by A. N. Wilson
By August 1932, the Nazis were doing so well in the polls, and the mainstream or semi-sane parties were in such disarray, that Goebbels was urging Hitler to go for bust. They conveyed to Schleicher in secret talks that he should tell the President that Hitler would only consent to serve in a government if he could be the Chancellor of Germany. Schleicher initially thought he was joking. It was out of the question! Even Schleicher, who had in fact done so much to assist the Nazis’ rise to power, could not see what was happening.
Not long afterwards, Papen proposed that maybe they should offer Hitler the post in what he called a Brown–Black (Nazi–Catholic) coalition. Papen clearly had no idea that such an idea was out of the question.
Hitler was a good hand at the political poker game. At the very beginning of his career he had managed to oust the pathetic founder-membership of Anton Drexler’s Nazi Party, and to say, in effect, that unless he had total control, he would not play. The same technique worked with the hardened politicians of Germany’s sane Right, and would later prove effective with the Prime Minister of Great Britain, then the greatest imperial world power. All or Nothing.
The Nothing, and this was the advancing dread of the German Right, was Communism. Papen was in many respects like the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, who felt that Mussolini in Italy was better than the Communists, and Hitler better than a Bolshevist German dictator.
In August, with Papen still holding on to the Chancellorship, they offered Hitler the post of Vice Chancellor. ‘The idea of the Leader as Vice Chancellor in a bourgeois Cabinet is too grotesque to be taken seriously’, was the view of Goebbels. Hitler emerged from this round of political talks with a feeling of abject defeat. He had not been given the Chancellorship, and it looked as if the government was going to limp on without the overt support of the 13 million or so Nazi activists in the country.
In the late summer and autumn, the Nazis kept up their pincer campaign of, on the one hand, political intrigue at the highest levels, and on the other, lowest level, street violence and murder. The violence turned public attention away from the humiliating fact that President Hindenburg had failed to make Hitler Chancellor. Papen brought in an emergency decree allowing a peremptory death sentence for acts of political, terrorist murder. Local SA leaders threatened mayhem, the smashing of Jewish shops, and the usual horrors, if death sentences were carried out against Nazis.
The Reichstag was dissolved in September and the fifth general election in one year was announced. In October, the Nazis staged a huge youth rally in Potsdam. There were by now grave doubts about party funding and money was tight. One of Hitler’s earliest supporters, Kurt Lüdecke, a rich gambling playboy, came back from America with some much needed funds. Hitler, whose spirits were low, had been in some doubts about whether he would be able to rise to the occasion of the youth rally, to which 110,000 boys and girls were coming from all over Germany. But as Lüdecke later remembered: ‘when Hitler stood alone at the front of the platform, a fantastic cry went up into the night, a sound of matchless jubilation. Then he raised his arms and dead silence fell. He burst into a flaming address which lasted scarcely fifteen minutes. Again he was the old Hitler, spontaneous, fiery, full of appeal.’ 9 For seven hours, the Hitler Youth then paraded past him.
The November election led to another stalemate. The German electorate was more or less evenly divided, with a slight drop in the Nazi vote. Nevertheless, on 19 November, a petition was handed to Hindenburg, signed by twenty of the leaders of Germany’s greatest businesses, demanding that Hitler be offered the Chancellorship. Hindenburg again offered Hitler a place in the coalition, and again Hitler refused. Schleicher replaced Papen as Chancellor.
Schleicher then delivered what could have been a killer blow to Hitler’s movement. He offered a place in his government to Gregor Strasser, the inventor of the term ‘the politics of catastrophe’. Strasser was a racist, a believer in thuggery, a Nazi. But he was a Nazi without Hitler’s black poetry, a Nazi without the Wagner-mysticism or the personal magnetism. Hitler moved fast. With the help of Hess, he combed through the movement with the speed and efficiency of one of Pius X’s monsignori spying out Modernists among the Catholic clergy in 1906. Any likely Strasser supporter was immediately removed from his position of influence or rank in the party. Strasser himself became isolated and such were the scare-tactics employed by the Nazi majority that his support ebbed away. He, in the end, funked accepting Schleicher’s offer of a job in government. ‘Strasser is isolated! Dead man!’ noted Goebbels gleefully.
The crisis had demonstrated Hitler’s enormous personal power in the party. It was a case of L’état c’est moi. It was no longer possible for any right-wing government to think of harnessing Nazi support without involving Hitler. And Hitler refused to be part of any government of which he was not the leader.
In January 1933, with the government lurching towards yet more political and economic crises, Papen foolishly believed that he saw a way of ousting Schleicher from the Chancellorship. He began cosying up to Hitler. Local elections in Lippe-Detmold that January showed a surge of Nazi support. With the withdrawal of support by the Centre Left and by Papen, Schleicher had no alternative but to recommend to the President yet another election, since the government could not hope to survive a vote of no confidence in the Reichstag.
By the end of January, Papen was recommending that Hindenburg appoint Hitler as Chancellor on condition that he had a Cabinet of conservatives.
Hitler’s state of nervous agitation as these negotiations were in progress had reached a state of near-delirium. ‘I have never seen him in such a state’, said Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was destined to be Nazi Germany’s fatally influential foreign minister.
Hitler wanted power so badly that it had driven him to frenzy. The Nazis would always speak of their victory as if it were a Rienzi-style act of political energy and violence – Die Machtergreifung, the seizure of power. In fact, Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany just as many others have done since in milder and more democratic times, by a series of telephone calls and a succession of compromises. Papen believed that he had neutered Hitler – he was ‘no danger at all. We’ve hired him for our act!’ – by insisting that all but two of the seats in the Cabinet be occupied by conservatives, not Nazis. Hitler played the much stronger card, while agreeing to this, of insisting that they all consent to an ‘Enabling Act’ which would be brought into force as soon as he had taken office. The Enabling Act would grant him Emergency Powers. These would, of course, as anyone could surely have foretold, entail the abolition of democracy in Germany and the handing to Adolf Hitler of more or less absolute power.
Papen consented. On 30 January, General Hindenburg, the President of Germany, agreed that the Chancellorship be given to Adolf Hitler. When Hitler received the news, he immediately alerted the Berlin Brownshirts to go onto the streets. The new Cabinet called on the President. Hindenburg appeared to be in a daze. Hitler, endimanché in a black frock coat and clutching a top hat, told ‘the old man’ that he would serve him as loyally as he had done when he was a soldier in the war. It was not usual for speeches to be made on these occasions and everyone looked embarrassed and shifty. Hindenburg was so disconcerted that he never in fact went through the formula of offering Hitler the Chancellorship. He merely said gruffly, ‘And now, gentlemen, forward with God!’
Hitler’s first act was to assemble the Cabinet and tell them that the Reichstag would be dissolved and new elections held to grant him the emergency powers necessary to deal with the crisis. As darkness fell over Berlin, the Stahlhelm units (who in the old Freikorps days had been a rival right-wing group) joined forces with the SA and 25,000 men marched in a torch-lit procession through the Brandenburg Gate and past the Chancellery. In the light of what followed, it is the pious custom of historians to emphasize with what chill all decent people greeted this spectacle. The truth is that the Nazis were extremely popular, and that Hitler, a
ll of whose views and plans had been repeatedly yelled through loud-hailers and microphones to the multitudes, was seen as just what Germany needed. Over 50,000 Berliners joined the Nazi Party in the month after his accession to power.10
SIX
Old Surehand
Henry Williamson, the author of the charming and popular story Tarka the Otter, described Adolf Hitler in 1936 as ‘the great man across the Rhine whose symbol is a happy child’. Two days after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, General Ludendorff, who had stood at Hitler’s side in the 1923 Munich putsch and who had now seen what sort of a man he was, wrote to President Hindenburg, ‘I solemnly prophesy to you that this damnable man will plunge our Reich into the abyss and bring inconceivable misery down upon our nation. Coming generations will curse you in your grave because of this action.’1
It would seem obvious to us, with the eyes of hindsight, that Williamson was a deluded fool and that Ludendorff spoke as he knew. Why could the majority of Germans not see – when the new regime immediately set up its hateful Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei), the Gestapo, when snoopers began to insist upon a census into every German citizen’s private life, racial background and religion? Why did the huge majority of Germans not see that a terrible mistake had been made, when the nation of Europeans who had given to the world the invention of the printed book instituted that chilling re-enactment of the Inquisition: the burning of books? What possessed Ernst Bertram, a literate man, to compose a lyric to be sung as the books were heaped up in funeral pyres of culture:
Reject what confuses you
Outlaw what seduces you,
What did not spring from a pure will,
Into the flames with what threatens you!
This was to celebrate the burning of, among other books, the work of his friend Thomas Mann, the lyrics of Heinrich Heine, and many other ornaments of German greatness. How could they have felt happy at such things? Admittedly, not all did – 250 noted writers and academics left the country as soon as Hitler became Chancellor.
The White Queen in Through the Looking Glass remarked that it is a poor sort of memory which only works backwards. Without an understanding of this truth, the study of history is impossible. Perspectives change with time. Most people are not capable of seeing into the future. Hindsight allows us to see things which were invisible to them. And to us these things seem so blindingly obvious that we wonder: how could they have been so blind?
When we consider the period in Germany, let us say, from Hitler becoming Chancellor in January 1933 to the splendid pageantry of the Olympic Games in 1936, it is particularly necessary to attempt an act of stupendous historical imagination: to think of Hitler and the National Socialist revolution without any knowledge of where it led in the years which followed 1936. Naturally, there were those who, for a variety of reasons, found the Nazis, and Hitler, repellent, all through these years of apparent triumph. The systematic anti-Semitism of the regime was alone enough to excite the contempt of decent people. If anyone had foretold, in January 1933, that the Nazis would be able to massacre about 6 million Jews, many of them being gassed in specially constructed death camps, their prophecy would have been dismissed as fantasy. The anti-Semitism in which German people, and the rest of the world, colluded in these early days was a much more low-key affair. We can see that it ended in the trains, carrying millions of people to their deaths, and the scar of this everlastingly horrible memory is branded on European consciousness, as is the memory of the war, instigated by Hitler in 1939 and which led to perhaps 50 million deaths.
The majority of the Jews who died in this ghastly mass slaughter were not, of course, German citizens. When the Nazis took control statisticians reported that fewer than 1 per cent of German citizens were religious Jews (approximately 525,000 people) with a rather larger number of ‘Jewish Germans of mixed race’ – some 750,000.2 In the last election before his appointment as Chancellor, Hitler had not stressed his anti-Semitic obsessions, and in the first year of his government, the Nazis moved slowly. On 7 April 1933, they passed a law which made it possible to purge Jews and others from the civil service. This included a wide range of callings, from judges to policemen to village schoolmasters.
Julius Streicher, whose rabidly anti-Jewish speeches and publications had enlivened public meetings for more than a decade, was put in charge of the central committee of the Nazi Party and on 1 April 1933, he called for a boycott of all Jewish businesses, shops, doctors, lawyers and dentists. For days beforehand, the SA were at work, daubing crudely painted signs outside shop doorways with the word JEW, and on the day of the boycott, SA heavies, some of them armed, stood at the doorways of shops, asking customers to withhold their patronage. In those early days, there were brave men such as Edwin Landau, a shopkeeper in a small west Prussian town, who donned his war medals and went to confront the bullies standing at the doors of other Jewish shops. Professor Viktor Klemperer, whose extensive diaries of the Nazi regime are essential reading, was forced to stand down as a professor of romance languages at Dresden University, but he noted in his diary on 25 April 1933 that he did not consider the German people to be especially anti-Semitic.
The maltreatment of Jews, and the beatings, and the monstrous beginnings of legislation against them gave sufficient warning signals to many that they were no longer safe in Germany. But there were those such as Peter Gay and his family in Berlin who felt that the dictatorship was sending mixed messages, and that it was ‘safe enough for them to remain’.3
The blindness of people to Nazi intentions – or, if not of a full-scale programme of extermination at this date, then at least to Nazi predilections – can perhaps be attributed to two causes. First is the enormous sense of relief which flooded over Germany at the end of the ineffectual Weimar Republic. And the second is what were perceived as miraculous social and economic improvements by the regime.
The relief was expressed by otherwise highly intelligent human beings. Gerhart Hauptmann, a Nobel prize winner, published an article entitled ‘I Say Yes!’ Its sentiments were those of millions of Germans who were prepared to overlook the obvious brutality of the Brownshirts and the hideousness of anti-Semitic rhetoric from Goebbels and Streicher, because they felt that something had happened to their country. It seemed possible to put an end to the humiliation. ‘A Pledge of Loyalty by German Writers to the People’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler’ was voluntarily signed by distinguished names, among them Martin Heidegger – one of the most revered philosophers of the twentieth century. Heidegger’s inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg was a paean of praise to the Leader, and the podium from which he spoke was festooned with the red banners and swastikas of the movement. Richard Strauss, by any standards one of the best composers of the twentieth century, placed himself at the regime’s disposal. Gottfried Benn, the poet, wrote to the exiled Klaus Mann – ‘On purely personal grounds I declare myself for the new State, because it is my Volk that is making its way now. Who am I to exclude myself; do I know anything better? No! … My intellectual and economic existence, my language, my life, my human relationships, the entire sum of my brain, I owe primarily to this Volk. My ancestors came from it; my children return to it …’4
Such were the feelings of unbounded relief which the National Socialist victory occasioned in the minds of many people who were not in themselves sinister, and who meant no harm to others. But they would have been peculiar indeed had they not been sustained by the apparent success of the social and economic programme which Adolf Hitler initiated from the moment of taking office. Klemperer, no friend to the regime, bumped into a stranger in a busy street in Dresden on 24 November 1936. ‘A young man hurries past me in the crowd, a complete stranger, half turns and says with a beaming face, “I’ve got work – the first time in three years – and good work – at Renner’s – they pay well! – for four weeks! –” and runs on.’5
Someone who was friendly towards the regime remarked on the tendency of historians to identify the ty
rannies of Stalin and Hitler. ‘But in Stalin’s Russia, the great majority were visibly unhappy. You have only to read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs to see how unhappy they were. In Germany in the early years of the regime, you could feel, see, the happiness.’6 The historian Robert Gellately wrote in 2001 that ‘Hitler won acclaim in the 1930s, perhaps first and foremost for beating the Great Depression, and for curing the massive unemployment in the country. Although definitely no economist himself, his regime overcame the Depression more quickly than any of the other advanced industrial nations.’ 7
This is an absolutely fundamental fact to grasp. Without it, very little else about the Third Reich is comprehensible. It was by no means only Fascists, such as Henry Williamson, who felt happy that Hitler was now the supreme Leader. Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, and Ward Price, the editor of that popular English newspaper, dined with Hitler in December 1933. Hitler, who wore full evening dress, rather than uniform, withdrew at the end of the meal to a room reserved for non-smokers, and Rothermere joined him. He was deeply impressed and the Daily Mail became a broadly pro-Hitler newspaper for several years thereafter.8 When Hitler went to breakfast at the British embassy in Berlin in March 1935 together with Göring and Ribbentrop, Sir Eric Phipps, the ambassador, had lined up his children in the reception room to raise their little arms and exclaim a bashful ‘Heil Hitler!’9 When supping at the Chancellery a few months later with Winifred Wagner, wearing the simple brown shirt of an SA officer, Hitler slapped his thigh and exclaimed, ‘Great people, the English!’10