Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

The Nazis played up the significance of clashes between the SA and the Communists. On February 5, Hitler, Goebbels, and other top Party officials attended the Berlin funeral of the SA leader and the policeman who had been shot by the Communists on January 30. It was a cold and rainy winter day, but an estimated 600,000 people lined the streets for the funeral. It was, Goebbels noted, the first time that the SA and the police stood together.29

  Göring could not resist moving against some police leaders and pushed out those unsympathetic to the Nazi cause. He banned demonstrations by Communists and suspended the Socialists’ main newspaper for three days. Besides harassing the opposition, he tackled the state’s institutions, but there was no “purge” of the police on the Soviet model. Most of those forced out were replaced not by die-hard Nazis but by “conservative and nationalist government experts, and to some extent conservatively inclined landowners from the nobility, former officers, and industrial managers.”30

  Göring suggested the cabinet take immediate action to rein in the Communists, whose violence in the streets was increasing, and on February 4 they agreed to issue an emergency “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the German People.” It had been substantially prepared by the Papen government and imposed strict regulations on public meetings and demonstrations of all kinds. Suspects could be held in custody for up to three months. The application of this decree was still limited, but it marked the beginning of the erosion of civil and legal rights.31

  On February 15, Göring instructed Prussian police to stop keeping Nazi organizations under surveillance. A week later he authorized the creation of “deputy police” (Hilfspolizei) from the ranks of the SA, the SS, and the Stahlhelm. News stories said measures had to be introduced to protect public security and private property against Communism. But soon the KPD and SPD were faced with Nazis who had been deputized as police.32

  The Reds waited for the Nazis to do something patently illegal, but nothing happened to justify calling a general strike or even mass demonstrations. The hand-to-hand fighting with the SA continued in February much as before, and there was no sudden switch to “Nazi terror” or open “murder” of working-class activists. Certainly some members of the KPD and SPD were killed in street battles, and so were some innocent bystanders. It was surely the case that police intervened with relish against the KPD, even opening fire on the crowds when (rarely) the occasion demanded. But the police were by no means under Nazi control from the outset.33

  It was already long past midnight when Communist Party leaders finally tried to reach agreement with the Socialist Party, but the efforts to form a united front failed. A last try by the KPD leader, Ernst Thälmann, in an open letter of February 27 “to the Social Democratic and Christian workers of Germany,” was ignored. The years of bitter struggle and acrimony within the working-class movement made cooperation impossible. The Socialists thought a strike would be used as an excuse by the government to destroy the trade unions and other workers’ organizations. In the end one left-wing party blamed the other for making Hitler possible.34

  The critic Carl von Ossietzky wrote that the supporters of the republic lost because they lacked the will to live. He said that the political right outmaneuvered the left by its “cold, hard will to power and its feel for the issues that really matter.” Thus the right “conquered the high ground without having to fire a shot.”35

  The liberal middle classes may have been struck by “icy horror” when they heard Hitler was appointed, but some consoled themselves that he could not last long. They wrongly concluded that Hitler had been “captured” by more experienced politicians and badly miscalculated his popular support.36

  In the March elections Hitler used the office of chancellor as a prestige factor and presented himself as Germany’s savior. His campaign echoed all the themes of the previous two or three years, with even stronger emphasis on the war with Marxism. The gatherings were packed wherever he went, and the speeches were often carried live on national radio. He talked about creating a “community of the people” in which the German worker was no longer a stranger, and he appealed to those who might be fleeing from the Nazi Party. He was sure he could turn them around once they saw that what he really wanted was in their best interests.37

  19

  DICTATORSHIP BY CONSENT

  The door was opened for the establishment of one-party rule in Germany when, late on February 27, 1933, a fire broke out in the Reichstag buildings. Police arrested Marinus van der Lubbe, almost certainly the lone culprit, although there has been speculation ever since about who might have set the fire. Whoever did it and whatever the reason, the arson came at a time most favorable to the Nazi cause.

  Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Papen, and the Berlin police chief, Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, rushed to the scene. According to Rudolf Diels, head of the Prussian Political Police, they seemed sincere in the belief that the arson was an attempt to create chaos and confusion. Göring was filled with emotion. Diels remembered him saying that it was the beginning of a “Communist coup.” He also recalled Hitler shouting: “There are no more grounds for mercy; anyone who gets in our way will be slaughtered. The German people will have no understanding for mercy.” Overcome with rage, Hitler added that “every Communist functionary will be shot where he is found. The Communist members of parliament must be hanged this very night.” He also wanted to pursue the Socialists.1

  Hitler did not follow through on the threat. Instead, early the next day he prevailed on President Hindenburg to declare a state of emergency and had new measures ready for the cabinet. The Reichstag-fire decree, as it became known, took immediate steps “in defense against Communistic violence endangering the state.”2 This measure suspended constitutional guarantees of personal liberty; allowed police to detain anyone they wished; and imposed restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly, and association. The powers of the national government were extended over the states. The decree also provided the legal basis for creating the secret state police, or Gestapo, as well as the concentration camps. The latter emerged soon after the March elections. In the meantime, state-sponsored violence was used against the paramilitary forces of the Communists and the Socialists.

  THE CREATION OF THE ONE-PARTY STATE

  The elections held on March 5 did not produce the majority Hitler hoped for. The Nazis won by far the most votes (43.9 percent), and collected 288 seats out of 647. Their allies in the election, the DNVP (Hugenberg’s party), picked up 8 percent of the vote and 52 seats. The NSDAP-DNVP coalition thus had a slim majority.

  Voters held to the big blocs. The SPD and the two Catholic parties (Center and Bavarian People’s) received almost the exact number of votes as in the last elections. Despite pressure on the Communists, they managed to hold on to 81 seats.

  It is hard to estimate the extent the votes for the big bloc parties were “against” the Nazis and how many simply reflected traditional loyalties. Safe to say, there was widespread yearning for much that Hitler stood for. He was by far the most popular leader in the country, its most militant anti-Marxist, and viewed by many as the only one able to hold back the Red tide. He also embodied the hope for better times. He won more votes than any party had received since 1920, and the massive numbers in his favor gave the government “plebiscitary legitimacy, which was all the more important in terms of moral backing.”3

  Goebbels considered the election results “fantastic and unbelievable,” greater “than we dared to hope.” He summed up the enormous support for Hitler and National Socialism as: “The people want it!” On the afternoon of March 6, he met with Hitler to work out details for his ministry, one of the few new ones added in the Third Reich. It was formally called the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda and comprised separate chambers for the press, radio, film, theater, music, the visual arts, and literature. The ministry came to play a considerable role in winning over those citizens who were not already on the Party’s side.4 Hitler’s view was that the propaga
nda would “channel all the energies of the people toward the purely political.” It would take time for economic policies to come into effect. In the meantime, he did not want the people to slip into apathy.5

  The Enabling Law had been on the table since at least November 1932, and it was no secret that the elections of March 5 would be the last for some time. Hitler said at the March 7 cabinet meeting that he regarded the election “as a revolution. Ultimately Marxism will no longer exist in Germany.” Papen reported that the leader of the Catholic Center Party was “prepared to let bygones be bygones” and had offered to cooperate in getting the Enabling Law passed.6

  The arrest or flight of Communist members of the Reichstag made it easier to get the two-thirds majority needed to bring in the Enabling Law as a constitutional amendment. Discussions with the Catholic Center and Bavarian People’s parties led to agreement on the new law on March 20, and three days later it was presented to the first meeting of the new Reichstag. To assure support, Hitler promised to respect the rights of the Catholic Church.7

  The Reichstag opened on March 21 in Potsdam in the famous Garrison Church. The pomp and ceremony of the old president next to the young chancellor conveyed a sense of continuity and hope. The first real business took place on March 23, when Hitler presented the Enabling Law in a special session held at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin. The government declaration began by saying what had gone wrong, above all since November 9, 1918. Just as in Hitler’s speeches, it promised a rebirth by way of cleansing the “body politic of its internal defects.” The burning of the Reichstag was taken as a failed signal to start a Communist revolution. The government would not stop until such threats were completely “exterminated and destroyed.” The ultimate goal was to end conflict and create a “genuine community of the people.”8

  Passage of the Enabling Law meant the end of the constitution, states’ rights, and other pillars of democracy. The Catholic Center Party went along. As one of its leaders explained, the “Fatherland is in the gravest danger. We dare not fail.”9

  The government allowed two hours for the Reichstag to decide and granted the right to speak to anyone who disagreed. Only Otto Wels of the SPD took up the challenge. The vote was 441 in favor and 94 against the law. It was to remain in force until April 1, 1937, when it had to be renewed.10

  Goebbels observed in his diary: “Now we are also constitutionally the masters of the Reich.” Not only was the Reichstag redundant, but within the cabinet Hitler’s authority was soon accepted by acclamation. As early as April 22—referring by then to Hitler as the führer—Goebbels noted that there was no longer any voting in the cabinet. “The führer decides. Everything is going much faster than we had dared to dream.”11

  Once the Enabling Law was passed, the political parties were soon dissolved, beginning in mid-March on the left wing of the political spectrum with the KPD. On April 17, Hitler met with Goebbels and opted to take on the trade unions, long the pillar of the Socialist working-class movement. The May 1 holiday tradition to celebrate the struggles of ordinary workers would go ahead, but instead of highlighting class struggle, it would be modified to celebrate all Germans and to give them a chance to express their national will. Immediately following the holiday, the unions would be taken over. Goebbels noted that there might be some “noise” for a few days, but that would pass, and “then they belong to us.” Moreover, “once we have the unions in our hand, then the other parties and organizations will not be able to hold out for long.” He expected no resistance, and next to none took place.12

  A flimsy excuse was found to ban the SPD on June 22. By the end of the month the two remaining liberal parties and even Hitler’s DNVP partners, recognizing the inevitable, had disbanded themselves. Finally, on July 5, the Catholic Center Party followed suit.13

  July 14, 1933, can be taken as the day of the last steps in the “coordination” process and was meant to mark the end of a long era dating back to the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. The day was celebrated as the beginning of the French Revolution and became the symbolic opening of the modern era of the “brotherhood of man.” The universal ideals of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” proclaimed by the French also inspired Lenin, Stalin, and the Bolshevik Revolution.

  It was therefore something of a statement that on July 14, 1933, the Hitler cabinet reeled off forty-two laws, meant to spell the end of the “brotherly” era. Also passed was the Law for the Prevention of Defective Offspring, which formed the basis of a new sterilization program.

  In addition, a new law on plebiscites was enacted. This mechanism made it possible to pass laws and other measures by direct appeal to the people. The events became devices Hitler used to show his popular backing, and they encapsulate the concept of his “plebiscitary dictatorship.”14

  TERROR AND ACCOMMODATION

  Concentration camps, initially for Communists, were widely publicized and designed to appeal to the strong anti-Communist phobia in the country. Even Socialists, longtime rivals for the hearts of workers, were “full of enthusiasm for the struggle against Communism and Bolshevism, with which they identified the creation of anarchy.”15 The anti-Communist campaign was supplemented by an attack on hard-core criminals. Hitler shared the popular distaste for sex offenders and the like, and by cracking down on them, he appealed to the German tradition of law and order.

  How much terror was there in the beginning? If we include temporary sites where victims were held briefly and tortured but not necessarily arrested, the number of victims was large. One recent account lists over 160 places used in 1933.16 We can only guess how many were dragged through them. In the first wave of arrests in March and April 1933, an estimated twenty-five thousand people, mainly Communists, were picked up in Prussia alone.17 It is likely that there were as many again in the rest of the country. A small number of women, mostly Communists, were sent to the camps beginning in March 1933 and held in Gotteszell (Baden). There were two Communist women at another camp in Moringen, near Göttingen, in early June 1933, and by autumn there were seventy-five women prisoners.18

  In the summer of 1933 a new wave of arrests picked up some leaders of recently disbanded political parties. On July 31 a camp census counted a total of 26,789 prisoners. Suspects, most in left-wing parties, were taken to a concentration camp for a short time, mistreated, and released. A total of about 80,000 spent time in a concentration camp in all the early camps. These figures do not include the many who were beaten by the SA or Party radicals in improvised torture cellars, which were soon dissolved. Most of the victims, like those sent to the early camps, had been involved in the Communist Party and, to a lesser extent, the Social Democratic Party or the trade unions.

  There were fatalities, but these were “relatively few,” and, with the emphasis on one group, namely the Communists, they make it hard to agree with those who insist that the Third Reich was established and maintained by terror. Karin Orth’s recent study shows that even now it remains difficult to determine the exact number killed in the early camps of 1933–34, but she—as well as most other specialists—puts the figure at “several hundred.”19

  Coercion and violence were limited and predictable and thus different from the arbitrary and sweeping terror of the Soviet Union. Hitler set out to combine popularity and power and aimed terror at specific groups of “outsiders.” Those who came to support his regime, and that was the great majority, accepted the harsh approach to these “others” as part of the bargain. Citizens could read the abundant stories in the press, and even if they assumed these were cleaned-up versions of the truth, it was easy to look the other way and give the government the benefit of the doubt. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, endured massive terror from the outset, then a civil war, followed by sustained terror.

  The images of the German camps portrayed in the press as anti-Communist institutions helped to ease popular accommodation to the new system. While some worried about them, concerns were partly allayed because of the perceived
Communist threat and breakdown in law and order.

  The Nazis had grown so confident about their support from the population by the end of 1933 that they seriously considered getting rid of both the Gestapo and the camps. Hitler played down the “excesses” in the camps and only said some enemies had had to be interned to stop them from interfering with Germany’s political rebirth.20

  The numbers confined were steadily reduced until the end of 1934, when there were “at most” three thousand prisoners. That was the lowest point they would ever reach.21 Nearly all camps had closed by 1934–35, when Hitler’s dictatorship was firmly anchored.

  How did ordinary citizens as a whole react to this first wave of arrests? Apart from those directly threatened, as Ian Kershaw concludes, “the violence and repression were widely popular.” It did not bother many Germans that the Reichstag-fire decree took away the rights of Communists. In fact, the decree was “warmly welcomed.”22

  “MARCH CASUALTIES”

  Sebastian Haffner, who lived in Berlin during those times, believes that if there had been elections only three weeks after March 5, the Nazis would have obtained “a true majority.” Many Germans were shifting their support to the Nazis. Haffner’s observations are backed up by the fact that millions were rushing to join the Nazi Party or one of its associated organizations.

  This increase in support, according to Haffner, was not “the result of the terror, or intoxication resulting from the constant festivities (though the Germans like being intoxicated by patriotic celebrations).” Apart from the bandwagon effect, and the attractiveness of getting in on the spoils, some wanted to be part of a larger movement, to be unified at last and comrades in a mighty cause. The snobbish Haffner looked down on the “more primitive, inarticulate, simpler souls” who switched sides when their “tribe” was beaten. “Saint Marx,” in whom workers and other folk once believed, he said sarcastically, “had not helped. Saint Hitler was obviously more powerful. So let’s destroy the images of Saint Marx on the altars and replace them with the images of Saint Hitler. Let us learn to pray: ‘It is the Jews’ fault’ rather than ‘It is the capitalists’ fault.’ Perhaps that will redeem us.”23