As was so often the case, Hitler began haltingly but picked up steam as he rumbled onto familiar tracks. He recounted his spectacular rise from obscurity; he recapitulated the obligatory broadsides against the men of November 1918; condemned the corrosive system that for fourteen years had produced nothing but misery and despair, leaving millions without work and thousands with bankrupt businesses and family farms lost to the banks. He lamented the degradation of the culture and the loss of pride in being German. It was time to save the nation, and just as he had built a party of twelve million from a tiny group of seven, he would rebuild Germany, restore its faith and self-respect. These efforts would be guided by one realization, one conviction: “We shall never believe in foreign help, never in help which lies outside our own nation, outside our own Volk. The future of the German Volk lies in itself alone.
“Our opponents are asking about our program,” he thundered. “They say ‘Show us the details of your program. . . . ’ ” Well, he might well ask the worthy gentlemen, “ ‘Where was your program over the past fourteen years?’ ” Surely, he said mockingly, you don’t “intend to now suddenly recall that you bear the responsibility for [these] fourteen years.” After the endless string of calamities they had inflicted on Germany, “the German people must be rebuilt from top to bottom, just as you destroyed it from top to bottom! That is our program!”
In order to rebuild the nation “we must eliminate the causes of our own disintegration and thus bring about the reconciliation of the German classes. . . . The parties which support this division can . . . be certain that as long as the Almighty keeps me alive, my resolve and my will to destroy them will know no bounds. Never, never,” Hitler bellowed, his rasping voice ramping ever higher, “will I stray from the task of stamping out Marxism and its side effects in Germany, and never will I be willing to make any compromise on this point. There can be only one victor: either Marxism or the German Volk! And Germany will triumph.”
As the campaign began, a wave of intimidation and terror broke over the country. SA gangs roamed the streets; the police were co-opted, the courts paralyzed; legal norms turned upside down; the very meaning of law in flux. Storm Troopers disrupted political gatherings, arrested Social Democratic and Communist officials, and assaulted Jews. Leftist newspapers were banned for a few days here and there, their offices raided, their campaign rallies broken up. “It is a disgrace which gets worse with every day that passes,” Viktor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of philology in Dresden, confided to his diary on February 21. “And there’s not a sound from anyone and everyone’s keeping his head down, Jewry most of all and their democratic press. . . . What is strangest of all is how one is blind in the face of events, how no one has a clue to the real balance of power.”
On February 24 the SA auxiliary police raided the Karl Liebknecht House, the Communist headquarters in Berlin. Only a few clerks and low-level functionaries were in the building and almost all of the party’s documents had already been removed. This did not prevent Göring from claiming to have found “tons of seditious material,” clearly revealing that a Communist coup was in the works. None of these incriminating documents were produced in the following days (or ever), even for the Nazi press, which did nothing to tamp down the party’s hysteria about an imminent Communist uprising.
Then, in the night of February 27–28, with the campaign going as the Nazis planned and the election only one week away, an event occurred that dramatically altered the pace of events. Hitler was enjoying an evening of relaxation with Goebbels and his wife, Magda, at their home when shortly after 9:30 Putzi Hanfstaengl telephoned with startling news: from the window of his quarters in the Wilhelmstrasse he could see rippling sheets of flame rising from the Reichstag. Goebbels was skeptical—was this another of Putzi’s bad jokes? Come see for yourself, Hanfstaengl told him brusquely and hung up. Stepping outside into the darkness, Hitler could see an ominous crimson glow beyond the black treetops of the Tiergarten. Within minutes Hitler and Goebbels arrived on the scene. Climbing out of their black limousines, they found the area cordoned off, fire brigades and police units swarming everywhere. Swollen fire hoses tessellated the pavement, sirens wailed, and through the tumult of soot and flying grit the sound of crackling flames, breaking glass, and falling timbers. The imposing glass dome of the building had shattered. The wood-paneled plenary chamber, with its ancient benches and cushioned chairs, its heavy curtains and dry-as-a-bone flooring, had gone up like a tinderbox.
Göring, dressed in an expensive camel-hair coat and wearing a brown hat turned up in front in the stylish Potsdam manner, was already on the scene, bustling about, bellowing commands. The fire was largely under control, he reported, as Hitler and his party approached. He had initially been worried about the Gobelin tapestries, but they had been saved. “It’s the Communists,” he declared. There was no doubt about it. A number of Communist deputies had been seen in the building only twenty minutes before the fire broke out. Surely this was the beginning of the long-anticipated Communist uprising. “God grant that this may be the Communists,” Hitler remarked to Sefton Delmer, an English journalist who managed to accompany Hitler and his party as they toured the still-burning Reichstag. “If the Communists got hold of Europe and had control of it six months—what am I saying!—two months—the whole continent would be aflame like this building.” To an impeccably dressed Papen, who arrived fresh from a formal dinner party in Hindenburg’s honor, Hitler added, “This is a God-given signal, Herr Vice Chancellor! If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist!”
Moments later Rudolf Diels, the career police official whom Göring had promoted to head the new Prussian secret state police (Gestapo), reported that a suspect had been apprehended in the building—a young, soot-covered Dutchman with strong anti-Fascist sentiments and vague ties to the Dutch Communist Party. The man, twenty-four-year-old Marinus van der Lubbe, defiantly admitted to starting the fire and steadfastly claimed to have acted alone. Over the past week he had set fires in other government buildings, he boasted, though not as successfully as the Reichstag conflagration. His actions were intended as a cry of protest against the new government. His confession, Diels thought, had the ring of truth to it and expressed skepticism that this was the signal for a Communist insurrection. From his numerous interrogations of arrested KPD officials and his review of confiscated Communist documents, he had come to the conclusion that the Communists were in disarray and were simply incapable of organizing a mass action to overthrow the government. The call for a general strike, the threats of a popular uprising, were all talk, his sources told him, intended above all to embarrass the Social Democrats and reveal their timidity.
When Diels tried to explain this, Hitler, his face flaming red with heat and excitement, wasn’t having it. In an outburst of rage that bordered on hysteria, he shrieked, “Now we’ll show them! Anyone who stands in our way will be mown down! The German people have been soft too long. Every Communist official must be shot. All Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. All friends of the Communists must be locked up. And that goes for the Social Democrats and the Reichsbanner as well!” After listening to this unbridled rant, Diels turned to the Reichstag building inspector standing beside him and muttered, “This is a madhouse.”
The little group adjourned to the Reichstag President’s office in the building, where Hitler continued his tirade. Still in a fury, Hitler ordered Göring to take all necessary measures to crush the Communist uprising, and Göring, himself highly agitated, quickly obeyed. He hurriedly issued a flood of sweeping and confusing instructions to Diels, ordering him to put all police on emergency footing with instructions for the mass arrest of Communists and Social Democrats, and a “shoot to kill” order in the event of resistance. Later a directive was sent by police radio to all law enforcement officials to arrest not only all Communist delegates in the Reichstag, but in all provincial legislatures and town c
ouncils as well. All Communist functionaries were to be rounded up, all Communist newspapers were to be suppressed. Some seven thousand Communist functionaries, legislative deputies, journalists, and fellow travelers were arrested.
Hitler and Goebbels left the still-burning Reichstag, convinced that they had witnessed the first shot in the Communist insurrection. They rushed to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, where they convened an impromptu conference of police and government officials. Hitler repeated his order for the mass arrest of Communists, and one official suggested that a new emergency decree against arson and terroristic attacks be issued to give legal cover for the arrests to follow. Hitler agreed but decided that it should be discussed at a meeting of the cabinet he would call for the next morning. From there Hitler and Goebbels rushed to the offices of the Völkischer Beobachter where they supervised the paper’s coverage of the crime. So far there had been no discussion of more sweeping measures.
The next morning, the Reich cabinet met in emergency session. The first item on the agenda was Hitler’s insistence that despite the expected Communist uprising, the March 5 elections must go forward. Papen favored declaring martial law, handing power over to the army (and Hindenburg), which Hitler was not about to do. Besides, no election could be held under martial law, and Hitler was convinced that after the Reichstag fire and the ensuing anti-Communist hysteria, the Nazis would prevail in the election, perhaps winning a majority. Wilhelm Frick then produced a short draft of a measure he had drawn up in preparation for the meeting. The gist of the document was that the regime would impose a form of martial law to be enforced not by the army but by the civilian government. The model was Papen’s July 20 seizure of power in Prussia during the previous year. The draft suspended freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and arrogated to the government the authority to open private mail and to place wiretaps on telephones. It also gave the regime the right to make arrests without warrant or judicial review and to detain persons for an unlimited amount of time. The police would be empowered to conduct warrantless searches and confiscate property “beyond the legal limits otherwise proscribed.”
The draft was accepted with little discussion or demur, and that same day Reich President Hindenburg was prevailed upon to issue an emergency decree, “For the Protection of People and State.” Hitler was careful to frame the decree as a purely defensive measure, intended as “a ruthless settling of accounts” with the Communists, something the conservative cabinet majority could certainly endorse, and, he insisted, the execution of the decree “must not be dependent on legal considerations.” The blanket suspension of civil rights embodied in the decree provoked no opposition. Under the circumstances, it did not seem so ominous. After all, it was to be only a temporary measure, the conservatives still held a majority in the cabinet, and, they complacently believed, still held the real power in the new government. To further allay fears of an emerging Nazi dictatorship, Hitler solemnly declared that the suspension of civil rights was only temporary. As he declared to Sefton Delmer, “I myself am only too anxious for the normal state of affairs to be restored as quickly as possible. . . . First, however, we must crush Communism out of existence.”
Although it is not clear that Hitler at first perceived the full implications of the hastily drafted edict, the Reichstag Fire Decree, as it came to be known, put an end to all civil rights guaranteed by the Weimar constitution and provided the legal basis for Nazi suppression of all opposition by “enemies of the state.” In four short paragraphs it sounded the death knell of democracy in Germany and served as the founding document of the Third Reich.
The Communists meanwhile vehemently denied any responsibility for the fire, claiming instead that the Nazis had set the blaze, and international opinion tended to agree. After all, the Nazis were the obvious beneficiaries of the fire, and the swift Nazi response seemed less a spontaneous reaction than an act of premeditation. Virtually no one believed that the enormous conflagration had been the work of one man, least of all van der Lubbe, whose police photographs seemed to offer pictorial evidence that the young man was mentally defective. (He was not.) So either the Communists had torched the building or the Nazis. Variations on exactly how and by whom were myriad, but in this view the Nazi reaction was so rapid and radical that it had to be a Nazi plot, planned and executed as justification for a severe crackdown on the left.
No definitive evidence of responsibility for the fire has ever emerged, but much hangs on the interpretation. Some historians have claimed that the Reichstag fire was part of a Nazi plan to establish the regime’s total domination over state and society, a calculated pretext for the oppressive measures that followed. Among other suggestive evidence, they point to the fact that a tunnel ran from Göring’s office directly to the speaker’s podium in the Reichstag, where, they hypothesize, the blaze began. They also note suspicious comments attributed to various SA men and other party leaders, especially Göring, in the preceding days, as they loudly claimed that the Communists were planning a campaign of public unrest and arson against government buildings. It remains a plausible case.
But the most compelling evidence to date strongly suggests that neither the Nazis nor the Communists set the fire, but that, unlikely as it might seem, Marinus van der Lubbe acted alone. But if the Nazis had not planned it, Hitler and the Nazi leadership saw in the Reichstag fire an unanticipated opportunity for decisive action against the Communists. It was exactly the sort of improvisation that would characterize the first months of Nazi rule—indeed, for much of the Third Reich. The Nazis certainly made every effort to link the Communists to the crime, arresting hundreds of Communist functionaries and formally charging Ernst Torgler, head of the Communist Reichstag delegation, and Georgi Dimitrov, a representative of the Communist International living in Berlin, and two other Bulgarian Communists who happened to be in the city. These actions were not simply for propaganda purposes; Hitler’s fear and rage were not feigned. Göring, Hitler, and the Nazi leadership were convinced that the long anticipated Communist revolution had finally come. There could be no doubt, Goebbels recorded in his diary on February 27, that the Reichstag fire represented “a final Communist attempt to use arson and terror to create disorder and in the resultant general panic to seize power. The decisive moment has come. Göring has set everything in motion.” Despite an utter lack of evidence, the Nazis had for years so demonized the Communists, had so stoked their own imagination with fantastic charges of devilish Bolshevik plots that they came to believe it themselves. They had expected a Communist uprising; now it had come. Nazi actions around the Reichstag fire were driven less by clever design than their own feverish fantasies.
Göring boasted publicly about the incriminating documents he had discovered in the Karl Liebknecht House—documents that revealed that the Communists were hatching a vast plot to overthrow the government. They intended to spread terror by setting fire to public buildings in Berlin and elsewhere; they planned to disrupt the nation’s electrical grid, murder public figures, and kidnap their wives and children; they even intended to poison the water supply. Despite Diels’s plea not to do so, Göring insisted that there should be a trial before the German Supreme Court in Leipzig, in which he would act as special prosecutor. It was to be a show trial of the first order. But the damning evidence Göring claimed to have found did not materialize in the Nazi press or at the trial. Publishing in exile, the left-leaning journal Die Weltbühne claimed that the cabinet, upon examining the documents, had insisted that they were such clumsy forgeries that they could not be presented to the court. In a humiliating blow to Göring, the court found no firm evidence of a Communist conspiracy and acquitted Torgler, Dimitrov, and the Bulgarian Communists. Van der Lubbe alone was convicted in September and beheaded in January 1934.
Regardless of who started the fire, the Nazis wasted no time in exploiting it. On March 2, Göring made the regime’s intentions brutally clear: “It will be my chief object
ive to expunge the pestilence of Communism. . . . I don’t need the Reichstag fire to move against Communism, and I’m not betraying any secret when I say that if it were left to Hitler and me, the perpetrators would already be swinging on the gallows.” In a directive to police officials across Germany, he made clear that they were to interpret the Reichstag Fire Decree broadly. The police and their auxiliaries were to move against the Communists “but also those who work with Communists, or support or further, even indirectly, their criminal goals.” It was open season not only on the left but on anyone suspected of opposition, no matter how insignificant, to the regime.
The enactment of the Reichstag Fire Decree removed the last gossamer restraints on the SA. All across Germany the Brown Shirts unleashed a campaign of unrestrained terror. Storm Troopers and party radicals, acting on their own initiative, seized city halls, purged police departments, schools, and cultural institutions. Jails and prisons overflowed with political prisoners taken into “protective custody”; Jews, Social Democrats, Communists, troublesome clergy, anyone who had crossed them, found themselves under assault. Grudges were settled, revenge taken. Ali Höhler, the convicted killer of Horst Wessel, was torn from his prison cell and murdered in a forest near Berlin. The police made some formal arrests and filed charges, but the SA acted as a law unto itself—as, indeed, it was. Storm Troopers dragged their victims to old warehouses, empty factories and schools, into cellars, where they were beaten and tortured. These makeshift prisons, or camps as they were called, sprouted like poisonous weeds all across the country—there were more than one hundred in Berlin alone. They followed no order from above; there was no coordinated plan of action for these spontaneous prison camps. As Rudolf Diels remarked, these hellholes “weren’t established; one day they were just there.”
The Third Reich Page 31