Hitler was hopeful that with the power of the state behind him, the elections of March 5 would yield a Nazi majority, freeing the party from Hindenburg and its conservative coalition partners. With a working majority in place, he would pass an “enabling law,” granting the government the power to act independently for a period of time—four years is what he had in mind—without interference from the Reichstag and its quagmire of wrangling parties. It was an idea Hitler—and also Papen—had put forward in November, and which Hindenburg had rebuffed, but the Old Gentleman had softened, and this “Government of National Concentration,” he realized, seemed to offer the last best chance for a workable, meaning right-wing, parliamentary government.
On the night of February 1, Hitler addressed the nation for the first time as Reich chancellor. For many who had never actually heard him speak but knew his reputation as a blustering firebrand and fanatic, the national radio address must have come as something of a surprise. It was a different Hitler whose voice crackled over the airwaves that winter night. Missing was the usual bombast, the bellicose tirades, the fanatical anti-Semitic rants. Instead, a surprisingly measured, statesmanlike Hitler pleaded for national unity, mouthing platitudes about national self-reliance, German greatness, and world peace. He called for the restoration of Germany’s right to defend itself, a reference to the international disarmament conference under way in Geneva, but rather than excoriating the victorious Allies, as he had routinely done for more than a decade, he expressed his “most sincere wish for the welfare of Europe, and more, for the welfare of the whole world.” He was committed to the “preservation and maintenance of a peace which the world needs now more than ever before.” He even invoked the Almighty, piously pledging that his government would “extend its strong, protecting hand over Christianity as the basis of our entire morality and the family as the germ cell of the body of our people and state.”
Turning to the most pressing issue of the day, he announced a four-year plan to rebuild the economy, which would put the jobless back to work, rescue the peasantry from poverty, and restore middle-class prosperity, but he offered no specifics. There was a glancing reference to “a compulsory labor service” and a commitment to “the performance of social duties for the sick and aged,” but little else. To a nation battered by a progression of economic calamities—the hyperinflation, harsh stabilization, and the Great Depression—he sought to assure the public and the business community that there would be no radical experiments that would destabilize the currency or hurl Germany into even greater economic despair.
None of this could be achieved, however, until the scourge of Marxism was expunged from German life. If the Communists were to seize power, Hitler warned, it would be “a catastrophe of unfathomable dimensions. . . . Beginning with the family and ranging through all of the concepts of honor and loyalty, Volk und Vaterland, culture and economy, all the way to the eternal foundation of our morality and our faith, nothing has been spared by this negating, all destroying dogma.” Fourteen years of Marxism had ruined Germany; one year of Bolshevism would destroy it. Alarming signs of Communist subversion were everywhere. “In a single gigantic offensive of willpower and violence, the Communist method of madness is attempting to poison and disrupt the Volk.” The Communists represented a clear and present danger to the political, economic, and moral health of the people, and cleansing Germany of this toxic pollutant would be the first priority of the new government. “Now, German people,” he concluded, “give us four years, and then pass judgment upon us! True to the order of the Field Marshal, we shall begin. May Almighty God look mercifully on our work, lead our will on the right path, bless our wisdom, and reward us with the confidence of our people. We are not fighting for ourselves, but for Germany!”
In a revealing reflection of his priorities, Hitler, on the next day, moved to win the support—or at the very least the benevolent neutrality—of the army. It was arranged for General Blomberg, the new minister of defense, to invite Hitler to address a group of generals at the home of General Hammerstein, commander of the army. Blomberg was sympathetic to the Nazis; Hammerstein was not, and as long as Hindenburg was alive, the army was a potential threat to the new government. Hitler began by reassuring the generals that the army would remain the only armed force in Germany; he had no intention of transforming the SA into a people’s army—a concern that had grown steadily throughout 1932 thanks to provocative remarks by Röhm and other SA commanders. They were also relieved to hear that Hitler intended to keep the army out of politics and that it would not be expected to intervene in the event of domestic unrest, a possibility that in February 1933 seemed quite likely. Perhaps most importantly, Hitler announced that rearmament would be the government’s highest priority. The army would be vastly expanded and would be well equipped not only to defend Germany’s frontiers but to be prepared for an expansion to the east, which, Hitler declared, was essential for the future health of the German people. Despite the initially cool reception he received and lingering reservations privately expressed by some of those present, Hitler’s remarks met with general approval. Few were enthusiastic supporters of Hitler, but for most the political alternatives in Germany seemed to be either the Nazis or the Reds, and for them that was no choice at all.
With the army apparently pacified, the Government of National Concentration wasted little time in translating Hitler’s words into action. Many Germans worried that Hitler’s assumption of power would push the country into civil war, a fear vigorously stoked by the Nazi press, which filled its pages with alleged leftist plots to overthrow the government. After all, the Social Democrats and Communists, implacable foes of the Nazis, were a force to be reckoned with. Together the two parties continued to draw an electorate larger than that of the NSDAP, and both commanded powerful street organizations. Surely the showdown would now come.
That anxiety was heightened when on January 31 the Communists called for a general strike to protest Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. It was, the Nazis claimed, the opening salvo of the expected Communist assault. Under the circumstances, it took little effort to convince Hindenburg—and much of the public—that the nation was in peril, and on February 2 the Reich President issued an emergency decree, “For the Protection of the German People.” The decree empowered the government to ban all public meetings, newspapers, leaflets, and pamphlets that brought the new government and its officials “into contempt.” In effect, it permitted the government to suppress Communist and Social Democratic campaign events, harass and arrest their functionaries, and to close any publication that offered even a hint of criticism of the Government of National Concentration. With a Reichstag election looming, the decree dealt a crippling blow to the Social Democratic and Communist campaigns, made criticism of the government a crime, and opened the door to “legal” harassment of opposing parties.
That decree was immediately followed by another that dissolved all elected bodies in Prussia, the country’s largest state and a stronghold of pro-democratic forces, and transferred all power to the national government. Both measures were blatantly unconstitutional, but aside from a protest to the Reichstag Rules Committee by the Social Democrats and their initiation of legal proceedings against the government in the Supreme Court, these actions provoked little public outcry and no sustained resistance.
The critical question was who would enforce these measures and how. The answer was not long in coming. Although still technically subordinate to Papen, Göring, acting in his capacity as Reich commissar for the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, immediately assumed control over all police forces in three fifths of Germany. Göring had played an important role in the frantic backdoor negotiations in the months leading to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, but held no formal position in the party hierarchy nor had he built up a cohort of followers within the ranks. Yet in the first crucial weeks of the Hitler government, it was Göring, with his boundless energy and naked ambition, who drove events, and it was his ruthless
will to power that set the tone of cold-blooded brutality and utter contempt for law that would define Nazi rule.
He did not wait for orders from Papen or even from Hitler. In his first days in office, he detached the section of the Berlin Police Presidium that had dealt with political matters during the Weimar years and created a separate entity that would report directly to him. It would be a secret state police or Gestapo, short for Geheime Staatspolizei, to gather information and conduct investigations of political events and personalities that might have criminal implications. To head the Gestapo he turned not to a fellow Nazi but to Rudolf Diels, a conservative, high-ranking career official in the Interior Ministry. Then, acting on his own, he immediately initiated a massive purge of the Prussian civil government at all levels, dismissing hundreds of officials—Social Democrats, liberals, Jews—anyone whose loyalty to the new Reich government was in question. Most important, he purged top police officials in fourteen major Prussian cities, replacing them with Nazis and hard-line conservatives. That was only the beginning. On February 17 he issued an order demanding that “the police must in all circumstances avoid even the appearance of a hostile attitude, still less the impression of persecution, against the patriotic associations”—the SA and Stahlhelm. “I expect from all police authorities that they maintain the best relations with these organizations which comprise the most important state-constructive forces. Patriotic activities and propaganda are to be supported by every means.” Furthermore, it was to be “the business of the police to abet every form of national propaganda.”
The activities of “subversive organizations,” on the other hand, were “to be combated with the most drastic methods.” The police were to move against “Communist terrorist acts” with “all severity.” When necessary, “weapons must be ruthlessly used.” To emphasize the point, Göring explained that “police officers who make use of firearms in the execution of their duties will, without regard to the consequences of such use, benefit by my protection. . . . Every official must bear in mind that failure to act will be regarded more seriously than an error due to taking action.” A few days later, at a closed meeting with police officials who were sworn to secrecy, he informed them that he knew that many of his instructions “conflicted with the present rights and laws of the Reich and its member states,” but he assured them that “every official who follows my instructions may be sure of my absolute protection.” Police officials need not worry that they might afterward be found guilty of violating the constitution. “There will be no attorney and no judge to punish an official for following the new course.”
On February 20, Göring summoned some two dozen leading industrialists to join him at his official residence to discuss economic matters with Hitler. Many of those leaders arrived at Göring’s offices expecting a discussion such as they had had with previous chancellors, a give-and-take about economic issues. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, president of the powerful Reich Association of German Industrialists, had prepared a statement, listing business concerns about Nazi economic policy as well as a series of questions for the new government. Krupp and the assembled leaders of industry were in for a rude shock. First, Göring kept these influential gentlemen waiting for a quarter hour, and Hitler, true to form, arrived later still. After perfunctory handshakes all around, he launched into a rambling monologue of an hour and a half that betrayed little understanding of or interest in economic matters. Hitler assured his listeners that the new government would undertake no economic experiments and recapitulated his well-known views about the primacy of politics over economics, his support for the fundamentals of capitalism, and the crucial importance of the upcoming election. He warned of the looming danger of Communism and his determination to smash it once and for all. “Now we stand before the final election,” he declared. “Whatever the outcome, there will be no retreat. One way or another, if the election does not decide, the decision will be brought about by other means.” No questions were invited, no opinions sought, but as Hitler exited the room, no one was in any doubt about the ominous meaning of his words.
Göring then took the floor and spoke more bluntly, explaining to the assembled businessmen their role in the “national uprising.” He did not mince words. Underscoring the importance of the ongoing campaign, he indicated that the government needed money for this crucial showdown and darkly suggested that those who were not on the front lines of the conflict had an obligation to make financial sacrifices for the cause. This might be easier for them to bear, he added, if the gentlemen understood that the March 5 election would be “the last for the next five years, probably even for the next hundred years.” (The Nazis were inordinately fond of predictions that this or that would last for one hundred years or maybe even a thousand.) When he finished his remarks, he departed the meeting as abruptly as Hitler.
At Göring’s departure, Hjalmar Schacht, the highly respected former president of the Reichsbank, who had long been a Nazi sympathizer and had helped organize the meeting, rose to speak. Whereas Göring had been aggressive but vague, Schacht presented the assembled gentlemen with the tab. The government expected a contribution of three million marks for the campaign. This, his listeners realized, had been the hidden agenda of the meeting all along. There was some grousing. Some still labored under the assumption that Papen, a favorite of the business community, was an equal partner in the cabinet, and insisted that a portion of their contributions go to the Battle Front Black-White-Red, an electoral alliance formed by Papen, Hugenberg, and Seldte of the Stahlhelm. The meeting, as one historian aptly described it, amounted to nothing more than a shakedown. The industrialists did their duty. That evening and in subsequent days Schacht was able to collect pledges of the full three million marks. In March Hitler would reward him by reinstalling him as president of the Reichsbank and a year later naming him Reich minister of economics.
After Göring’s meeting with the industrialists, funds began pouring into the party’s war chest. “Money is there,” Goebbels reported on February 22. “Now we can get going.” With the necessary cash at last on hand and the Brown Shirts conducting a campaign of intimidation and terror against the party’s enemies, a National Socialist landslide did not seem at all far-fetched.
Still, the party wanted to leave nothing to chance. On February 22, claiming that the Communist threat was so menacing that the police lacked the manpower to meet the challenge, Göring announced the creation of an auxiliary police force to be staffed by “volunteers.” Where would the state find these volunteers? Almost overnight, some fifty thousand SA, SS, and Stahlhelm men “volunteered” and were sworn in as “Hilfspolizei,” or auxiliary police. They immediately appeared on the streets all across Prussia wearing their brown Nazi uniforms with the swastika on the left arm, and on the right a white armband signifying auxiliary police. Technically they were under the authority of the regular police, but this was an obvious fiction. These volunteers were the same thugs who for years had clashed with the police, fought pitched battles with the Communists, committed murder and arson, and harassed ordinary citizens on the streets. Now they were the law. Less than a month after Hitler assumed the chancellorship, a state-sanctioned reign of terror had begun.
Among the new and most potent weapons Goebbels wielded in the campaign was the radio. In previous campaigns the government parties had denied Hitler access to the radio; now the tables would be turned. “We make no bones about it,” Goebbels told a group of radio general managers and directors he had summoned to Berlin, “the radio belongs to us, to no one else! And we will place the radio at the service of our idea, no other idea shall be expressed through it.” Virtually every night throughout the campaign, Goebbels flooded the airwaves with speeches by Nazi leaders, monopolizing evening programming. He arranged for Hitler to speak in every town that had its own broadcasting station, and his speeches would be carried nationwide. Loudspeakers were to be strategically placed so that Hitler’s voice would blare through every street and square, reverberating in t
he shops and restaurants and bars. Goebbels provided a dramatic introduction to Hitler’s appearances, setting the scene in a breathless tone intended to “convey . . . the magical atmosphere of our huge demonstrations.”
In one radio broadcast Goebbels also issued a chilling warning to the party’s opponents. “If the Jewish press”—in the Nazi lexicon any non-Nazi newspaper was “Jewish” or “Marxist” or both—“complains that the National Socialist movement is broadcasting Hitler’s speeches nationwide, then I say to them, ‘what you’ve shown us how to do, we are now doing ourselves.’ ” Then, in a voice literally brimming with menace, he added: “If the Jewish newspapers try to get around our emergency decrees or think that they can intimidate our movement, then I say to them: ‘You should beware. One day our patience will come to an end, and then we will stuff shut your lying Jewish mouths.’ ”
The Nazis wove two major motifs into their campaign. One was a positive message: Hitler was rebuilding the nation, putting things right after fourteen years of democratic misrule, cowardice, and corruption. He called on patriotic Germans to join him in his fight to overcome the religious, regional, and class cleavages that had sapped German strength and eroded its resolve. He needed their help. Second and far more prominent was his determination to eradicate Marxism. Both themes were on display in Hitler’s first public appearance as chancellor on February 10 at the Berlin Sportpalast. It was also his first campaign speech for the March 5 election, and on this occasion Hitler the reserved statesman, the conciliatory chancellor, retreated to the wings, while Hitler the demagogic leader of the National Socialist movement strode boldly onto center stage. Gone were the dark blue business suit, black tie, and patent leather shoes; he marched through the wildly cheering crowd in his brown party uniform, the red swastika armband in place; his polished jack boots gleaming in the bright lights. All around the great oval auditorium a stream of swastika banners proclaimed anti-Marxist slogans.
The Third Reich Page 30