The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  * * *

  Papen was a lively, dapper man, a Catholic aristocrat with charm and excellent social connections. He married the daughter of a wealthy Saar industrialist and enjoyed close ties to business leaders. Before entering politics, he had made a career in the military. During the war, he had served as military attaché in Mexico and Washington but was expelled from the United States in 1916 for attempting to sabotage American military shipments to Canada. Thereafter he served briefly as a battalion commander in France and then as a staff officer in Turkey. Following the war, he embarked on a political career as a member of the Zentrum and gravitated immediately to its far right wing. Despite being almost completely unknown, his aristocratic heritage, business connections, military background, and antidemocratic sentiments all recommended him to Schleicher, who referred to his creation condescendingly as Fränzchen, little Franz. He was the ideal front man to lead the authoritarian transformation of the German state Schleicher and the High Command envisioned.

  Papen’s was to be a government of national concentration, which would stand above parties. The cabinet, selected by Schleicher, was composed almost exclusively of conservative aristocrats without formal party affiliation. It contained no figure of national prominence, in either government or business, and commanded virtually no support in the Reichstag. No matter. It was a government that was never intended to rely on the support of the public or the parties, only on the favor of Hindenburg and his military entourage. Its opponents disdainfully christened it “the cabinet of barons.” Virtually every parliamentary party, including Papen’s own Zentrum, immediately denounced this new chancellor sprung on the country by Hindenburg and Schleicher. Only Hugenberg’s DNVP and the tiny business-oriented DVP threw their meager support behind the Papen government, leaving it with an even smaller parliamentary base than its late and unlamented predecessor.

  Key to the new cabinet’s success was the attitude of the NSDAP. Schleicher believed that he had secured the cooperation, if not outright support, of the Nazis. In secret meetings in May he had struck a bargain with Hitler, or so he thought. In return for a Nazi pledge to refrain from attacking the new government, Papen would lift the ban on the SA and SS and call for new elections, two demands made by Hitler. It was to be a policy of toleration, a political truce that Schleicher hoped would evolve into close cooperation.

  Lacking any sign of public support and demonstrating precious little interest in it, Papen openly courted business and industrial leaders. His government, he claimed, was “the last great chance” to save private enterprise and halt Germany’s calamitous slide into state socialism. He indicated that tax credits for industry and a retreat from the binding nature of wage contracts, steps long sought by business, were on the way, and he promised a sharp reduction in government spending on social programs. As a sign of his determination to dismantle Weimar’s welfare programs, he used his first emergency decree in June to announce substantial reductions in unemployment and health benefits, while suggesting that government spending in certain areas—transportation and housing construction, in particular—might stimulate economic activity in the private sector. These harsh measures outraged labor but found considerable resonance in the wary business community.

  While sending encouraging signals to business, Papen also openly courted the political right, hoping to bind Hitler and conservative leader Hugenberg in one manner or another to his government. Following through on Schleicher’s deal with Hitler, he lifted the ban on the SA and SS on June 16, despite strong objections from several state governments, and he used his emergency powers to dissolve the Reichstag and call for new elections to be held on July 31. Papen apparently hoped that new elections would further weaken the moderate center and left, while providing broad popular support for his authoritarian designs. “The system is collapsing,” Goebbels gleefully confided to his diary. Papen might be chancellor for now, but the people were to be called to the polls once again. “Voting, voting! Out to the people. We’re all very happy.”

  No sooner had the ban on the SA been lifted than a firestorm of political terrorism raged through the country. Storm Troopers surged back onto the streets, and violent clashes with the Red Front and Reichsbanner became everyday occurrences. In the last half of June, the police reported seventeen political murders, and during the run-up to the election on July 31, no fewer than eighty-six killings and literally hundreds of wounded were recorded. The dead and wounded were for the most part Nazis and Communists. “Berlin was in a state of civil war,” wrote Christopher Isherwood, the English writer, who was living in the city that summer. “Hate exploded suddenly without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon. Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer-mugs, chair legs or leaded clubs; bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster columns, rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines.”

  During seven days in mid-July, the carnage in the streets reached a murderous crescendo. On Sunday, July 17, some seven thousand Storm Troopers marched into the Communist stronghold of Altona, a working-class suburb of Hamburg, where they encountered thousands of heavily armed men of the Red Front. Stones were thrown; shots fired; a pitched battle raged through the narrow streets. When the police finally established order, eighteen people, many of them innocent bystanders, were dead and more than a hundred wounded. Despite all the mayhem and bloodshed Germany had endured since 1929, “Bloody Sunday” came as a shock.

  On the day after the Altona riot, the Papen government issued an emergency decree that prohibited all outdoor rallies and marches. The measure had little effect. The fighting continued; the casualties mounted. Then, on July 20, claiming that the inability of the Prussian authorities to preserve public order forced him to act, Papen dismissed the Social Democratic government of Prussia and declared himself Reich commissar for Germany’s largest state. It was nothing more than a thinly veiled coup d’état carried out against the last lingering stronghold of Weimar democracy.

  Papen hoped that this bold—and illegal—move would establish his anti-Marxist credentials and allow him to present himself to the public as a strong law-and-order leader, and it did win praise in conservative, nationalist circles. But the parties of the moderate center and left were unalterably opposed to Papen and his action. Even the DNVP and DVP, while applauding the chancellor’s “Prussian coup,” were not enthusiastic about mounting a pro-Papen campaign. The Nazis remained true to their pledge to “tolerate” the Papen government, but toleration, they insisted, did not imply support. Although the Nazi campaign refrained from a direct assault on Papen, Goebbels, in a secret memorandum, warned the party’s regional leaders that they “should refuse most strenuously to be associated with this cabinet.” The Nazis heaped ridicule on the emergency decrees of the Papen government, but the primary target of the Nazi campaign was not Papen but “the bankrupt system parties,” which were trying to divert attention from their own dismal history of failure by attacking the newly installed government. The Social Democrats and Communists were responsible for the “bloodbath in the streets,” the Nazis insisted, and “the red civil war” raging over Germany was “the product of a Marxist-Jewish murder campaign.” The chief goal of the campaign was therefore “to destroy the bourgeois splinters, to make inroads for the first time into the ranks of the Zentrum, and to drive the Marxists from power once and for all.”

  During the campaigns of 1932, the Nazis raised the already shrill pitch of negative campaigning into an entirely new register. Rather than emphasizing the party’s radical Weltanschauung or the specifics of its own vague program, the Nazis chose to hammer away at Weimar democracy’s political and economic failures. The existing “system” was a swindle, the Nazis howled, and the other parties were the puppets of special interests—especially big business and big labor. The mainstream parties—the liberals, the Conservatives, the Social Democrats—had sold out the far
mer, the shopkeeper, and the worker to the corporate giants and corrupt union bosses. What had this democracy delivered but an unbroken string of economic disasters, social strife, and humiliating international oppression?

  Hitler again took to the skies, carrying this message to fifty cities in the final fortnight of the campaign. His public appearances were carefully choreographed events. The RPL dispatched special instructions to the party authorities where Hitler was to speak, and an advance team checked the venue, musical selections, the parade route, security, and the roster of preliminary speakers—the warm-up acts for the main performance. Propaganda, the Nazis understood, was not about information; it was about emotions, it was about spectacle, about showmanship. Goebbels and his staff were particularly sensitive to the entertainment value of campaign events, especially Hitler’s public appearances. They understood the marketing concept of branding—and the merchandising associated with it. At each stop on Hitler’s speaking tour, they peddled photographs of Hitler, Goebbels, Strasser, and other top party leaders; they hawked swastika-crested pens, scarves, pendants, bookmarks, and copies of Mein Kampf.

  Theirs was a politics of presentation, and certain tactical considerations were axiomatic: always rent a room too small—better to have spectators scrambling to get in, waiting outside, straining to hear, than to rent a large hall that might be only half full. Place loudspeakers outside so those unfortunates who couldn’t manage a ticket could experience some of the excitement inside. Always provide warm-up acts—either local Nazi political leaders or a speaker from the party’s official list—to work the crowd. The star attraction should always arrive late, allowing the anticipation to build to a fever pitch. In their staging, these Nazi productions resemble nothing in our current public life so much as a rock concert. The stagecraft, the timing, the theatricality was everything.

  Even the daily confrontations and violence seemed scripted. Nazi campaign speeches were intended to provoke, and they did. At many campaign events, local Communists would appear, as if on cue, to sing Communist songs and hurl taunts at Nazi speakers. A brawl would erupt, windows would be smashed, heads broken. The fight would be discussed in the taverns and barbershops for days. Between 1930 and 1933 these clashes became virtual rituals, a drama with a discernible narrative arc, and everyone, from the Nazi speakers and Storm Troopers to the Communist Red Front, understood their roles. It was entertainment; it was spectacle. You didn’t want to miss it.

  Hitler and Goebbels understood that to an electorate grown cynical and angry, the details, the facts didn’t matter. The public, they were convinced, did not want a nuanced discussion of the issues. The party certainly had detailed position papers on everything from fertilizer for farmers to foreign policy, but this was not what Nazi campaigns were selling. For those who bothered to examine the party’s appeals, blatant contradictions abounded—the Nazis promised farmers higher prices for their livestock and produce while pledging lower food prices to city dwellers—and opposing parties never tired of pointing them out.

  Nazi promises didn’t add up, their exasperated opponents complained in frustration. The Nazis were promising everything to everybody, essentially asking people to believe that two and two equal five. Such criticism did not faze the Nazis in the least. They either ignored it or turned it on its head: that sort of whining and impotent criticism was what was wrong with German politics. The other parties—the liberals, the Conservatives, the Communists and Socialist Democrats—were paralyzed by pessimism. They could only wring their hands helplessly while the country sank deeper into chaos and despair. They understood only why things wouldn’t work. But there are times, Hitler understood, when desperate, angry people want two and two to be five, and National Socialism would make it so. There would be a “triumph of the will” over ineffectual rationalism. In the toxic political atmosphere of Depression Germany, slurs, smears, innuendo, and character assassination became the norm as the level of political discourse plummeted. The truth, the facts, hardly mattered, only the successful spin.

  In his countless speeches, Hitler offered no specific policy solutions to the country’s crushing economic problems—that, too, was left to party journals and position papers, which few, either inside the party or in the general public, bothered to read. The RPL warned party speakers and local organizations not to worry about the specifics. “These things don’t need to be discussed in propaganda,” it explained. “Currency questions, autarky, and financial issues don’t belong in rallies. They are technical problems to be handled by specialists.” Party functionaries were instructed to confine themselves to the general campaign slogans and talking points developed at headquarters.

  Hitler was most comfortable pounding away at one theme—the criminal failures of the ineffectual Weimar system, the perfidy of the parliamentary parties, and the determination of the National Socialists to destroy both. Intermingled with this negative assault was a positive message, a vision of an “awakened” National Socialist Germany that would liberate itself from international subjugation and unleash its own energies and talents that had been suppressed by class conflict, religious division, and parochial regional loyalties. Hitler and only Hitler could make Germany great again. This was Hitler’s basic stump speech, delivered literally hundreds of times. It was a speech that combined lofty calls for national unity and common purpose with a wickedly sarcastic caricature of the current system that invariably drew appreciative applause and knowing laughter from the crowd. One did not need to be a Nazi sympathizer or a committed Nazi to find this critique of Germany’s political plight on target.

  These themes were on vivid display in a brief speech Hitler delivered in Eberswalde in the last days of July—a speech important enough for Goebbels to film for national distribution. Having utterly failed the worker, the artisan, the shopkeeper, the farmer for the past thirteen years, the system parties, Hitler charged, did not care to talk about their past performance; they preferred instead to focus only on the past six weeks of the campaign and its violence. “They say: For these past six weeks the National Socialists are responsible.” How this could be so, he didn’t quite see—the National Socialists had not appointed Herr von Papen. Hindenburg and the parties that support him had done that. “But,” moving to the punch line, “even if it were so, I would gladly take responsibility for the last six weeks, but the gentlemen should be so kind as to take responsibility for the past thirteen years. . . . For thirteen long years they have proven what they are capable of accomplishing: A nation destroyed economically, the farmers ruined, the middle class in misery, the finances in the Reich, the states, the towns in shambles, everything bankrupt and millions unemployed. They can twist it any way they want to—but for all this they are responsible.” The line always brought storms of applause.

  Did anyone really believe that a nation could achieve anything worthwhile, he continued, when its “political life is so mangled and mutilated as ours in Germany.” He had just glanced at the ballot in Hessen-Nassau—“thirty-four parties,” he exclaimed, his words dripping with sarcasm.

  The workers their own party, and not just one, that would be too few, it had to be three, four; the middle class, which is so intelligent, must have even more parties; business interests their parties; the farmer his own particular party—also two, three; and the gentlemen homeowners must have their specific interests of a political and philosophical nature represented in a party; and naturally the gentlemen renters can’t be left behind; and the Catholics a party and the Protestants a party, and the Bavarians a party and the Thuringians their own party and the Württembergers an extra special party, and so on and on. Thirty-four parties in one tiny state and that at a time when we are facing monumental challenges that can only be solved if the entire strength of the nation is pulled together. . . . I have set myself one goal, and that is to sweep these thirty-four parties out of Germany.

  He closed with the usual rousing rhetorical flourish:

  We don’t want to be the representatives
of one occupation, one class, one estate, one religion, or one region. No, we want to educate the German to understand that there can be no life without justice, and there can be no justice without power, and that there can be no power without strength and that that strength must reside in our own people.

  Surprisingly underplayed in Hitler’s campaign speeches in 1932 were the vicious anti-Semitic tirades of earlier years. Hitler was an ideological fanatic, and anti-Semitism was at the very core of National Socialist ideology, but he was also a cunning, cold-eyed political strategist. Selling Nazi ideology, he and his staff concluded, had attracted a small but intensely loyal hard core of supporters—the 3 to 6 percent of the electorate the party had received during the first decade of its obscure existence. But ideological appeals could not be expected to attract more.

  While Hitler rarely spoke directly to the “Jewish question” during the campaigns of 1932, the party’s anti-Semitism had hardly gone into total eclipse. It was always there, always in plain sight. Hitler might soar above the ugly, hate-fueled rhetoric when addressing large crowds of potentially undecided voters—after all, everyone presumably knew his views—but out on the campaign trail, the party’s regional speakers railed against the pernicious influence of the Jews, and much of the graphic material produced by the RPL—the leaflets, pamphlets, and posters that blanketed the streets during the campaigns—portrayed the most repellent anti-Semitic stereotypes. Those images, some bordering on the pornographic, were a prominent feature of Julius Streicher’s scurrilous Der Stürmer and found their way into the party’s Illustriert Beobachter (Illustrated Observer), the NSDAP’s contribution to the country’s popular picture press.