary people. Freed from the Reichstag and reliant only on the Reich President, he saw little need in trying to convince a desperate nation of the necessity of his chosen course. He was right, and he knew it, and in time the ungrateful public would recognize it as well. As the year wore on, the austere Brüning became the most reviled man in German politics, the “hunger Chancellor” who was reduced to moving about the country in a train carriage with the curtains down to hide from the public. If crowds spotted him they were apt to throw rocks. Worse still, his deeply unpopular deflationary measures failed to halt or even slow the economy’s inexorable plunge. They did, however, inflame political passions and provide an inviting target for anti-Republican protest.

  The NSDAP led the assault. Although the party’s now imposing Reichstag delegation led by Hermann Göring could, and did, exploit parliamentary proceedings as a forum for Nazi propaganda, the NSDAP’s political energies continued to be focused on the streets. Between the Reichstag elections of 1930 and 1932 the Nazis did not relax or slacken the pace of their agitation. Instead, the party continued to centralize its propaganda apparatus and to pursue its policy of perpetual campaigning. This strategy had evolved gradually since the adoption of Himmler’s “propaganda action” campaigns in 1928–29, and with membership rising dramatically, it was now possible to keep the agitation at a fever pitch. Between 1928 and September 1930, the party’s membership almost tripled, lurching from 108,717 to 293,000. Then in the wake of the 1930 campaign, applications for membership jumped yet again. Between September and the end of the year, the Nazis registered almost 100,000 new names on the party rolls. Even without the benefit of a national campaign in 1931, the NSDAP doubled its membership again. Each of these members paid regular party dues, filling the Nazis’ rapidly expanding war chest and funding in large part the party’s propaganda campaigns. By the close of 1932, a year dominated by a plethora of national and regional elections, the NSDAP boasted a membership of almost 1.5 million.

  The rapidly growing membership made work in the party’s modest headquarters in the Schellingstrasse increasingly difficult, and in 1930 the party, flush with funds from membership dues and a sizable contribution from the industrialist Fritz Thyssen, acquired an ornate palais on the Brienner Strasse just off the renowned Königsplatz. It quickly became known as the Brown House and served as party headquarters until January 1945, when it was badly damaged by Allied bombs. The building was extensively renovated in grand style by Hitler’s favorite architect, Paul Ludwig Troost, and was ready for occupancy by early 1931. Engraved above its entry portal was the party’s signature slogan: “Germany Awaken!” Along with offices for the party leadership and staff was a “hall of flags,” at the center of which the party’s “Blood Flag” from the 1923 Putsch was reverently displayed. By 1931 the NSDAP was no longer a fly-by-night enterprise but an established political institution, able to organize mass rallies and stage elaborate parades of the uniformed SA in every corner of the country. These activities were intended to create a dynamic, peripatetic public image for the party, bridging the gaps between national and regional elections. While the other parties, especially those of the bourgeois center and right, tended to go into hibernation between elections, the Nazis operated in a state of perpetual mobilization. As a circular to Nazi functionaries in the Rhineland emphasized in May 1931, all the other parties would be “going into their deep summer slumber and the legislatures [would] be closing their doors—[they think] it’s too hot for politics—[but] for us National Socialists there is no pause. . . . We have no time to rest. Now is the time to intensify our propaganda work.”

  When no elections were on the horizon, the Nazis resorted to stunts. On December 4, 1930, the film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front opened in Berlin. The film had been cleared for release by the Social Democratic authorities, and for days in advance of the premiere, Goebbels and the Nazi press inveighed against this “affront to German honor.” On opening night at the palatial Mozartsaal on Nollendorfplatz, 150 Storm Troopers reduced the theater to sheer bedlam. They rampaged through the theater, threw stink bombs from the balcony, released hundreds of mice in the orchestra, and, shouting “Juden raus,” (Jews out!) roughed up anyone they thought to be Jewish. Following their spectacular sabotage of its premiere, the Nazis mounted a series of mass demonstrations against the film, punctuated by violent clashes with the police. Within days, the country’s Film Board, responding to the public outcry drummed up by the Nazis, reversed itself and rescinded its approval of All Quiet. The film was withdrawn from distribution, and the Nazis boasted that they had won a major triumph. “We are once again in the spotlight of public interest. The Republic rages in fury about our film victory.” It could not have been grander, Goebbels gloated.

  The Nazi campaign against All Quiet was but one manifestation of a broad assault on what it considered the un-German, cosmopolitan decadence of postwar Germany. In the aftermath of the Great War and the social and political tumult of the hyperinflation, the nation, censorious social critics lamented, had plunged into a morass of hedonistic squalor. Some blamed the war, some economic woes, others women’s suffrage, but all agreed that the frenetic pleasure-seeking disregard of the traditional values of family, faith, and fidelity had sent the country plummeting into a state of “moral collapse. The boulevard press—tabloids—were filled with lurid stories of crime and sex, and were, of course, tremendously popular. The appalling evidence of the country’s moral decay was everywhere: sex, jazz, flappers, homosexuality, “the New Woman,” and an orgy of wild uninhibited dancing, all challenges to traditional values, all foreign, especially American, imports.

  The Nazis launched assaults on all these manifestations of postwar popular culture, posing as the stalwart defenders of traditional “German” values. They reviled the postwar cinema, with its sordid sexuality, and condemned the new art, exemplified by Kandinsky, Klee, Beckmann, and other Expressionist painters. All had existed before the war but became centerpieces of what came to be called Weimar culture. The new atonal music arriving from Vienna, the futuristic architecture and furnishings of the Bauhaus, the seductive cynicism of Bertolt Brecht’s plays all seemed urban, foreign, far from the image of an idyllic pastoral Germany, which had, like most objects of nostalgic yearning, hardly existed.

  Cultural critics and many ordinary Germans shared these views, but the Nazis placed them in an ideological context. The degenerate developments that were corroding German cultural life from high to low were the creations of the Jews and amounted to nothing less than “cultural bolshevism.” The actors, directors, musicians, novelists, playwrights, publishers, and architects who now dominated the German cultural scene were either “Jews or were swimming completely in the Jewish backwash.” Indeed, all German culture had become “jewified” (verjudet). “Everywhere we look Jews. . . . They saturate the body of our people and stamp their mentality on it,” a mentality whose essence was “money and eroticism.” Not rooted in any indigenous national culture, “they recognize no traditional values. Always desirous
for the New, they crave the sensational.” It was the task of National Socialism “to once again warn the people and save them from the abyss.”

  Giving coverage to these views, the Nazis could now rely on a vastly expanded party press. Before the great electoral breakthrough in September 1930, the NSDAP controlled forty-nine newspapers, only six of which were dailies. By 1932 the number had expanded to 127, with a circulation in excess of a million. The party’s Völkischer Beobachter, published daily in both Munich and Berlin, saw its circulation rise steadily from 26,000 in 1929 to over 100,000 in 1931, and Goebbels’s Berlin-based Der Angriff became a daily for the first time in November 1930. All brought much needed revenue to the party treasury in Munich.

  Utilizing their expanding membership and their increasingly sophisticated propaganda apparatus, the Nazis marched aggressively through a series of regional elections in 1931, registering significant gains in Oldenburg, Hamburg, Hessen, and Anhalt, while the traditional bourgeois parties faltered badly. Between these elections, Hitler enlisted the party in another referendum campaign, this time in a bizarre coalition of antidemocratic forces that ranged from the DNVP to the Communists. The referendum was an attempt to unseat the democratically elected Prussian state legislature, which was controlled by the parties of the Weimar coalition—the SPD, Zentrum, and left-liberals (DDP). It was the all-important power base of the Social Democrats in Germany, and the referendum was intended to undermine this bastion of pro-democracy forces. Beginning in April, the campaign raged across Germany’s largest state until August, when the Prussian public went at last to the polls. The referendum failed—it received just 36 percent of the vote—but, just as the anti-Young campaign had done, it offered the NSDAP another opportunity for national exposure.