The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  Thus, within a fortnight of receiving full powers from the Reichstag, Hitler had achieved what Bismarck, Wilhelm II and the Weimar Republic had never dared to attempt: he had abolished the separate powers of the historic states and made them subject to the central authority of the Reich, which was in his hands. He had, for the first time in German history, really unified the Reich by destroying its age-old federal character. On January 30, 1934, the first anniversary of his becoming Chancellor, Hitler would formally complete the task by means of a Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich. “Popular assemblies” of the states were abolished, the sovereign powers of the states were transferred to the Reich, all state governments were placed under the Reich government and the state governors put under the administration of the Reich Minister of the Interior.14 As this Minister, Frick, explained it, “The state governments from now on are merely administrative bodies of the Reich.”

  The preamble to the law of January 30, 1934, proclaimed that it was “promulgated with the unanimous vote of the Reichstag.” This was true, for by this time all the political parties of Germany except the Nazis had been quickly eliminated.

  It cannot be said that they went down fighting. On May 19, 1933, the Social Democrats—those who were not in jail or in exile—voted in the Reichstag without a dissenting voice to approve Hitler’s foreign policy. Nine days before, Goering’s police had seized the party’s buildings and newspapers and confiscated its property. Nevertheless, the Socialists still tried to appease Hitler. They denounced their comrades abroad who were attacking the Fuehrer. On June 19 they elected a new party committee, but three days later Frick put an end to their attempts to compromise by dissolving the Social Democratic Party as “subversive and inimical to the State.” Paul Lobe, the surviving leader, and several of his party members in the Reichstag were arrested. The Communists, of course, had already been suppressed.

  This left the middle-class parties, but not for long. The Catholic Bavarian People’s Party, whose government had been kicked out of office by the Nazi coup on March 9, announced its own dissolution on July 4, and its ally, the Center Party, which had defied Bismarck so strenuously and been a bulwark of the Republic, followed suit the next day, leaving Germany for the first time in the modern era without a Catholic political party—a fact which did not discourage the Vatican from signing a concordat with Hitler’s government a fortnight later. Stresemann’s old party, the People’s Party, committed hara-kiri on the Fourth of July; the Democrats (Staatspartei) had already done so a week before.

  And what of Hitler’s partner in government, the German National Party, without whose support the former Austrian corporal could never have come legally to power? Despite its closeness to Hindenburg, the Army, the Junkers and big business and the debt owed to it by Hitler, it went the way of all other parties and with the same meekness. On June 21 the police and the storm troopers took over its offices throughout the country, and on June 29 Hugenberg, the bristling party leader, who had helped boost Hitler into the Chancellery but six months before, resigned from the government and his aides “voluntarily” dissolved the party.

  The Nazi Party alone remained, and on July 14 a law decreed:

  The National Socialist German Workers’ Party constitutes the only political party in Germany.

  Whoever undertakes to maintain the organizational structure of another political party or to form a new political party will be punished with penal servitude up to three years or with imprisonment of from six months to three years, if the deed is not subject to a greater penalty according to other regulations.15

  The one-party totalitarian State had been achieved with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance, and within four months after the Reichstag had abdicated its democratic responsibilities.

  The free trade unions, which, as we have seen, once had crushed the fascist Kapp putsch by the simple means of declaring a general strike, were disposed of as easily as the political parties and the states—though not until an elaborate piece, of trickery had been practiced on them. For half a century May Day had been the traditional day of celebration for the German—and European—worker. To lull the workers and their leaders before it struck, the Nazi government proclaimed May Day, 1933, as a national holiday, officially named it the “Day of National Labor” and prepared to celebrate it as it had never been celebrated before. The trade-union leaders were taken in by this surprising display of friendliness toward the working class by the Nazis and enthusiastically co-operated with the government and the party in making the day a success. Labor leaders were flown to Berlin from all parts of Germany, thousands of banners were unfurled acclaiming the Nazi regime’s solidarity with the worker, and out at Tempelhof Field Goebbels prepared to stage the greatest mass demonstration Germany had ever seen. Before the massive rally, Hitler himself received the workers’ delegates, declaring, “You will see how untrue and unjust is the statement that the revolution is directed against the German workers. On the contrary.” Later in his speech to more than 100,000 workers at the airfield Hitler pronounced the motto, “Honor work and respect the worker!” and promised that May Day would be celebrated in honor of German labor “throughout the centuries.”

  Late that night Goebbels, after describing in his most purple prose the tremendous enthusiasm of the workers for this May Day celebration which he had so brilliantly staged, added a curious sentence in his diary: “Tomorrow we shall occupy the trade-union buildings. There will be little resistance.”*16

  That is what happened. On May 2 the trade-union headquarters throughout the country were occupied, union funds confiscated, the unions dissolved and the leaders arrested. Many were beaten and lodged in concentration camps. Theodor Leipart and Peter Grassmann, the chairmen of the Trade Union Confederation, had openly pledged themselves to cooperate with the Nazi regime. No matter, they were arrested. “The Lei-parts and Grassmanns,” said Dr. Robert Ley, the alcoholic Cologne party boss who was assigned by Hitler to take over the unions and establish the German Labor Front, “may hypocritically declare their devotion to the Fuehrer as much as they like—but it is better that they should be in prison.” And that is where they were put.

  At first, though, both Hitler and Ley tried to assure the workers that their rights would be protected. Said Ley in his first proclamation: “Workers! Your institutions are sacred to us National Socialists. I myself am a poor peasant’s son and understand poverty … I know the exploitation of anonymous capitalism. Workers! I swear to you, we will not only keep everything that exists, we will build up the protection and the rights of the workers still further.”

  Within three weeks the hollowness of another Nazi promise was exposed when Hitler decreed a law bringing an end to collective bargaining and providing that henceforth “labor trustees,” appointed by him, would “regulate labor contracts” and maintain “labor peace.”18 Since the decisions of the trustees were to be legally binding, the law, in effect, outlawed strikes. Ley promised “to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of a factory—that is, the employer … Only the employer can decide. Many employers have for years had to call for the ‘master in the house.’ Now they are once again to be the ‘master in the house.’”

  For the time being, business management was pleased. The generous contributions which so many employers had made to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party were paying off. Yet for business to prosper a certain stability of society is necessary, and all through the spring and early summer law and order were crumbling in Germany as the frenzied brown-shirted gangs roamed the streets, arresting and beating up and sometimes murdering whomever they pleased while the police looked on without lifting a nightstick. The terror in the streets was not the result of the breakdown of the State’s authority, as it had been in the French Revolution, but on the contrary was carried out with the encouragement and often on the orders of the State, whose authority in Germany had never been greater or more concentrated. Judges were intimidated; they were afraid for their
lives if they convicted and sentenced a storm trooper even for cold-blooded murder. Hitler was now the law, as Goering said, and as late as May and June 1933 the Fuehrer was declaiming that “the National Socialist Revolution has not yet run its course” and that “it will be victoriously completed only if a new German people is educated.” In Nazi parlance, “educated” meant “intimidated”—to a point where all would accept docilely the Nazi dictatorship and its barbarism. To Hitler, as he had publicly declared a thousand times, the Jews were not Germans, and though he did not exterminate them at once (only a relative few—a few thousand, that is—were robbed, beaten or murdered during the first months), he issued laws excluding them from public service, the universities and the professions. And on April 1, 1933, he proclaimed a national boycott of Jewish shops.

  The businessmen, who had been so enthusiastic over the smashing of the troublesome labor unions, now found that left-wing Nazis, who really believed in the party’s socialism, were trying to take over the employers’ associations, destroy the big department stores and nationalize industry. Thousands of ragged Nazi Party officials descended on the business houses of those who had not supported Hitler, threatening to seize them in some cases, and in others demanding well-paying jobs in the management. Dr. Gottfried Feder, the economic crank, now insisted that the party program be carried out—nationalization of big business, profit sharing and the abolition of unearned incomes and “interest slavery.” As if this were not enough to frighten the businessmen, Walther Darré, who had just been named Minister of Agriculture, threw the bankers into jitters by promising a big reduction in the capital debts of the farmers and a cut in the interest rate on what remained to 2 per cent.

  Why not? Hitler was, by midsummer of 1933, the master of Germany. He could now carry out his program. Papen, for all his cunning, had been left high and dry, and all his calculations that he and Hugenberg and the other defenders of the Old Order, with their 8-to-3 majority in the cabinet against the Nazis, could control Hitler and indeed use him for their own conservative ends, had exploded in his face. He himself had been booted out of his post as Prime Minister of Prussia and replaced by Goering. Papen remained Vice-Chancellor in the Reich cabinet but, as he ruefully admitted later, “this position turned out to be anomalous.” Hugenberg, the apostle of business and finance, was gone, his party dissolved. Goebbels, the third most important man in the Nazi Party, had been brought into the cabinet on March 13 as Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Darré, regarded as a “radical,” as was Goebbels, was Minister of Agriculture.

  Dr. Hans Luther, the conservative president of the Reichsbank, the key post in the German economic system, was fired by Hitler and packed off to Washington as ambassador. Into his place, on March 17, 1933, stepped the jaunty Dr. Schacht, the former head of the Reichsbank and devoted follower of Hitler, who had seen the “truth and necessity” of Nazism. No single man in all of Germany would be more helpful to Hitler in building up the economic strength of the Third Reich and in furthering its rearmament for the Second World War than Schacht, who later became also Minister of Economics and Plenipotentiary-General for War Economy. It is true that shortly before the second war began he turned against his idol, eventually relinquished or was fired from all his offices and even joined those who were conspiring to assassinate Hitler. But by then it was too late to stay the course of the Nazi leader to whom he had for so long given his loyalty and lent his prestige and his manifest talents.

  “NO SECOND REVOLUTION!”

  Hitler had conquered Germany with the greatest of ease, but a number of problems remained to be faced as summer came in 1933. There were at least five major ones: preventing a second revolution; settling the uneasy relations between the S.A. and the Army; getting the country out of its economic morass and finding jobs for the six million unemployed; achieving equality of armaments for Germany at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva and accelerating the Reich’s secret rearming, which had begun during the last years of the Republic; and deciding who should succeed the ailing Hindenburg when he died.

  It was Roehm, chief of the S.A., who coined the phrase “the second revolution,” and who insisted that it be carried through. He was joined by Goebbels, who in his diary of April 18, 1933, wrote: “Everyone among the people is talking of a second revolution which must come. That means that the first revolution is not at an end. Now we shall settle with the Reaktion. The revolution must nowhere come to a halt.”19

  The Nazis had destroyed the Left, but the Right remained: big business and finance, the aristocracy, the Junker landlords and the Prussian generals, who kept tight rein over the Army. Roehm, Goebbels and the other “radicals” in the movement wanted to liquidate them too. Roehm, whose storm troopers now numbered some two million—twenty times as many as the troops in the Army—sounded the warning in June:

  One victory on the road of German revolution has been won … The S.A. and S.S., who bear the great responsibility of having set the German revolution rolling, will not allow it to be betrayed at the halfway mark … If the Philistines believe that the national revolution has lasted too long … it is indeed high time that the national revolution should end and become a National Socialist one … We shall continue our fight—with them or without them. And, if necessary, against them … We are the incorruptible guarantors of the fulfillment of the German revolution.20

  And in August he added, in a speech, “There are still men in official positions today who have not the least idea of the spirit of the revolution. We shall ruthlessly get rid of them if they dare to put their reactionary ideas into practice.”

  But Hitler had contrary thoughts. For him the Nazi socialist slogans had been merely propaganda, means of winning over the masses on his way to power. Now that he had the power he was uninterested in them. He needed time to consolidate his position and that of the country. For the moment at least the Right—business, the Army, the President—must be appeased. He did not intend to bankrupt Germany and thus risk the very existence of his regime. There must be no second revolution.

  This he made plain to the S.A. and S.S. leaders themselves in a speech to them on July 1. What was needed now in Germany, he said, was order. “I will suppress every attempt to disturb the existing order as ruthlessly as I will deal with the so-called second revolution, which would lead only to chaos.” He repeated the warning to the Nazi state governors gathered in the Chancellery on July 6:

  The revolution is not a permanent state of affairs, and it must not be allowed to develop into such a state. The stream of revolution released must be guided into the safe channel of evolution … We must therefore not dismiss a businessman if he is a good businessman, even if he is not yet a National Socialist, and especially not if the National Socialist who is to take his place knows nothing about business. In business, ability must be the only standard …

  History will not judge us according to whether we have removed and imprisoned the largest number of economists, but according to whether we have succeeded in providing work … The ideas of the program do not oblige us to act like fools and upset everything, but to realize our trains of thought wisely and carefully. In the long run our political power will be all the more secure, the more we succeed in underpinning it economically. The state governors must therefore see to it that no party organizations assume the functions of government, dismiss individuals and make appointments to offices, to do which the Reich government—and in regard to business, the Reich Minister of Economics—is competent.21

  No more authoritative statement was ever made that the Nazi revolution was political, not economic. To back up his words, Hitler dismissed a number of Nazi “radicals” who had tried to seize control of the employers’ associations. He restored Krupp von Bohlen and Fritz Thyssen to their positions of leadership in them, dissolved the Combat League of Middle-Class Tradespeople, which had annoyed the big department stores, and in place of Hugenberg named Dr. Karl Schmitt as Minister of Economics. Schmitt was the most orthodox of b
usinessmen, director general of Allianz, Germany’s largest insurance company, and he lost no time in putting an end to the schemes of the National Socialists who had been naïve enough to take their party program seriously.

  The disillusion among the rank-and-file Nazis, especially among the S.A. storm troopers, who formed the large core of Hitler’s mass movement, was great. Most of them had belonged to the ragged army of the dispossessed and the unsatisfied. They were anticapitalist through experience and they believed that the revolution which they had fought by brawling in the streets would bring them loot and good jobs, either in business or in the government. Now their hopes, after the heady excesses of the spring, were dashed. The old gang, whether they were party members or not, were to keep the jobs and to keep control of jobs. But this development was not the only reason for unrest in the S.A.