Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  Many were carried out by members of the so-called Fighting League of the Commercial Middle Class (Kampfbund des gewerblichen Mittelstandes), in which violent antisemitism went hand in hand with equally violent opposition to department stores (many of them Jewish owned). The extent of the anti-Jewish violence prompted Jewish intellectuals and financiers abroad, especially in the USA, to undertake attempts to mobilize public feeling against Germany and to organize a boycott against German goods – a real threat, given the weakness of the German economy. Beginning in mid-March, the boycott gathered pace and was extended to numerous European countries. The reaction in Germany, led by the Fighting League, was predictably aggressive. A ‘counter-boycott’ of Jewish shops and department stores throughout Germany was demanded. The call was taken up by leading antisemites in the party, at their forefront and in his element the Franconian Gauleiter and pathological antisemite Julius Streicher. They argued that the Jews could serve as ‘hostages’ to force a halt to the international boycott.

  Hitler’s instincts favoured the party radicals. But he was also under pressure to act. On the ‘Jewish Question’, on which he had preached so loudly and so often, he could scarcely now, once in power, back down in the face of the demands of the activists without serious loss of face within the party. When, on 26 March, it was reported through diplomatic contacts that the American Jewish Congress was planning to call the next day for a world-wide boycott of German goods, Hitler was forced into action. As usual, when pushed into a corner he had no half-measures. Goebbels was summoned to the Obersalzberg. ‘In the loneliness of the mountains,’ he wrote, the Führer had reached the conclusion that the authors, or at least beneficiaries, of the ‘foreign agitation’ – Germany’s Jews – had to be tackled. ‘We must therefore move to a widely framed boycott of all Jewish businesses in Germany.’ Streicher was put in charge of a committee of thirteen party functionaries who were to organize the boycott. The party’s proclamation of 28 March, prompted by the Reich Chancellor himself and bearing his imprint, called for action committees to carry out a boycott of Jewish businesses, goods, doctors, and lawyers, even in the smallest village of the Reich. The boycott was to be of indefinite duration. Goebbels was left to undertake the propaganda preparations. Behind the entire operation stood pressure from the Fighting League of the Commercial Middle Class.

  Led by Schacht and Foreign Minister von Neurath, counter-pressures began to be placed on Hitler to halt an action which was likely to have disastrous effects on the German economy and on its standing abroad. Hitler at first refused to consider any retreat. But by 31 March, Neurath was able to report to the cabinet that the British, French, and American governments had declared their opposition to the boycott of German goods in their country. He hoped the boycott in Germany might be called off. It was asking too much of Hitler to back down completely. The activists were by now fired up. Abandonment of the boycott would have brought not only loss of face for Hitler, but the probability that any order cancelling the ‘action’ would have been widely ignored. However, Hitler did indicate that he was now ready to postpone the start of the German boycott from 1 to 4 April in the event of satisfactory declarations opposing the boycott of German goods by the British and American governments. Otherwise, the German boycott would commence on 1 April, but would then be halted until 4 April. A flurry of diplomatic activity resulted in the western governments and, placed under pressure, Jewish lobby groups distancing themselves from the boycott of German goods. Hitler’s demands had largely been met. But by now he had changed his mind, and was again insisting on the German boycott being carried out. Further pressure from Schacht resulted in the boycott being confined to a single day – but under the propaganda fiction that it would be restarted the following Wednesday, 5 April, if the ‘horror agitation’ abroad against Germany had not ceased altogether. There was no intention of that. In fact, already on the afternoon of the boycott day, 1 April, Streicher announced that it would not be resumed the following Wednesday.

  The boycott itself was less than the success that Nazi propaganda claimed. Many Jewish shops had closed for the day anyway. In some places, the SA men posted outside ‘Jewish’ department stores holding placards warning against buying in Jewish shops were largely ignored by customers. People behaved in a variety of fashions. There was almost a holiday mood in some busy shopping streets, as crowds gathered to see what was happening. Groups of people discussed the pros and cons of the boycott. Not a few were opposed to it, saying they would again patronize their favourite stores. Others shrugged their shoulders. ‘I think the entire thing is mad, but I’m not bothering myself about it,’ was one, perhaps not untypical, view heard from a non-Jew on the day. Even the SA men seemed at times rather half-hearted about it in some places. In others, however, the boycott was simply a cover for plundering and violence. For the Jewish victims, the day was traumatic – the clearest indication that this was a Germany in which they could no longer feel ‘at home’, in which routine discrimination had been replaced by state-sponsored persecution.

  Reactions in the foreign press to the boycott were almost universally condemnatory. A damage-limitation exercise had to be carried out by the new Reichsbank President Schacht to assuage foreign bankers of Germany’s intentions in economic policy. But within Germany – something which would repeat itself in years to come – the dynamic of anti-Jewish pressure from party activists, sanctioned by Hitler and the Nazi leadership, was now taken up by the state bureaucracy and channelled into discriminatory legislation. The exclusion of Jews from state service and from the professions had been aims of Nazi activists before 1933. Now, the possibility of pressing for the implementation of such aims had opened up. Suggestions for anti-Jewish discriminatory measures came from various quarters. Preparations for overhauling civil service rights were given a new anti-Jewish twist at the end of March, possibly (though this is not certain) on Hitler’s intervention. On the basis of the notorious ‘Aryan Paragraph’ – there was no definition of a Jew – in the hastily drafted ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ of 7 April, Jews as well as political opponents were dismissed from the civil service. An exception was made, on Hindenburg’s intervention, only for Jews who had served at the front. The three further pieces of anti-Jewish legislation passed in April – discriminating against the admission of Jews to the legal profession, excluding Jewish doctors from treating patients covered by the national insurance scheme, and limiting the number of Jewish schoolchildren permitted in schools – were all hurriedly improvised to meet not simply pressure from below but de facto measures which were already being implemented in various parts of the country. Hitler’s role was largely confined to giving his sanction to the legalization of measures already often illegally introduced by party activists with vested interests in the discrimination running alongside whatever ideological motivation they possessed.

  The seismic shift in the political scene which had taken place in the month or so following the Reichstag fire had left the Jews fully exposed to Nazi violence, discrimination, and intimidation. It had also totally undermined the position of Hitler’s political opponents. There was now little fight left in oppositional parties. The readiness to compromise soon became a readiness to capitulate.

  Already in March, Theodor Leipart, the chairman of the trade union confederation, the ADGB, had tried to blow with the wind, distancing the unions from the SPD and offering a declaration of loyalty to the new regime. It was to no avail. The planning of the destruction of the unions was undertaken by the boss of the still relatively insignificant Nazi union, the Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation (NSBO, National Socialist Factory Cell Organization), Reinhold Muchow and, increasingly, by Robert Ley, the NSDAP’s Organization Leader. Hitler was initially hesitant, until the idea was proposed of coupling it with a propaganda coup. Along the lines of the ‘Day of Potsdam’, Goebbels prepared another huge spectacular for 1 May, when the National Socialists usurped the traditional celebration of th
e International and turned it into the ‘Day of National Labour’. The ADGB took a full part in the rallies and parades. Over 10 million people altogether turned out – though for many a factory workforce attendance was scarcely voluntary.

  The following day, the razzmatazz over, SA and NSBO squads occupied the offices and bank branches of the Social Democratic trade union movement, confiscated its funds, and arrested its functionaries. Within an hour, the ‘action’ was finished. The largest democratic trade union movement in the world had been destroyed. In a matter of days, its members had been incorporated into the massive German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF), founded on 10 May under Robert Ley’s leadership.

  The once-mighty Social Democratic Party of Germany, the largest labour movement that Europe had known, was also at an end. It had been forced during the last years of Weimar into one unholy compromise after another in its attempts to uphold its legalistic traditions while at the same time hoping to fend off the worst. When the worst came, it was ill-equipped. The depression years and internal demoralization had taken their toll. Otto Wels’s speech on 23 March had shown courage. But it was far too little, and far too late. Support was haemorrhaging away. During March and April, the SPD’s paramilitary arm, the huge Reichsbanner, was forced into dissolution. Party branches were closing down. Activists were under arrest, or had fled abroad. Some already began preparations for illegality. Alongside the fear, there was wide disillusionment with Social Democracy. The flight into exile of many party leaders – necessary safety measure that it was – enhanced a sense of desertion. The SPD was by now a rudderless ship. Otto Wels and other party leaders left for Prague, where a party headquarters in exile had already been established. All party activities within the Reich were to be banned, the SPD’s parliamentary representation abolished, its assets confiscated.

  The remaining parties now rapidly caved in, falling domino-style. The Staatspartei (formerly the DDP, the Deutsche Demokratische Partei) dissolved itself on 28 June, followed a day later by the dissolution of the DVP. The Nazis’ conservative coalition partners, the DNVP – renamed in May the German National Front (Deutschnationale Front, DNF) – also capitulated on 27 June. It had been losing members to the NSDAP at an increasing rate; its grass-roots organizations had been subjected to repression and intimidation; the Stahlhelm – many of whose members supported the DNVP – had been placed under Hitler’s leadership in late April and was taken into the SA in June; and the party’s leader, Hugenberg, had become wholly isolated in cabinet, even from his conservative colleagues. Hugenberg’s resignation from the cabinet (which many had initially thought he would dominate), on 26 June, was inevitable after embarrassing the German government through his behaviour at the World Economic Conference in London earlier in the month. Without consulting Hitler, the cabinet, or Foreign Minister von Neurath, Hugenberg had sent a memorandum to the Economic Committee of the Conference rejecting free trade, demanding the return of German colonies and land for settlement in the east. His departure from the cabinet signified the end for his party. Far from functioning as the ‘real’ leader of Germany, as many had imagined he would do, and far from ensuring with his conservative colleagues in the cabinet that Hitler would be ‘boxed in’, Hugenberg had rapidly become yesterday’s man. Few regretted it. Playing with fire, Hugenberg, along with his party, the DNVP, had been consumed by it.

  The Catholic parties held out a little longer. But their position was undermined by the negotiations, led by Papen, for a Reich Concordat with the Holy See, in which the Vatican accepted a ban on the political activities of the clergy in Germany. This meant in effect that, in the attempt to defend the position of the Catholic Church in Germany, political Catholicism had been sacrificed. By that stage, in any case, the Zentrum had been losing its members at an alarming rate, many of them anxious to accommodate themselves to the new times. Catholic bishops had taken over from the Zentrum leaders as the main spokesmen for the Church in dealings with the regime, and were more concerned to preserve the Church’s institutions, organizations, and schools than to sustain the weakened position of the Catholic political parties. Intimidation and pressure did the rest. The arrest of 2,000 functionaries in late June by Himmler’s Bavarian Political Police concentrated minds and brought the swift reading of the last rites for the BVP on 4 July. A day later, the Zentrum, the last-remaining political party outside the NSDAP, dissolved itself. Little over a week later, the ‘Law against the New Construction of Parties’ left the NSDAP as the only legal political party in Germany.

  VII

  What was happening at the centre of politics was happening also at the grass-roots – not just in political life, but in every organizational form of social activity. Intimidation of those posing any obstacle and opportunism of those now seeking the first opportunity to jump on the bandwagon proved an irresistible combination. In countless small towns and villages, Nazis took over local government. Teachers and civil servants were particularly prominent in the rush to join the party. So swollen did the NSDAP’s membership rolls become with the mass influx of those anxious to cast in their lot with the new regime – the ‘March Fallen’ (Märzgefallene) as the ‘Old Fighters’ cynically dubbed them – that on 1 May a bar was imposed on further entrants. Two and a half million Germans had by now joined the party, 1.6 million of them since Hitler had become Chancellor. Opportunism intermingled with genuine idealism.

  Much the same applied also to the broad cultural sphere. Goebbels took up with great energy and enthusiasm his task of ensuring that the press, radio, film production, theatre, music, the visual arts, literature, and all other forms of cultural activity were reorganized. But the most striking feature of the ‘coordination’ of culture was the alacrity and eagerness with which intellectuals, writers, artists, performers, and publicists actively collaborated in moves which not only impoverished and straitjacketed German culture for the next twelve years, but banned and outlawed some of its most glittering exponents.

  The hopes long cherished of the coming great leader eradicated the critical faculties of many intellectuals, blinding them to the magnitude of the assault on freedom of thought as well as action that they often welcomed. Many of the neo-conservative intellectuals whose ideas had helped pave the way for the Third Reich were soon to be massively disillusioned. Hitler turned out for them in practice to be not the mystic leader they had longed for in their dreams. But they had helped prepare the ground for the Führer cult that was taken up in its myriad form by so many others.

  Hardly a protest was raised at the purges of university professors under the new civil service law in April 1933 as many of Germany’s most distinguished academics were dismissed and forced into exile. The Prussian Academy of Arts had by then already undertaken its own ‘cleansing’, demanding loyalty to the regime from all choosing to remain within its hallowed membership.

  The symbolic moment of capitulation of German intellectuals to the ‘new spirit’ of 1933 came with the burning on 10 May of the books of authors unacceptable to the regime. University faculties and senates collaborated. Their members, with few exceptions, attended the bonfires. The poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), whose works were among those consumed by the flames, had written: ‘Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.’

  VIII

  Scarcely any of the transformation of Germany during the spring and summer of 1933 had followed direct orders from the Reich Chancellery. Hitler had rarely been personally involved. But he was the main beneficiary. During these months popular adulation of the new Chancellor had reached untold levels. The Führer cult was established, not now just within the party, but throughout state and society, as the very basis of the new Germany. Hitler’s standing and power, at home and increasingly abroad, were thereby immeasurably boosted.

  Already in spring 1933, the personality cult surrounding Hitler was burgeoning, and developing extraordinary manifestations. ‘Poems’ – usually unctuous doggerel verse, sometimes with a pseudo-religious tone �
�� were composed in his honour. ‘Hitler-Oaks’ and ‘Hitler-Lindens’, trees whose ancient pagan symbolism gave them special significance to völkisch nationalists and nordic cultists, were planted in towns and villages all over Germany. Towns and cities rushed to confer honorary citizenship on the new Chancellor. Streets and squares were named after him.

  The levels of hero-worship had never been witnessed before in Germany. Not even the Bismarck cult in the last years of the founder of the Reich had come remotely near matching it. Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday on 20 April 1933 saw an extraordinary outpouring of adulation as the entire country glutted itself with festivities in honour of the ‘Leader of the New Germany’. However well orchestrated the propaganda, it was able to tap popular sentiments and quasi-religious levels of devotion that could not simply be manufactured. Hitler was on the way to becoming no longer the party leader, but the symbol of national unity.

  And it became more and more difficult for bystanders who were less than fanatical worshippers of the new god to avoid at least an outward sign of acquiescence in the boundless adoration. The most banal expression of acquiescence, the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, now rapidly spread. For civil servants, it was made compulsory a day before Hitler’s party was established as the only one permissible in Germany. Those unable to raise the right arm through physical disability were ordered to raise their left arm. The ‘German Greeting’ – ‘Heil Hitler!’ – was the outward sign that the country had been turned into a ‘Führer state’.

  What of the man at the centre of this astonishing idolization? Putzi Hanfstaengl, by now head of the Foreign Press Section of the Propaganda Ministry, though not part of the ‘inner circle’, still saw Hitler at that time frequently and at close quarters. He later commented how difficult it was to gain access to Hitler, even at this early period of his Chancellorship. Hitler had taken his long-standing Bavarian entourage – the ‘Chauffeureska’ as Hanfstaengl called it – into the Reich Chancellery with him. His adjutants and chauffeur, Brückner, Schaub, Schreck (successor to Emil Maurice, sacked after his flirtation with Geli Raubal), and his court photographer Heinrich Hoffmann were omnipresent, often hindering contact, frequently interfering in a conversation with some form of distraction, invariably listening, later backing Hitler’s own impressions and prejudices. Even Foreign Minister Neurath and Reichsbank President Schacht found it difficult to gain Hitler’s attention for more than a minute or two without some intervention from one or other member of the ‘Chauffeureska’. Only Göring and Himmler, according to Hanfstaengl, could invariably reckon with a brief private audience on request with Hitler, though Goebbels, at least, should be added to Hanfstaengl’s short-list. Hitler’s unpredictability and lack of any form of routine did not help. As had always been the case, he tended to be late in bed – often after relaxing by watching a film (one of his favourites was King Kong) in his private cinema. Sometimes he scarcely appeared during the mornings, except to hear reports from Hans Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, and to look over the press with Goebbels’s right-hand man in the Propaganda Ministry, Walther Funk. The high-point of the day was lunch. The chef in the Reich Chancellery, who had been brought from the Brown House in Munich, had a difficult time in preparing a meal ordered for one o’clock but often served as much as two hours later, when Hitler finally appeared. Otto Dietrich, the press chief, took to eating in any case beforehand in the Kaiserhof, turning up at 1.30 p.m. prepared for all eventualities. Hitler’s table guests changed daily but were invariably trusty party comrades. Even during the first months, conservative ministers were seldom present. Given the company, it was obvious that Hitler would hardly, if ever, find himself contradicted. Any sort of remark, however, could prompt a lengthy tirade – usually resembling his earlier propaganda attacks on political opponents or recollections of battles fought and won.