The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  The discontents of the stormtroopers were not confined to envy of the army and impatience with the stabilization of politics after July 1933. Many ‘old fighters’ resented the newcomers who jumped onto the Nazi bandwagon early in 1933. Tension was particularly high with the former Steel Helmets who came into the organization. It increasingly found an outlet in fights and scuffles in the early months of 1934. In Pomerania the police banned former Steel Helmet units (now organized as the National Socialist German Front-Fighters’ League) after a stormtrooper leader was murdered by an ex-Steel Helmet member.6 But the resentment of old brownshirts could also be felt on a wider scale. Many had expected rich rewards on the elimination of the Nazis’ rivals, and were disappointed when established local politicians and conservative partners of the Nazis took many of the best pickings. One brownshirt activist, born in 1897, wrote in 1934:

  After the seizure of power, things changed dramatically. People who had hitherto scorned me were now overflowing with praises. In my family and among all the relatives I was now considered number one, after years of bitter feuding. My Storm Division grew by leaps and bounds from month to month so that (from 250 in January) by 1 October 1933, I had 2,200 members - which led to my promotion to Senior Storm Division Leader at Christmas time. The more the philistines lauded me, however, the more I came to suspect that these scoundrels thought they had me in the bag . . . After the incorporation of the Steel Helmets, when things came to a stop, I turned on the reactionary clique which was sneakily trying to make me look ridiculous before my superiors. There were all kinds of denunciations against me at the higher SA offices and with the public authorities . . . Finally, I succeeded in being appointed local mayor . . . so that I could break the necks of all the prominent philistines and the reactionary leftovers of the old times.7

  Such feelings were even stronger amongst the many veteran stormtroopers who failed to manoeuvre themselves into positions of power as successfully as this man did.

  As the young brownshirts found their violent energies deprived of an overtly political outlet, they became involved in increasing numbers of brawls and fights all over Germany, often without any obvious political motive. Gangs of stormtroopers got drunk, caused disturbances late at night, beat up innocent passers-by, and attacked the police if they tried to stop them. Matters were made still worse by Röhm’s attempt to remove the brownshirts from the jurisdiction of the police and the courts in December 1933; henceforth, the stormtroopers were told that all disciplinary matters had to be handled by the organization itself. This was a licence for inaction, even though prosecutions still took place. Röhm found more difficulty in establishing a separate SA jurisdiction that would deal retroactively with more than 4,000 prosecutions of SA and SS men for crimes of various kinds that were still before the courts in May 1934, mostly resulting from the early months of 1933. Many others had been quashed, and more offences still had never been prosecuted in the first place, but this was still a considerable number. Moreover, the army had its own courts-martial; by so setting up a parallel system within the SA, Röhm would obtain a large measure of equal status to it for his own organization. Privately, he had announced the previous July that an SA leader with jurisdiction over the murder of an SA man would be able to sentence to death up to twelve members of ‘the enemy organization which initiated the murder’. This gave a grim indication of the nature of the justice system he hoped to create.8 Clearly, some means had to be found of diverting all this excess energy into useful channels. But leadership of the SA only made matters worse by seeking to direct the movement’s violent activism into what a regional leader in the East, Edmund Heines, publicly described as ‘the continuation of the German revolution’. 9 As head of the SA, Ernst Röhm spoke at numerous rallies and marches in the first months of 1934, emphasizing in similar fashion the revolutionary nature of Nazism and launching open attacks on the Party leadership and in particular the German army, whose senior officers the brownshirts blamed for their temporary banning by order of former Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning in 1932. Röhm caused considerable alarm in the army hierarchy when he declared that he wanted the stormtroopers to form the basis of a national militia, effectively bypassing and perhaps eventually replacing the army altogether. Hitler attempted to fob him off by making him Minister without Portfolio with a seat in the cabinet in December 1933, but given the increasing redundancy of the cabinet by this stage, this meant very little in practical terms, and was no substitute for Röhm’s real ambition, which was to occupy the Ministry of Defence, held at the time by the army’s representative General Werner von Blomberg.10

  Deprived of real power at the centre, Röhm began to build up a cult of his own leadership within the SA and continued to preach the need for further revolution.11 In January 1934, stormtroopers gave practical expression to their radicalism when they burst into the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin and broke up a celebration of the ex-Kaiser’s birthday being held there by a number of army officers.12 The next day, Röhm sent Blomberg a memorandum. Perhaps exaggerating its import for effect, Blomberg said that it demanded that the SA should replace the army as the country’s main fighting force and the traditional military should be restricted to training the stormtroopers to assume this role.13 To the army leadership, the brownshirts now appeared an increasingly serious threat. Since the summer of 1933, Blomberg had brought the army round from its previous formal political neutrality towards increasingly open support for the regime. Blomberg and his allies were seduced by Hitler’s promises of a massive expansion of German military strength through the resumption of conscription. They had been won over by Hitler’s assurance that he would conduct an aggressive foreign policy that would culminate in the recovery of the territories lost by the Treaty of Versailles and the launching of a new war of conquest in the east. Blomberg in turn ostentatiously demonstrated his loyalty to the Third Reich by adopting the ‘Aryan Paragraph’, which banned Jews from serving in the army, and incorporating the swastika into the army’s insignia. Although these were largely symbolic gestures - at the insistence of President Hindenburg, for example, Jewish war veterans could not be dismissed, and only some seventy soldiers were actually cashiered - they were still important concessions to Nazi ideology that indicated just how far the army had come to terms with the new political order.14

  At the same time, however, the army was still by no means a Nazified institution. Its relative independence was underpinned by the close interest taken in its fortunes by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, its formal Commander-in-Chief. Hindenburg indeed had refused to appoint Walther von Reichenau, the pro-Nazi choice of Hitler and Blomberg, to succeed the conservative and anti-Nazi Kurt von Hammerstein as head of the army when he retired. Instead, he had enforced the appointment of General Werner von Fritsch, a popular staff officer of strong conservative views, with a passion for horsemanship and a strict Protestant outlook on life. Unmarried, workaholic and narrowly military in outlook, Fritsch had the Prussian officer’s arrogant contempt for the vulgarity of the Nazis. His conservative influence was backed by the head of the Troop Office, General Ludwig Beck, appointed at the end of 1933. Beck was a cautious, shy and withdrawn man, a widower whose main recreation was also horse-riding. With men such as Fritsch and Beck occupying two of the senior posts in the army leadership, there was no chance of the army yielding to pressure from the SA. Blomberg secured a meeting with Hitler and the leadership of the SA and SS on 28 February 1934 at which Röhm was forced to sign an agreement that he would not try to replace the army with a brownshirt militia. Germany’s military force of the future, declared Hitler emphatically, would be a professional and well-equipped army, for which the brownshirts could only act in an auxiliary capacity. After the army officers had left the following reception, Röhm told his men that he was not going to obey the ‘ridiculous corporal’ and threatened to send Hitler ‘on leave’. Such insubordination did not go unnoticed. Indeed, aware of his attitude, Hitler had already had him put under covert surveilla
nce by the police.15

  Competition with the SA led Blomberg and the military leaders to try and win Hitler’s favour in a variety of ways. The army regarded the SA as a potential source of recruits. But it was worried by the prospect that this might lead to political infiltration, and scornful of the fact that the SA leadership included men who had been dishonourably discharged from the military. It preferred therefore to agitate for the reintroduction of conscription, embodying this in a plan drawn up by Beck in December 1933. Hitler had already promised that this would happen when he had talked to army leaders the previous February. He had told the British Minister Anthony Eden, indeed, that it would be a mistake to allow a ‘second army’ to exist, and that he intended to bring the SA under control and to reassure foreign opinion by demilitarizing it.16 Yet despite this, stories of local and regional brownshirt commanders prophesying the creation of an ‘SA state’ and a ‘night of the long knives’ began to multiply. Max Heydebreck, an SA leader in Rummelsburg, was reported as saying: ‘Some of the officers of the army were swine. Most officers were too old and had to be replaced by young ones. We want to wait till Papa Hindenburg is dead, and then the SA will march against the army. What can 100,000 soldiers do against such a greatly superior force of SA-men?’17 SA men began stopping army supplies in transit and confiscating weapons and supplies. Yet on the whole, such incidents were local, sporadic and uncoordinated. Röhm never devised any concerted plan. Contrary to later allegations by Hitler, he had no immediate intention of launching a putsch. Indeed Röhm announced at the beginning of June that he was going on a rest cure, on doctor’s orders, to Bad Wiessee, near Munich, and sent the SA on leave for the whole of July.18

  II

  The continued disturbances and radical rhetoric were enough to worry not just the army leaders, but also some of Hitler’s conservative colleagues in the cabinet. Up to the passage of the Enabling Act, the cabinet had continued to meet regularly in order to pass draft decrees for forwarding to the President. From the end of March, however, it started to be bypassed by the Reich Chancellery and the individual Ministries. Hitler did not like the extensive and sometimes critical discussions that a cabinet meeting involved. He preferred decrees to be worked out as fully as possible before they came to the full meeting of Ministers. Increasingly, therefore, the cabinet met only to rubber-stamp previously decided legislation. Up to the summer recess of 1933, it still met four or five times a month, and there were also relatively frequent meetings in September and October 1933. From November 1933, however, a distinct change could be noted. The cabinet met only once that month, three times in December, once in January 1934, twice in February and twice in March. Then it failed to convene in April 1934, met only once in May and had no sessions at all in June. By this time it had long since ceased to be dominated even numerically by the conservatives, since the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels had joined it as Reich Propaganda Minister in March 1933, to be followed by Rudolf Hess and Ernst Röhm on 1 December and another Nazi, the Education Minister Bernhard Rust, on 1 May 1934. The Nationalist Alfred Hugenberg had resigned on 29 June 1933 and been replaced as Agriculture Minister by the Nazi Walther Darré. The cabinet appointed by Hindenburg on 30 January 1933 had contained only three Nazis - Hitler himself, Wilhelm Frick, the Interior Minister, and Hermann Goring as Minister without Portfolio. Of the seventeen cabinet Ministers in office in May 1934, however, a clear majority - nine - were long-term members of the Nazi Party. It had become clear, even to a man as prone to self-deception and political blindness as the conservative Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, that the original expectations with which he and his conservative colleagues had entered the cabinet on 30 January 1933 had been completely dashed. It was not they who were manipulating the Nazis, but the Nazis who were manipulating them, and intimidating and bullying them as well.19

  Yet, astonishingly, Papen had by no means abandoned his dream, articulated openly during his period of office as Chancellor in 1932, of a conservative restoration brought about with the mass support of the Nazi Party. His speechwriter Edgar Jung continued to argue in the summer of 1933 for a vision of the ‘German revolution’ that would involve ‘the depoliticization of the masses, their exclusion from the running of the state’. The rampant populism of the SA seemed a serious obstacle to the anti-democratic and elitist regime that Papen desired. Around the Vice-Chancellor there gathered a group of young conservatives who shared these views. Meanwhile the Vice-Chancellery became the destination of an increasing number of complaints from people of all kinds about Nazi violence and arbitrary behaviour, giving Papen and his staff an increasingly negative view of the effects of the ‘national revolution’ which they had so far backed, and turning his group rapidly into a focus for all kinds of discontent.20 By May 1934 Goebbels was complaining in his diary about Papen, who was rumoured to have his eye on the Presidency once the aged Hindenburg was dead. Other conservative members of the cabinet were not exempt from the Nazi propaganda chief’s scorn either (‘there has to be a real clear-up there as soon as possible’, he wrote).21 There was an obvious danger that the Papen group, already under close police surveillance, would make common cause with the army. Indeed Papen’s press secretary Herbert von Bose was beginning to establish active contact with critical generals and senior officers worried about the activities of the SA. Hindenburg, long a buffer between the army and the conservatives on the one hand, and the leading Nazis on the other, was known to have become seriously ill in April 1934. It was soon clear that he was not going to recover. He retired to his landed estate in Neudeck, East Prussia, at the beginning of June, to await the end. His passing would clearly create a moment of crisis for which the regime had to be prepared.22

  The moment was all the more critical for the regime because, as many people were aware, the enthusiasm of the ‘national revolution’ in 1933 had discernibly fallen off a year later. The brownshirts were not the only section of the population to feel disappointed at the results. Social Democratic agents reported to the exiled party leadership in Prague that people were apathetic, constantly complaining, and telling endless political jokes about the Nazi leaders. Nazi meetings were poorly attended. Hitler was still widely admired, but people were even beginning to direct criticisms in this quarter too. Many of the Nazis’ promises had not been kept, and fears of a new inflation or a sudden war were leading to panic buying and hoarding in some places. The educated classes feared that the disorder caused by the stormtroopers might spill over into chaos or, worse, Bolshevism.23 The leading Nazis were aware that such mutterings of discontent could be heard beneath the apparently smooth surface of political life. In answer to questions from the American journalist Louis P. Lochner, Hitler went out of his way to stress the unconditional loyalty he required of his subordinates.24

  Matters were coming to a head. The Prussian Minister-President Hermann Goring, himself a former leader of the SA, was now so concerned at the drift of events that he agreed to hand over control of the Prussian political police to Heinrich Himmler on 20 April 1934, enabling the ambitious young SS leader, already in charge of the political police in all other parts of Germany, to centralize the police apparatus in his own hands. The SA, of which the SS was at this point still nominally a part, was an obvious obstacle to the achievement of Himmler’s aims.25 On a four-day cruise in the navy vessel Deutschland off Norway in mid-April, Hitler, Blomberg and top military officers seem to have reached an agreement that the SA should be curbed.26 May passed, and the first half of June, without Hitler making an open move. Not for the first time, Goebbels began to feel frustrated at his master’s seeming indecision. By late June, he was recording, ‘the situation is getting ever more serious. The Leader must act. Otherwise Reaction will become too much for us.’27

  Hitler’s hand was finally forced when Papen gave a public address at Marburg University on 17 June 1934 in which he warned against a ‘second revolution’ and attacked the personality cult surrounding Hitler. It was time for the permanent upheaval of
the Nazi revolution to come to an end, he said. The speech, written by Papen’s adviser Edgar Jung, mounted a strong attack on the ‘selfishness, lack of character, insincerity, lack of chivalry, and arrogance’ at the heart of the so-called ‘German revolution’. It was greeted with thunderous applause from his listeners. Shortly afterwards, appearing at a fashionable horse-racing meeting in Hamburg, Papen was greeted by cheers and shouts of ‘Hail, Marburg!’ from the crowd.28 Back from a frustrating meeting with Mussolini in Venice, Hitler vented his spleen at Papen’s activities before he had even learned of his Vice-Chancellor’s speech in Marburg. Addressing the Party faithful in Gera, Hitler attacked the ‘little pygmies’ who were trying to stop the victory of the Nazi idea. ‘It is ridiculous when such a little worm tries to fight such a powerful renewal of the people. Ridiculous, when such a little pygmy fancies himself capable of obstructing the gigantic renewal of the people with a few empty phrases.’ The clenched fist of the people, he threatened, would ‘smash anyone who dares to make even the slightest attempt at sabotage’.29 At the same time, the Vice-Chancellor’s complaint to Hitler, coupled with a threat to resign, met with a promise that the SA’s drive towards a ‘second revolution’ would be stopped and a suggestion, which Papen too readily accepted, that the whole situation should be discussed in due course with the ailing President.30 Not for the first time, Papen was lulled into a false sense of security by Hitler’s disingenuous promises and a misplaced faith in Hindenburg’s influence.