Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  I, however, was determined to stay the course. Not, Heaven knows, because I had a particular love of democracy. But because I knew that Hindenburg would have been all too happy to use the Reichswehr against us. So, in case we tried to use force, would the Reichswehr’s commander, General Kurt Equord-Hammerstein. Known as “the Red General,” Hammerstein was as left-leaning as any German officer has ever been. My boys in the SA, for all their dedication and courage, did not stand a chance against him. Much later, it transpired that both Marie-Luise and Helga, Hammerstein’s daughters, were members of the German Communist Party’s secret intelligence service. That explains how, no sooner had I addressed the Reichswehr High Command 3 February 1933 than the gist of my words was passed to Moscow.

  At the end of 1934 I forced him to resign, thus ridding myself of his presence. But that did not prevent him and his family from remaining what the Americans, bluntly but accurately, call a pain in the ass. Until his death, which took place in November 1943, he never ceased his treacherous activities. First, he resigned his membership in Berlin’s Herrenklub, “The Gentlemen’s Club,” because it had expelled its Jewish members. As if, given how prestigious the club and how important the matters that were discussed there, the presence of members of “the chosen race” could be tolerated! Later, he and his family joined Brüning in an attempt to save some Jews from the gas chambers.

  He also took an active part in some of the plots against me and would certainly have assassinated me if only the opportunity had presented himself. When he finally died, his family refused an official funeral. The reason, I am told, was that they did not want the Reichskriegsflagge with the swastika on it to cover his coffin! But that was not the end of the matter. Both of Hammerstein’s sons, Ludwig and Kunrat, were involved in the attempt to kill me on 20 July 1944. After that conspiracy failed, they fled abroad. Unfortunately so, for I would have loved to have them hanged like the rest.

  Back to 1932. On 12 September von Papen, to preempt a motion of no confidence by the Communists, dissolved the Reichstag and ordered new elections. When the results were announced in November, it turned out that the Communists, mounting their strongest showing in the whole of German history, had gained eleven seats. Our dear nationalist allies gained four. As for us, we went down from 230 seats to 196. That still left us the strongest party by far; but it was nevertheless a stinging blow to our comrades’ morale, especially to that of Goebbels, who was being sued by the Jew Bernhard Weiss, deputy chief of the Berlin police, and did not see a way out. Worst of all, our funding was drying up. All of a sudden people who had supported us in the past no longer wanted to have anything to do with us. It may be true, as they say, that nothing succeeds like success. What is certain is that nothing fails like failure.

  Still unable to command a majority, on 17 November Papen, confident that his friend Hindenburg would reappoint him, resigned. However, the old gentleman surprised him, and everyone else, by appointing Schleicher in his place. As it turned out, Schleicher was no more able to form a coalition than his predecessors Papen and Brüning had been. He would, however, not have been up to his reputation as an accomplished intriguer if he had not had a plan up his sleeve. A Plan B, as people say, which, in reality, was Plan A.

  First, he offered me the vice-Chancellorship, knowing perfectly well that I would refuse to accept it as I had similar offers in the past. Next, he turned to Gregor Strasser. Strasser no longer served as my chief of propaganda. That was a post I had given to Goebbels. But he still remained number two in the Party. Now Schleicher was hoping to lure him away from it, splitting it and providing him, Schleicher, with some kind of parliamentary base to build on. In return he would get the vice-Chancellorship which Schleicher had just offered me! Discovering this double treachery, I was beside myself with rage. I immediately forced Strasser to resign from the Party and made him take his supporters with him. I also seized the opportunity to make all remaining officials to swear a loyalty oath to me. From that point on, all new appointees had to do the same. Even so, this was the worst crisis the Party had gone through since our Putsch nine years before. It was one whose originators I neither forgot nor forgave.

  Later, after he had lost power, Schleicher was heard to complain that he had been Chancellor for fifty-seven days and that, on each of those days, he had been betrayed fifty-seven times. Look who is talking! He held on desperately, but to no avail. The chief intriguer against him was Papen. Though no longer in office, he still retained the confidence of Hindenburg. He also remained High Commissioner for Prussia, a post which, with Hindenburg’s support but in direct violation of the Constitution, he had grabbed for himself during his time as Chancellor. Almost as adept at intrigue as Schleicher, his next step was to approach his master with a new proposition. The Right would join the NSDAP and form a government with me at is head. But he himself, acting as deputy chancellor, and his conservative friends, would see to it that I remained a prisoner in their hands. Hindenburg still did not like the idea very much. But he did not have a choice. What was needed was a strong man able to command a majority and restore order. And I was the only one who fit the bill.

  The news that Hindenburg had finally agreed to make me Chancellor reached my associates and me as we were gathered at Goebbels’ new luxurious flat on the Reichskanzlerplatz (today’s Theodor Heuss-Platz) on the evening of 29 January. Our reaction may well be imagined. But not all the news was good. We were told that Schleicher and Hammerstein had put the Potsdam garrison on alert. Between them, they were going to pack Hindenburg off to his estate and, using his name, mount a military Putsch in a last-ditch effort to prevent us from taking over. Hindenburg, for his part, summoned General Werner von Blomberg, who was representing Germany at the Geneva disarmament conference, to come home by the first train to take over from Gröner as Minister of War, a move whose significance was by no means clear. In response, I immediately alerted the Berlin SA. In the event it turned out there had been no coup attempt. But better safe than sorry.

  The meeting with the President was scheduled to take place at 10:30 the next morning. There were some last-minute difficulties. Hindenburg had finally given way and was prepared to make me Chancellor. But he was adamant that he would not let me have Papen’s post of High Commissioner for Prussia as well. In the end, I had to concede that point. That having been settled, I was sworn in. At 12:00 I emerged from the Presidential Palace on the Wilhelmstrasse to be congratulated by my associates, acclaimed by my supporters, and photographed by the press.

  Much later some historians, such as Hans Mommsen, created a veritable cottage-industry by identifying and denouncing all those who, in their opinion, had supposedly “levered” us in our bid for power. Who haven’t they blamed? The Right, the Left, the unions, the middle classes, the intellectuals, Hindenburg Sr., Hindenburg Jr., Hugenberg, Papen, Schleicher… Supposedly, all these, and many others, had either failed to resist us or were happy to join us. I want to put it on the record that this is rubbish. Almost to a man, anyone who was somebody in Germany at the time opposed us to the best of his ability and for as long as he could. Why should they have done otherwise? They had their own interests in mind, not ours. We, with myself at the head, did everything, or almost everything, ourselves. In this, as the fact that, even after the setback of November 1932, we were easily the largest Party in the Reichstag, we had the support of the German people, and that was that.

  For that evening Goebbels organized a parade of the Berlin SA to celebrate our victory. The men marched past me by the tens of thousands, carrying torches and singing the Horst Wessel Song until they were hoarse. Hindenburg too watched, tapping out the rhythm of the march with his cane on the floor. A new era had begun, and I was absolutely determined to make it the greatest in the whole of German history.

  Part II. The Years of Peace

  11. Gleichschaltung

  Taking power is one thing. Wielding it effectively, quite a different one. A visitor who did not know my collaborators and me might hav
e considered our, and my, chances of doing so quite poor. Not only was my experience zero, but Hindenburg, on Papen’s advice, had appointed me specifically so that I would not be able to do as I pleased. And even after I had become Reich Chancellor, he still remained a factor to be reckoned with. Apart from myself, out of twelve ministers only one, Frick, represented the NSDAP. All the rest were either conservative or apolitical and were determined to go their own way.

  True, together with my right-wing allies I commanded a majority in the Reichstag. However, it was fairly slim and could not be depended on to carry out the radical, and much-needed, reforms I had in mind. Most of the senior members of Germany’s old, venerable, institutions—the army, the bureaucracy, high finance, industry, the churches, and the universities—regarded us National Socialists as arrivistes. Not to say canaille. After all, with very few exceptions we had neither been born in noble houses, nor raised under privileged circumstances, nor attended the best universities as, almost to a man, they had. Nor did we carry dueling scars on our cheeks. An idiotic fashion bearing witness to an equally idiotic custom, and one which, after a fight in which one of our best-known journalists was killed in an even more idiotic quarrel over a woman, I did my best to abolish.

  Two other forces stood in our way. One was the trade unions, most of which were associated with the Communists and the Socialists. In the past they had proved capable of enforcing their will. As, for example, they had done during the well-intentioned but incompetent and ill-fated Kapp Putsch of 1920. To go against them, or rather against the millions of workers they claimed to represent, was madness. We needed them; who else was going to build the new Germany we were planning and fight for it when the time came? Others were the Länder, or states, which made up the Reich. In fact the Reich had never been a centralized entity. That had been true of the so-called First Reich—the most decentralized political entity in Europe, much more so than countries such as Spain, England, Italy, Russia, and, above all, France. It was almost equally true of the Second Reich. At that time each Land had its own ambassador in Berlin; several of them even had their own armies.

  Briefly, our political tradition was, and after 1945, once again became, federal. To be sure, federalism has its advantages. It is one reason why, in Germany, cultural facilities of every kind, such as universities, palaces, museums, theaters, and opera houses, are not concentrated in a single city as, to a very large extent, is the case in England and France. Instead, they are scattered all over the country. Personally, I always felt that the various dialects, dresses, customs, and traditions of each district represent the very essence of Germandom. It was through them that the spirit of the people, bubbling up as it were, manifested itself. As such they were worth preserving and fostering. Politically, though, federalism is and remains problematic. It makes it very hard for the central government to enforce its will.

  I did not wait until my hundred days’ grace were over. In fact, I did not have even a single day’s grace. Holding the first Cabinet meeting just a few hours after my appointment, I moved to dissolve the Reichstag and to hold new elections. My purpose in doing so was to allow us to pass an Enabling Act, which would give us the right to govern by decree, without the Reichstag. As I had expected, our right-wing allies and the Catholic Center raised some objections. I won them over by promising that I would govern constitutionally.

  That, incidentally, is a promise I kept. During our years in power we National Socialists, and I personally, were presented with plenty of ideas for a new constitution. By none more so than by Herr Professor Carl Schmitt, the famous jurist and political scientist whose often incomprehensible tomes are still being hotly debated in Germany and abroad. In the end, though, we preferred to keep the one we already had. Changing it would have brought down on our heads every single jurist in the country. Personally, I dislike jurists. They are cretins, always hiding behind their paragraphs in the hope of disguising their utter lack of common sense. I would have loved to create an ambience in which no right-thinking German man would lower himself to the point of studying law. But I admit that, for any large organization, they are a necessity. An evil one, to be sure, but one which unfortunately we cannot do without; witnesss our top-level SS, SD (Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service) and Gestapo organization, all of which were full of them.

  Instead, we undermined the Constitution until all that was left of it was essentially a hollow shell. We also modified it when necessary. As, for example, we did in 1934 when we amalgamated my position as Chancellor with that of President. But we never replaced it. In any case, after some quibbling I got my way. The elections would be held on 5 March. We, my colleagues and I, immediately threw ourselves into the fray. This time, as one may imagine, money was not short. Not only did we receive large sums from the industrialists, but we generously helped ourselves to the state’s resources as well. As usual, the SA played a key role. Enjoying greater freedom of action than ever before, some of its men actually wore armbands designating them as auxiliary police. It protected our meetings, broke up those of our opponents, and ransacked the offices of opposition newspapers as, owing to their lies, they deserved to be. It also plastered the walls with propaganda posters, held marches and popular concerts, and briefly did what it could to impress voters and to attract them to our side.

  A week before the appointed date we had an unexpected stroke of luck. On the evening of 27 February I was dining with Goebbels, Hoffmann, and some others when Hanfstängl called and said that the Reichstag was going up in flames. At first I thought he was drunk! It was, however, all too horribly true. In the aftermath four people were arrested: three Bulgarian Communists and one Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe. The Bulgarians were tried and acquitted. One of them, Georgi Dimitrov, later ended up as his country’s first Communist dictator; that showed what our justice system was like in those days and what a long way we still had to go before it, too, was gleichgeschaltet (coordinated) with the other elements of the state and made to work smoothly with them. As for van der Lubbe, who, unlike the others, was caught torch in hand, by all accounts he was something of an oddball. He was found guilty and beheaded. How, considering the size of the building, he could have set the fire singlehandedly remains a mystery to the present day.

  Not that it mattered. Having dealt with the Communists for years, we National Socialists knew very well who was responsible for the dastardly act. We leaped at the opportunity and did what had to be done. As to the claims that we ourselves had set the fire, they are too ridiculous to merit an answer. Supported by Moscow, which like an octopus was sending out its tentacles in all directions, the Communists were dangerous enemies. The reason was that, as I knew from my days in Vienna, they were the only ones who possessed a Weltanschauung, one which, however perverted it might be, had the power to carry the masses. “Arise, ye wretched of the earth!” I did not want to take any chances. That is why, on the very next day, I had Hindenburg sign a decree that abolished certain civil liberties—freedom of speech, freedom from non-judicially-ordered search, the whole rotten liberal rigmarole—and imposed the death penalty for certain crimes. It also authorized the central government to take over from those of the states in case a national emergency demanded doing so.

  For all our campaigning and occasional intimidation of opponents, the elections themselves did not go quite as well as we had hoped. Our efforts notwithstanding, we National Socialists did not obtain an absolute majority. Even with the help of our allies we still fell far short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass the Enabling Law. In a way, it did not matter. We were determined that there should be no more elections for a long, long time to come. Partly because we did not believe in counting noses as a method of government, and partly because we had no intention of giving up our hard-won power. Not then, not ever. As Goebbels put it on the very first day, we would have to be carried out first. That, too, was a promise we kept.

  My next problem was to do away with the state governments and to centralize all pow
er in our hands. On the evening of 9 March, just four days after the elections, our forces swung into action. Our key man on the spot was General (ret.) Franz von Epp, another Pour le Mérite holder who had joined us almost immediately after the war. A Bavarian by birth, in 1919-20 he had played a prominent role both in the border fighting with Poland and in the suppression of the Munich Communist “government.” Now I appointed him Reich Commissioner; he took over the government facilities and functions in Bavaria, and that was that. His move gave the signal for similar ones in the remaining, smaller states. Thus within twenty-four hours, we National Socialists accomplished what not even Bismarck, the greatest German statesman of all time, had been able to do: namely, take power away from the Länder and concentrate it in the hands of the Reich, where it properly belongs.

  Personally, I was not at all sorry to see the Reichstag gone. It had been, and in spite of its new glass cupola still remains, a big, ugly lump of a building typical of the pompous period during which it was built. But its destruction made us look for a proper setting to open the new one. As so often, it was Goebbels who came up with the idea and oversaw is execution. We would hold the meeting not in Berlin but at Potsdam’s Garnisonskirche; the 200-year-old church King Friedrich Wilhelm I had built for the local garrison where the bones of King Frederick II were resting at the time. In the whole of Germany, no other building had such long and strong links with the Prussian/German military tradition.

  The date chosen for the opening of the first Reichstag of the Third Reich was 21 March. That too was a happy choice, because 21 March 1871 had been the day on which Bismarck opened the first Reichstag of the Second Reich. I shall not go into the details, which were shown in every newsreel in every movie house all over Germany. Suffice it to say that so successful was the ceremony that even Hindenburg, who for over two years had done what he could to prevent my appointment, was visibly moved. The high point came at the end. Making a deep bow, I shook Hindenburg’s hand—a symbolic union of the new Germany with the old. From that point on our relationship improved. The better he understood what my collaborators and I were trying to do, the easier he found it to get along with me.