Yet the government did not ban the Communists in a formal, legal sense, because it feared that the party’s voters would all desert to the Social Democrats in the elections Hitler had called for 5 March. Amidst massive Nazi propaganda, paid for by an inflow of fresh funds from industry, and violent intimidation, in which most rival political meetings were banned or broken up, the Nazis still failed to achieve an overall majority, peaking at 44 per cent and only getting over the 50 per cent barrier with the help of their conservative Nationalist coalition partners. The Communists still won 12 per cent and the Social Democrats 18 per cent, with the Centre Party holding firm at 11 per cent of the vote. This meant that Hitler and his cabinet colleagues were still far short of the two-thirds majority they needed to alter the constitution. But on 23 March 1933 they still managed to get it by threatening civil war if they were frustrated, and by winning over the Centre Party deputies with the promise of a comprehensive Concordat with the Papacy guaranteeing Catholics’ rights. The so-called Enabling Act passed by the Reichstag that day gave the cabinet the right to rule by decree without reference either to the Reichstag or to the President. Together with the Reichstag Fire Decree it provided the legal pretext for the creation of a dictatorship. Only the ninety-four Social Democratic deputies present voted against it.
The Social Democrats and Communists between them had won 221 seats in the Reichstag elections of November 1932 as against 196 for the Nazis and another 51 for the Nazis’ allies the Nationalists. But they failed completely to mount any concerted resistance to the Nazi seizure of power. They were bitterly divided. The Communists, under orders from Stalin in Moscow, labelled the Social Democrats ‘Social Fascists’ and argued that they were worse than the Nazis. The Social Democrats were reluctant to co-operate with a party whose deviousness and unscrupulousness they rightly feared. Their paramilitary organizations fought hard against the Nazis on the streets, but they would have been no match for the army, which backed the Hitler government all the way in 1933, and their numbers were also well below those of the stormtroopers, who numbered more than three-quarters of a million in February 1933. The Social Democrats wanted to avoid bloodshed in this situation, and stayed true to their law-abiding traditions. The Communists believed that the Hitler government was the last gasp of a moribund capitalist system that would quickly collapse, opening the way to a proletarian revolution, so they saw no need to prepare for an uprising. Finally, a general strike was out of the question when unemployment stood at 35 per cent; striking workers would quickly have been replaced by unemployed people desperate to rescue themselves and their families from destitution.
Goebbels got the agreement of the trade union leaders to support the creation of a new national holiday on Mayday, a long-held demand of the unions, and turned it into a so-called day of national labour, with hundreds of thousands of workers gathering on Germany’s public squares under the swastika to listen to speeches by Hitler and the other Nazi leaders broadcast over loudspeakers. The next day stormtroopers all over Germany raided trade union and Social Democratic offices and premises, looted them, carried off the funds, and closed them down. Within a few weeks, mass arrests of union officials and Social Democratic leaders, many of whom were beaten up and tortured in makeshift concentration camps, had broken the spirit of the labour movement. Other parties were now targeted in turn. The liberal and splinter parties, reduced by electoral attrition to being small groups on the fringes of politics, were forced to dissolve themselves. A whispering campaign began against Hitler’s Nationalist coalition partners, coupled with the harassment and arrest of Nationalist officials and deputies. Hitler’s chief Nationalist ally, Alfred Hugenberg, was forced to resign from the cabinet, while the party’s floor leader in the Reichstag was found dead in his office in suspicious circumstances. Protests by Hugenberg met with a hysterical outburst from Hitler, in which he threatened a bloodbath if the Nationalists resisted any longer. By the end of June the Nationalists too had been dissolved. The remaining big independent party, the Centre, suffered a similar fate. Nazi threats to sack Catholic civil servants and close down Catholic lay organizations combined with the Papacy’s panic fear of Communism led to a deal, concluded in Rome. The party agreed to dissolve itself in return for the finalization of the Concordat already promised at the time of the Enabling Act. This supposedly guaranteed the integrity of the Catholic Church in Germany along with all its assets and organizations. Time would show that this was not worth the paper it was written on. In the meantime, however, the Centre Party followed the others into oblivion. By the middle of July 1933, Germany was a one-party state, a position ratified by a law formally banning all other parties apart from the Nazis.
It was not just parties and trade unions that were abolished however. The Nazi assault on existing institutions affected the whole of society. Every state government, every state parliament in Germany’s federal political system, every town and district and local council was ruthlessly purged; the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act were used to dismiss supposed enemies of the state, meaning enemies of the Nazis. Every national voluntary association, and every local club, was brought under Nazi control, from industrial and agricultural pressure-groups to sports associations, football clubs, male voice choirs, women’s organizations - in short, the whole fabric of associational life was Nazified. Rival, politically oriented clubs or societies were merged into a single Nazi body. Existing leaders of voluntary associations were either unceremoniously ousted, or knuckled under of their own accord. Many organizations expelled politically leftish or liberal members and declared their allegiance to the new state and its institutions. This whole process (‘coordination’ in Nazi jargon) went on all over Germany from March to June 1933. By the end, virtually the only non-Nazi associations left were the army and the Churches with their lay organizations. While this was going on, the government passed a law that allowed it to purge the civil service, a vast organization in Germany that included schoolteachers, university staff, judges and many other professions that were not government-controlled in other countries. Social Democrats, liberals and not a few Catholics and conservatives were ousted here too. To save their jobs, at a time when unemployment had reached terrifying dimensions, 1.6 million people joined the Nazi Party between 30 January and 1 May 1933, when the Party leadership banned any more recruiting, while the number of brownshirt paramilitaries grew to over two million by the summer of 1933.
The proportion of civil servants, judges and the like who were actually sacked for political reasons was very small. The major reason for dismissal, however, was not political but racial. The civil service law passed by the Nazis on 7 April 1933 allowed dismissal of Jewish civil servants, though Hindenburg had succeeded in getting a clause inserted protecting the jobs of Jewish war veterans and those appointed under the Kaiser, before 1914. The Jews, Hitler claimed, were a subversive, parasitical element who had to be got rid of. In fact most Jews were middle-class, and liberal-to-conservative in their politics, insofar as they had any. Nevertheless Hitler believed that they had deliberately undermined Germany during the First World War and caused the revolution that created the Weimar Republic. A few socialist and Communist leaders had been Jewish, it is true, but the majority were not. For the Nazis this made no difference. The day after the March election, stormtroopers rampaged along the Kurfürstendamm, a fashionable shopping street in Berlin, hunting down Jews and beating them up. Synagogues were trashed, while all over Germany gangs of brownshirts burst into courthouses and dragged off Jewish judges and lawyers, beating them with rubber truncheons and telling them not to return. Jews who were amongst those arrested as Communists or Social Democrats were particularly harshly treated. Over forty Jews had been murdered by stormtroopers by the end of June 1933.
Such incidents were widely reported in the foreign press. This formed the pretext for Hitler, Goebbels and the Nazi leadership to put into action a long-mulled-over plan to stage a nationwide boycott of Jewish shops and businesses. On 1 Ap
ril 1933 stormtroopers stood menacingly outside such premises warning people not to enter them. Most non-Jewish Germans obeyed, but not with any enthusiasm. The biggest Jewish firms were untouched because they contributed too much to the economy. Realizing it had failed to arouse popular enthusiasm, Goebbels called the action off after a few days. But the beatings, the violence and the boycott had their effect on the Jewish community in Germany, 37,000 of whose members had emigrated by the end of the year. The regime’s purge of Jews, whom it defined not by their religious adherence but by racial criteria, had a particular effect in science, culture and the arts. Jewish conductors and musicians such as Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer were summarily dismissed or prevented from performing. The film industry and radio were rapidly purged of both Jews and political opponents of the Nazis. Non-Nazi newspapers were closed down or brought under Nazi control, while the journalists’ union and the newspaper publishers’ association both placed themselves under Nazi leadership. Left-wing and liberal writers, such as Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann and many others, were stopped from publishing; many left the country. Hitler reserved his particular enmity for modern artists like Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Vassily Kandinsky. Before 1914 he had been rejected from the Vienna Art Academy because his painstakingly representational drawings of buildings had been thought talentless. Under the Weimar Republic, abstract and Expressionist artists had gained wealth and reputation with what Hitler thought were ugly and meaningless daubs. While Hitler railed against modern art in his speeches, gallery and museum directors were sacked and replaced with men who enthusiastically removed modernist works from exhibition. The many modernist artists and composers, like Klee or Schoenberg, who held positions in state educational institutions, were all fired.
Altogether about 2,000 people active in the arts emigrated from Germany in 1933 and the following years. They included virtually everyone with an international reputation. Nazi anti-intellectualism was underlined still further by events in the universities. Here too Jewish professors in all fields were dismissed. Many, including Albert Einstein, Gustav Hertz, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born and twenty past or future Nobel prize winners, left the country. By 1934, some 1,600 out of 5,000 university teachers had been forced out of their jobs, a third because they were Jewish, the rest because they were political opponents of the Nazis. Sixteen per cent of physics professors and assistants emigrated. In the universities it was above all the students, helped by a small number of Nazi professors such as the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who drove the purges on. They forced Jewish and leftist professors out by violent demonstrations, and then, on 10 May 1933, they organized demonstrations in the main squares of nineteen university towns and cities in which huge numbers of books by Jewish and left-wing authors were piled up and set alight. What the Nazis were trying to achieve was a cultural revolution, in which alien cultural influences - notably the Jews but also modernist culture more generally - were eliminated and the German spirit reborn. Germans did not just have to acquiesce in the Third Reich, they had to support it with all their heart and soul, and the creation of the Propaganda Ministry under Joseph Goebbels, which soon acquired control over the whole sphere of culture and the arts, was the main means by which the Nazis sought to achieve this end. Nevertheless, Nazism was in many respects a thoroughly modern phenomenon, keen to use the latest technology, the newest weapons, and the most scientific means of reshaping German society to its will. Race, for the Nazis, was a scientific concept, and by making it the basis of all their policies, they were taking their stand on what they conceived of as the application of scientific method to human society. Nothing, neither religious beliefs, nor ethical scruples, nor long-hallowed tradition, was to get in the way of this revolution. Yet in the summer of 1933, Hitler felt constrained to tell his followers that it was time for the revolution to come to a stop. Germany needed a period of stability. This book begins at that moment, the moment when the destruction of the remnants of the Weimar Republic had been completed and the Third Reich was finally in power.
1
THE POLICE STATE
‘ NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES’
I
On 6 July 1933 Hitler gathered leading Nazis together for a stock-taking of the general situation. The National Socialists’ revolution had succeeded, he told them; power was theirs, and theirs alone. It was now, he said, time to stabilize the regime. There should be no more talk, of the kind that had been circulating amongst senior members of the brownshirted paramilitary wing of the Party, the Storm Division (Sturmabteilung , or SA), of a ‘second revolution’ to follow the ‘conquest of power’:
Revolution is not a permanent condition. It must not develop into a permanent condition. The stream of revolution has been undammed, but it must be channelled into the secure bed of evolution . . . The slogan of the second revolution was justified as long as positions were still present in Germany that could serve as points of crystallization for a counter-revolution. That is not the case any longer. We do not leave any doubt about the fact that if necessary we will drown such an attempt in blood. For a second revolution can only direct itself against the first one.1
This declaration was followed by numerous similar, if less overtly threatening, statements by other Nazi leaders in the following weeks. Pressure was mounting from the Reich Justice and Interior Ministries to deal with arbitrary violence, and the Reich Economics Ministry was worried that continuing unrest would give the international financial community the impression of continuing instability in Germany and so discourage economic investment and recovery. The Interior Ministry complained about arrests of civil servants, the Justice Ministry about arrests of lawyers. Brownshirt violence was continuing all over the country, most notoriously in the ‘Köpenick blood-week’ in June 1933, when a raiding party of stormtroopers had encountered resistance from a young Social Democrat in a Berlin suburb. After the Social Democrat shot three stormtroopers dead, the brownshirts mobilized en masse and arrested more than 500 local men, torturing them so brutally that ninety-one of them died. Amongst them were many well-known Social Democratic politicians, including the former Minister-President of Mecklenburg, Johannes Stelling.2 Clearly, this kind of violence had to be checked: it was no longer necessary to beat the opponents of the Nazis into submission and establish a one-party state. Moreover, Hitler was beginning to be concerned about the power that the rampages of the ever-expanding SA gave to its leader Ernst Röhm, who had declared on 30 May 1933 that its task of completing the National Socialist Revolution ‘still lies before it’. ‘Whether declarations of loyalty come every day from “co-ordinated” beekeeping or bowling clubs makes no odds,’ Röhm added, ‘nor whether a town’s streets get up-to-date names.’ Others might celebrate the Nazi victory, but the political soldiers who had fought it, he said, had to take matters in hand and carry it further.3
On 2 August 1933, worried by such declarations, Hermann Goring, acting in his capacity as Minister-President of Prussia, rescinded an order of the previous February enrolling the brownshirts as auxiliary officers of the Prussian police. The Ministries of other federated states followed suit. The established police force now had more room for manoeuvre in dealing with the stormtroopers’ excesses. The Prussian Ministry of Justice set up a central Public Prosecutor’s Office to deal with murders and other serious crimes in the concentration camps, though it also ordered the end of ongoing prosecutions of SA and SS men for crimes of violence, and the pardoning of those few who had actually been sentenced. Strict regulations were issued about who was entitled to place people in protective custody, and what procedures were to be observed in doing so. An indication of what had been the practice to date was provided by the prohibitions contained in the consolidated regulations issued in April 1934: no one was to be taken into protective custody for personal reasons such as slander, or because they had dismissed employees, or acted as legal representatives of people subsequently imprisoned, or had brought an objectionable legal action before the court
s. Deprived of its initial raison d’être as the street-fighting, saloon-brawling arm of the Nazi movement, and removed from its position in charge of many small improvised prison camps and torture centres, the SA found itself suddenly without a role.4
Elections were now no longer seriously contested, so the stormtroopers were robbed of the opportunity that the constant electioneering of the early 1930s had given them to parade through the streets and break up the meetings of their opponents. Disillusion began to set in. The SA had expanded hugely in the spring of 1933, as sympathizers and opportunists from many quarters flooded in. In March 1933 Röhm had announced that any ‘patriotically minded’ German man could join. When recruitment to the Nazi Party had been halted in May 1933, because the Party leadership feared that too many opportunists were joining, and their movement was being swamped by men who were not really committed to their cause, many people had seen enrolment in the brownshirts as an alternative, thus weakening the links between the Party and its paramilitary wing. The incorporation of the huge veterans’ organization, the Steel Helmets, into the brownshirt organization, in the second half of 1933, further boosted SA numbers. At the beginning of 1934 there were six times as many stormtroopers as there had been at the beginning of the previous year. The total strength of the ‘Storm Division’ now stood at nearly three million men; four and a half million if the Steel Helmets and other incorporated paramilitary groups were counted in. This completely dwarfed the size of the German armed forces, which were legally restricted to a mere 100,000 by the Treaty of Versailles. At the same time, however, despite restrictions imposed by the Treaty, the army was by far the better equipped and better trained fighting force. The spectre of civil war that had loomed so ominously at the beginning of 1933 was beginning to raise its head once more.5
The Third Reich in Power Page 3