by Bill Yenne
CHAPTER 6
Ballot Boxes and Long Knives
DURING 1933 AND 1934, two factors came into play in such a manner as to place Hitler into power, to secure that power, and to secure Heinrich Himmler’s shadowy, sinister place as the second most powerful man in the reborn Reich.
It all began at the ballot box. Under its distinctive banner, the NSDAP rose to power far more quickly than anyone might have expected. From a fringe party with just a dozen of the Reichstag’s 493 seats in May 1928, the party’s number of seats had spiraled up to 107 in the September 1930 election. In the next election, held in July 1932, the Nazis won 230 seats, becoming, for the first time, the largest political party in Germany.
The Nazi party’s rise was like a mythological tale of a serpent being born out of tumult. After the chaos of its early years, the Weimar Republic had stabilized in the mid-1920s. Currency reforms had brought an end to hyperinflation by putting the reichsmark on the gold standard. The global economic boom that resulted in the Roaring Twenties helped to stabilize the economy of Germany, although the severe reparations demanded of Germany by the hated Treaty of Versailles still held the country down like a schoolyard bully.
A certain amount of stability and continuity was provided by the image of the nation’s president. Under the Weimar constitution, the role of the kaiser as head of both state and government had been superseded by an elected president, who served as head of state and who appointed the Reichskanzler (chancellor), who headed the government. While the president was more of a figurehead, the chancellor ran the government. In 1925, the people had elected the strong and familiar Paul von Hindenburg as president. He had come out of retirement in 1914 to serve as chief of the general staff during World War I, and he came out of retirement again in 1925. Though the country went through a revolving door of chancellors, the familiar, fatherly figurehead remained the same through a critical period of stabilization.
Had the rest of the world not collapsed suddenly in 1929, the history of Germany probably would have gone differently. The NSDAP probably would not have gotten those 107 seats in September 1930. Nor would there have been the succession of events that followed.
After a decade of prosperity in the Western world came Black Thursday. On October 24, 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashed, and falling economic dominoes rippled across the world financial markets. The twenties no longer roared, but sobbed.
In Germany, it was the Munich of 1919 all over again. The nation needed a strong hand, but would it be gloved in the red of the communists, or the black of the Nazis? The answer came when it was the Nazis who displaced the centrist Social Democrats in first place among the nation’s political parties, and the Communists remained mired in third place.
In March 1932, the Weimar Republic was due to hold a presidential election, and Adolf Hitler announced his candidacy. At age eighty-four, and with his health failing, Hindenburg had hoped to retire for the last time, but those who feared the Nazis realized that he was the only man who could beat Hitler. Hitler came in second in both the first and second rounds of the election. In the run-off on April 10, Hindenburg garnered 53.1 percent to Hitler’s 36.7, while the Communist candidate, Ernst Thallman, was a distant third. The Nazis were held at bay, but three months later, they held the largest blocks of seats in the Reichstag. It seemed that Hitler was indeed accomplishing with ballots what he knew would have been impossible without bullets.
Adolf Hitler salutes the crowd in Nuremberg in November 1935, flanked by slouching, brown-shirted SA men on the left and helmeted SS men, standing upright on the right. U.S. National Archives
A “mass roll call” of SA, SS, and other uniformed Nazis at the annual Reichsparteitag rally inside the massive Luitpoldhain amphitheater in Nuremberg. U.S. National Archives
When Chancellor Franz von Papen called another Reichstag election in November, the Nazis lost some ground, but still remained the largest party. Because the Social Democrats and the Nazis distrusted one another—and the Communists—the government remained paralyzed. Because no party had a strong enough majority, nothing got done. The government was paralyzed, and the people demanded a strong hand. Finally, Papen convinced Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor—just to break the impasse.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler became Reichskanzler. As such, he was asked by the president, Hindenburg, to form a new government. Five weeks later, on March 5, 1933, the Weimar Republic held its last election—the last free election to include all of Germany for the next fifty-seven years.
It has been said that the Communists might have done better had it not been for a fire, set by a Communist, that gutted the Reichstag itself on February 27. A Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested, convicted, and executed for the arson. He was almost certainly involved, but theories of a conspiracy have circulated for years. Though the Communist Party as a whole was blamed for the fire, it lost just 19 of the 100 seats it had held, and the Social Democrats lost only one. However, the Nazis won 92 and retained their majority. The tide had definitely turned.
Also passed in March 1933 was the Ermächtigungsgesetz (enabling act). It amounted to a mandate giving the chancellor the right to exercise near dictatorial powers. The dithering years of the revolving door of chancellors had brought forth a desire to put more power into the office in order to get things done. Had the new chancellor been someone other than Adolf Hitler, things would have been much different, but history is full of turning points and in 1933, Germany was overflowing with them.
Fifteen years after the humbling dissolution of the Second Reich, a new Third Reich emerged. With Hitler legally entitled to form a new government, there was no doubt that government would be a fusion of party and nation. It was, said Hitler, a Reich that would last a thousand years.
Under the Nazis, there was also a move toward consolidating power in the central government in Berlin and limiting the political and administrative authority of the sixteen German lander, or states.
As this new government was forming, Nazis from every corner of the party jockeyed for position, each staking out turf and grabbing for portfolios in the new government. Though lost in the crowd in any cursory view of the Third Reich hierarchy as a “minister without portfolio,” Dr. Alfred Rosenberg now effectively wielded the portfolio of the Reich’s “racial philosopher.” The Estonian-born engineer Rosenberg had been a Thule Society member, an early confidant of Dietrich Eckart, and a member of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the Nazi Party precursor, even before Hitler himself. A devotee of racial theorists such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, he had aligned himself with Helena Blavatsky, Guido von List, and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels in believing in a qualitative racial hierarchy that was topped by Aryans. Indeed, he had been among the first to use the term untermensch (“under man,” or subhuman) to describe both Slavs and Jews. Rosenberg shared Hitler’s disdain for both Jews and Bolsheviks, and he had developed a theory in which the two were parties to an overarching, international conspiracy against Germany. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Rosenberg helped create organizations such as the Militant League for German Culture and the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question. A loyal NSDAP man, Rosenberg had earlier served as an ideological caretaker while Hitler was in Landsberg, and he was elected to the Reichstag in 1930 on the NSDAP slate. In January 1934, Hitler made him a sort of racial philosopher-in-chief for the party and for the Reich.
Many of the early philosophers who had influenced Hitler and Himmler in their formative years, and who been key figures in such influential organizations as the Germanenorden and Thule Gesellschaft, were still around, though their influence had waned. Hitler had deliberately distanced himself from Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels since World War I. This was probably because he wanted his ideas and racial doctrines to appear as though they flowed from him, not from anything he might have picked up from the old Ariosophist or from having read Ostara when he was still a starving student back in prewar Vienna. In Mein Kampf, Hitler mentioned on
ly in passing that he had read some “anti-Semitic pamphlets” while he was a student in Vienna.
Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff, the early member of the DAP who was also a conspicuous figure in the Germanenorden and Thule Gesellschaft around the end of World War I, had dropped out of sight in the 1920s, returning to Turkey, where he had lived and worked before World War I. There are stories that he also traveled to Mexico during these years. He reappeared on the scene in Germany after Hitler took power, hoping to reassert himself within the ranks of the NSDAP and with the all-powerful Hitler. He certainly went about it the wrong way. Intending to inflate his own importance to the DAP back in the party’s early days, he wrote Bevor Hitler Kam: Urkundlich aus der Frühzeit der Nationalsozialistischen Bewegung (Before Hitler Came: Documents from the Early Days of the National Socialist Movement), which was published in January 1933. As the title suggests, the book focused on the pre-Hitler origins of the party, which was a focus that Hitler did not want. Hitler had the book banned, and the old Thulean left the Reich, retreating back to Turkey, where he watched the Nazi era from the sidelines.
Another mysterious man in the shadows of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power was Hermann Steinschneider. Like Hitler, he was born in Austria in 1889. The son of a Jewish actor, he took a page from the books of List and Lanz, renaming himself and claiming aristocratic lineage. As Erik Jan Hanussen, Danish nobleman, he made a name for himself in the middle-class parlors and theaters in Weimar-era Germany as an astrologer, clairvoyant, and hypnotist. It has been claimed that Hanussen met Hitler and taught him methods for mass hypnosis and crowd control. However, Hitler’s own skills at such oratorical tasks were already quite abundant—or, as we recall from Karl Alexander von Müller, “almost like hocus-pocus.”
Hanussen’s controversial prediction of the Reichstag Fire is considered to be either an amazing feat of fortune-telling or evidence of inside information. Some people say that Hanussen had hypnotized Marinus van der Lubbe to get him to set the fire, but others claim that Hanussen was just a man who knew too much. As often happens with men who know too much, he did not last long. Like Sebottendorff, he had worn out his welcome. Shortly after the fire, he was found murdered and lying in a shallow grave near Berlin.
Rudolf Hess (1894–1987) was the Third Reich’s deputy Führer when he made a mystery flight to Scotland in May 1941. Hess spent forty-six years in custody, never saying a word about his motives for this trip. He took his reason for it to his grave. U.S. Army art collection
The Third Reich was made up of both philosophers and warriors. Heinrich Himmler imagined himself with a foot in both camps. The pompous Hermann Göring had no such illusions; the former World War I air ace imagined himself a warrior. Having dropped into the shadows after the failed putsch of 1923, Göring now reemerged in the forefront of the NSDAP. His portfolio would be that of the Interior Ministry of Prussia, the largest of the German states. Prussia accounted for three-quarters of Germany’s area and 68 percent of its population—and Berlin was within Prussia. Bavaria, the second largest state, comprised a quarter of Germany’s area, but just 15 percent of the population. His appointment as head of Prussia gave Göring a turf that was commensurate with his grandiose ego.
Within Göring’s turf was the very powerful Prussian state police, and within the police was a Göring inlaw named Rudolf Diels. He suggested, and Göring enthusiastically embraced, the creation of a powerful and authoritative police and intelligence apparatus that would extend its tentacles beyond Prussia and throughout all of Germany. The Göring-Diels blueprint called for a force called Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), headed by Diels and answerable directly to Göring himself. Known universally as the Gestapo, this entity would become an all-powerful super–police force that would have authority superior to that of the police forces of the sixteen individual lander. As the Nazis consolidated their power, these lander police forces would be consolidated into a nationwide regular police force known as the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police). They would be in the same chain of command as, but beneath, the Gestapo.
A solemn Heinrich Himmler (left) shakes the hand of a disappointed Hermann Göring (right), who handed him control of the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) in April 1934. The Gestapo had been Göring’s idea, and he had hoped to command this secret national police force. However, Himmler outmaneuvered him, taking unquestioned control of all German police, to become the Third Reich’s top cop. U.S. National Archives
Heinrich Himmler, a cool, calculating character, was a study in contrast to the loud, bombastic Göring. As such, he approached the turf war more carefully. In the immediate aftermath of the Nazi victory, his turf was small, but would not be for long. Systematically, he worked to solidify his own turf and his place within the Third Reich. As Hitler moved the epicenter of the NSDAP from Munich to Berlin, Himmler appointed his own man in the capital. To neutralize Kurt Daluege, who still reigned autonomously at the SS offices in Berlin, held a seat in the Reichstag, and had been appointed by Hitler to be a minister without portfolio, Himmler sent Standartenführer SS (Colonel) Reinhard Heydrich, the man destined to become his strong right hand.
Had Hollywood central casting been responsible for casting the dark roster of the Third Reich, Himmler would have been cast as a clerk, and Heydrich would have been cast in the role of Reichsführer SS. Tall and Nordic in appearance, Heydrich had a chiseled face, a strong jaw and icy-cold, serpentine eyes. Four years younger than Himmler, he too had missed combat in World War I, although he eventually became involved with a Nationalist freikorps. In 1922, he enlisted as a cadet in Germany’s minuscule postwar navy and attained the rank of lieutenant before his insatiable desire for women got him into trouble with the wrong people. In this case, the father of a jilted lover was the friend of Erich Raeder, the navy’s chief of staff, and Heydrich was booted for conduct unbecoming an officer. Heydrich wound up marrying Lina von Osten, the “other woman” with whom he had been cheating on the rejected daughter of Raeder’s pal.
In 1931, a friend of a friend got Heydrich a face-to-face interview with Himmler, who hired him immediately to head his new SS intelligence and counterintelligence apparatus, which became the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, or Security Service), in June 1932. In 1933, Heydrich became Himmler’s man in Berlin and part of his master plan. This master plan was nothing short of having Himmler become Germany’s chief of police. In April 1933, one might have made the case for either Göring or Röhm achieving this goal, but nobody ever overestimated the calculating cleverness of Heinrich Himmler.
While Göring and Diels were dreaming of expanding the Prussian state police into a nationwide police force, Himmler was operating on a parallel premise. As Göring controlled the Prussian police, Himmler now controlled the police in Bavaria. With ruthless efficiency, he was turning that state into a model for the kind of police state that he planned for all of Germany. In March 1933, he established a Konzentrationslager, a prison facility in which to “concentrate” communists and other political enemies of the NSDAP and the Third Reich. Located in Dachau, near Munich, this concentration camp would become a model for much worse things to come.
Himmler was also reworking the Führer’s bodyguard detail, the Stosstruppe Adolf Hitler, into a small but effective paramilitary force, headed by Gruppenführer SS Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, who had been part of Hitler’s succession of bodyguard units since 1928. With his Völkisch interest in old-fashioned Germanic terminology, Himmler fixated on an antiquated term for bodyguard, Leibstandarte, and with the Führer’s acquiescence, named himself to be the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.”
The immense eagle and swastika, the emblems of the Nazi Party, became the state emblems of Germany when Hitler took power. Here, Hitler addresses the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, in 1938 as the body’s members give the Nazi salute. U.S. National Archives
By the end of 1933, with the aid of Wilhelm Frick, the Reich interior minister, Himmler had muscled nine additional lander police departments under SS
control. By February 1934, he controlled all but two, one of which was Prussia.
On April 10, 1934, a checkmated Göring handed over the keys to Gestapo headquarters at Number 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. (Diels was hustled out the back door and exiled to a minor political post in Cologne, where he would remain under Göring’s protection, safe but neutered.) Himmler would maintain his own offices at this address, while Heydrich would settle the SD into offices nearby at Number 102 Wilhelmstrasse.
Himmler now controlled both the SS and the Gestapo, although it would not be until February 1936 that Hitler formally decreed that Himmler was the Chef der Deutschen Polizei, or the police chief of the Third Reich.
As Hermann Göring had aspired to have the Gestapo emerge as a national constabulary under his control, Ernst Röhm imagined that his SA would soon supplant the rickety Reichswehr as Germany’s national army. Indeed, while the Reichswehr had a strength of 100,000 men, the SA had half a million in its brown uniform. The NSDAP had built an army for a battle for power that had never come, yet this unnecessary army still remained.
There was no love lost between the old generals of the Reichswehr and the SA. The former regarded the SA as nothing more than a street gang—a characterization that was essentially correct. In the spring of 1933, the Reichswehr begrudgingly struck a cooperative agreement with the SA for the latter to provide training and a conduit for recruiting, but Röhm considered it only a matter of time before he—not the Reichswehr generals—ruled Germany’s armed forces.