By March 1932 there were 6 million Germans unemployed and the chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, was increasingly having to ask President Paul von Hindenburg to force through by decree unpopular measures intended to restore economic stability. Already the democratic credentials of the Weimar Republic were looking distinctly weak and, as civil service and public sector salaries were reduced and even war pensions cut, foreign debt climbed and the street fighting between communist and NSDAP gangs increased in intensity. Brüning managed to ban the SA and the SS, the uniformed militias of the NSDAP, but in the presidential election of March 1932 Hindenburg, the hero of the Great War, only won in a run-off, with Hitler coming second with 37 percent of the votes cast. In May, Brüning resigned, to be replaced by Franz von Papen, a former junior officer in the army who had been expelled from the United States in 1916 while military attaché at the German embassy in Washington, suspected of planning sabotage of factories producing war material for the British.Von Papen was an old-fashioned nationalist who was happy to work with the NSDAP, and lifted the ban on the latter’s uniforms, but his government was too narrowly based – it was very much a collection of well-bred old pals – to command a majority in the Reichstag, while his monarchist and Christian beliefs made him suspect to the NSDAP. To try to achieve a majority, he persuaded Hindenburg to dissolve parliament, and in the general election of July 1932 the NSDAP got 37 per cent of the votes cast – 14 million – and 230 seats, while the SPD came second with 133 and the communists third, increasing their 78 seats to 89.Von Papen offered Hitler, now head of the largest party in the Reichstag albeit without an overall majority, the post of vice-chancellor, but Hitler held out for chancellor or nothing. On this occasion, it was nothing, as Hindenburg distrusted Hitler, disliked his politics and refused to appoint him.
Von Papen now introduced some measures to ameliorate the plight of the workers and in another election in November 1932 there was some falling off in support for the NSDAP, who nevertheless remained the largest party with 33 per cent of the votes and 196 seats, while the communists gained 11 seats, bringing their total to 100. Von Papen resigned, to be replaced by Kurt von Schleicher. General von Schleicher had been closely involved with the secret rearmament that had started under Weimar, and with the arrangement with the Red Army that allowed German soldiers to train in armoured warfare and develop military aviation well inside Russia and away from the prying eyes of the British and the French. He was an extreme nationalist, prepared to use the NSDAP but not to put them into power, and an arch intriguer and political fixer. He tried to form an alliance between the trade unions and the army aimed at keeping the NSDAP out, but only succeeded in alienating big business and the landowners. Unable to carry the Reichstag, and finding Hindenburg unwilling to let him impose a military dictatorship, he resigned in January 1933. Hindenburg now had no options left, and he sent for Hitler.
Von Schleicher is generally regarded as the man who buried the Weimar Republic and made it possible for Hitler to come to power, but it is difficult to see how Hitler could have been prevented from coming to power by legitimate means. Only an unlikely coalition of the SDP and the communists could have outvoted the NSDAP in the Reichstag, but even then, if the NSDAP could have obtained the votes of the fifty-two nationalist Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) members (probable) and the Catholic Centre Party’s seventy (possible, if only to block the communists), Hitler could have formed a coalition with an absolute majority. The fact is that most Germans wanted Hitler, if nothing else as a last-ditch antidote to economic chaos, social collapse and unemployment.14
Adolf Hitler, appointed chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, has possibly had more written about him than anyone else in modern history, and it is still almost impossible to glimpse the real man through the smoke of propaganda (his own and his enemies’), revulsion at what eventually happened in the concentration camps set up by his regime, and the results of the denazification of Germany at the end of the Second World War and since. Today, no German will stand up in public and defend any aspect of the Third Reich* and trying to get officers of the modern German army, the Bundeswehr, to discuss any aspect of the 1939–45 war is like drawing teeth. Certain facts are, however, indisputable. Firstly, Hitler and his party came to power as a result of the normal, albeit in some respects flawed, democratic political process. Secondly, not all of what the NSDAP did when it achieved power was bad – it made provision for old-age pensions, adult education and public health services far better than anything that existed in Britain at the time, and it built the autobahns. Thirdly, Hitler was a charismatic leader and brilliant orator. While he was quite ready to use terror, mere fear could not have kept virtually the whole nation fighting right to the bitter end. Hitler may have been bad, but he certainly was not mad. Indeed, had he stopped after the absorption of the Sudeten Germans in 1938, he might well now be regarded as the greatest German since Charlemagne.*
It is always dangerous (albeit fun) to speculate on what might have happened had not the Wall Street Crash forced the Weimar government into an inescapable round of deflation, higher taxes and unemployment, thus making the promises of Hitler and others to stabilize the currency and restore full employment (and, incidentally, to break free from the shackles of Versailles) so attractive. The Weimar Republic had been rearming in secret; any German government, whatever its political colour, would have wanted to renegotiate the borders fixed by Versailles; the Polish Corridor could not realistically be expected to remain Polish nor Danzig a ‘Free City’ for ever; even a liberal and democratic Germany would have wanted to station its troops in the Rhineland, extend customs union with Austria into full-blown amalgamation and incorporate the Sudeten Germans. But a democratic Germany might have achieved all of that by negotiation, and she might have stopped short of gobbling up the whole of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. It is also reasonable to suppose that a democratic Germany would have resisted the temptation to have another crack at the old enemy, France, but it is very possible that she would have gone to war with Russia eventually, and quite possibly in alliance with the British and the French. The Second World War might well have happened anyway, although the sides might have lined up differently.
As it was, Hitler’s aims were straightforward: all power in Germany was to be in the hands of the NSDAP, the economy was to be restored, and the Versailles Treaty to be annulled or ignored and the German territories lost after 1918 were to be recovered. Longer-term goals included the establishment of Lebensraum, ‘living space’, or territorial expansion. As this could not be to the west or the south, it would be at the expense of Russia and Poland in the east. With himself as chancellor but with only two others (Frick and Göring) of his own party in the cabinet of what was supposedly a coalition government, Hitler now had to establish NSDAP control of the country and then to consolidate it. The Reichstag was dissolved on 1 February and in the March elections the NSDAP got 43.9 per cent of the vote and 288 seats, which in coalition with the nationalist DNVP with its fifty-two seats gave Hitler a small overall majority. The election was marred by intimidation, bullying of opponents and vote-packing by the SA (Sturmabteilung or ‘Storm Detachment’), the rough trade of the NSDAP, but even so the election was reasonably fair and Hitler would have had a thumping majority without the assistance of the SA gangs.
Hitler now moved remarkably quickly, helped by an arson attack on the Reichstag building in February 1933 that could conveniently be blamed on the communists. Despite conspiracy theories then and since, there is no reason to believe that the Berlin police did not get their man – a simple-minded Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, who may or may not have acted on the instigation of a communist, but almost certainly not on the orders of the Communist Party, which had nothing to gain and much to lose from his action. In the event, the communists lost anyway as in March 1933 the newly elected Reichstag passed an enabling act, which by law had to have a two-thirds majority, granting emergency powers to the chancellor, Hitler, to rule by decree. As t
he eighty-one communist members of the Reichstag were in jail and not able to vote, the result was a foregone conclusion, but, if they had been there, Hitler would almost certainly still have got his majority. Progress now was rapid. That same month, communist and socialist trades unions and newspapers were taken over and either abolished or transformed into supporters of the regime, the first concentration camp was opened at Dachau (not yet an extermination centre) and the German state legislatures were taken over by NSDAP appointees. In April foreigners and Jews (except those who had served in the 1914–18 war) were dismissed from the public service, and the Secret State Police, the Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo, was formed. In May all trades unions were subsumed into the NSDAP German Labour Front and in June the Social Democrats, the SPD, were banned and the other political parties, seeing the graffiti on the wall, disbanded ‘voluntarily’. By July 1933 Germany was a one-party state and in a referendum in November 1933 92 per cent of the voters approved.
The NSDAP had seized power, or rather had it handed to it, and despite his revolutionary rhetoric Hitler now needed stability in order to consolidate that power. Stability was threatened by the activities of the SA, which had its origins in the working class and the unemployed. Its members wore party uniform (the ‘brownshirts’) and as stewards and general bully boys had been the standard-bearers of the party in its long upward struggle. Now, however, the SA was an embarrassment with its members taking the law into their own hands, beating up those whom it thought were its enemies (including anyone talking with an odd accent, or of swarthy appearance) and generally behaving as if they were a state within a state. Statements by its commander, Ernst Röhm, a former captain in the army, that the NSDAP revolution was unfinished alarmed industrialists and landowners, while his claim that the 4-million-strong organization should form the army of the new state angered the generals. As all the institutions that Röhm threatened were needed by Hitler for his long-term plans for Germany, the National bit of National Socialism had to stamp on the Socialism bit and Röhm had to go, although this was undoubtedly made easier by his being a drunkard and a homosexual, about which orientation the NSDAP leadership held Presbyterian views. In July 1934 the Night of the Long Knives removed any threat the SA might pose, and settled numerous old scores the while. At least seventy-seven NSDAP members, including the entire SA leadership, were shot or arrested and then shot, along with some 100 others, including the former chancellor, General von Schleicher, and his wife.
In August 1934 Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg died, aged eighty-seven. He had fought in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars of German unification and from 1916 was Chief of the General Staff, professional head of the German army. He was revered throughout Germany and many saw him as the last link to an honourable past. The NSDAP portrayed him as having handed over all that was best in the old Germany to the vigorous and dynamic new Germany, in the shape of Hitler. Hitler now combined the offices of president and chancellor into one and became Führer (leader) and Reichskanzler as well as Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht or ‘Armed Forces’. All members of the Wehrmacht were required to swear an oath to Hitler personally,* and, in a referendum held in August when the voters were invited to approve Hitler’s becoming Führer, 89.93 per cent voted ‘yes’. That the published result showed that around 4.5 million had voted ‘no’ would indicate that the referendum was properly conducted and that approval of Hitler was genuine.
By the end of 1934 Hitler and the NSDAP were the unchallenged rulers of Germany, with legal permission to do almost whatever they liked. Now for Versailles and the lost territories.
* * *
At the height of the war to come, the United States would dispose of 100 divisions and 8 million men† in the most technologically advanced army the world had yet seen, but in 1932, when Hitler was preparing his party for power in Germany, America was one of the least militarized societies in the developed world and her army’s most visible military operation was against her own people in her own capital.
This was the third year of the Great Depression and there were few signs of it ever ending. For most of the inhabitants of Washington, however, the great unfolding drama was that of the Bonus Expeditionary Force, as the 25,000 veterans of the Great War called themselves. They had come to the capital, unemployed, hungry and broke, many with their wives and children, to seek early redemption of a promise made to them in 1924. Then, in a rare fit of generosity, Congress had passed an act granting a cash bonus of $1,000 to all who had served in the Great War, to be paid in 1945, the idea being that by then the veterans would be entering middle age and could do with a handout, and by then the money to pay it would be easily available from public funds. The veterans had calculated that if the bonus were to be paid now, rather than their having to wait another thirteen years, they would each get $500 – $7,600 or £3,800 at today’s values – a sizeable sum. In order to make their point, the veterans marched up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and held meetings, when they would harangue each other and anyone else who would listen. Squatting in derelict buildings and makeshift camps in parks and fields, they kept themselves alive by begging, generally non-aggressively, or with donations from sympathizers. While the House of Representatives passed a bill to pay the bonus, it was defeated in the Senate. Congress had no intention of redeeming its promise early – it did not have the money, or, if it did, there were more important things to spend it on. President Hoover found the whole thing an unwelcome distraction and refused to see the representatives of the marchers.
To begin with, many of the Washington police, including the commissioner, had some sympathy with the marchers and were reluctant to use force to move them on, but, as the long hot summer wore on, presidential and governmental irritation increased. The marchers would not go home (many had no homes to go to or, if they had, there was nothing to go there for), hygiene in their camps deteriorated and the whole thing was becoming a national embarrassment. The press, initially supportive, began to turn against the marchers and it was claimed that the whole thing was being stirred up by communist agitators. In Michigan a demonstration by unemployed workers outside the Henry Ford factory got out of hand and police fired on the crowd, killing four and wounding a number. While what happened in Michigan was nothing to do with the Bonus Marchers, it fed the paranoia of the conspiracy theorists, who began to see any gathering of the unwashed, veterans or not, as composed of red rabble rousers. On 28 July Congress ordered the Washington police to remove the Bonus Marchers from public buildings and parks. Stones were thrown, the police over-reacted and drew their pistols and two marchers were killed. The president now ordered the army to put an end to what he described as ‘rioting and defiance of civil authority’ and what General Douglas MacArthur, the army’s Chief of Staff, called‘incipient revolution’.15
At around 5 p.m. the army moved in, led personally by MacArthur in full uniform. It was unfortunate that office work had just ended for the day, and the streets were packed with office workers leaving for home. The vanguard of the military might about to be unleashed was the 3rd Cavalry commanded by Major George S. Patton. It was doubly unfortunate that instead of charging the Bonus Marchers, which is what they were presumably supposed to do, Patton’s warriors laid into the office workers and uninvolved spectators, riding them down and whacking them with the flats of their drawn sabres, before then turning their attention to the marchers. After the cavalry came the infantry, backed up by six tanks (which did more damage to the road surface with their steel tracks than they did to the marchers). An infantry charge preceded by a bombardment of tear gas drove the marchers back and by 10 p.m. two adults and a baby had been killed and the troops were pouring petrol over the marchers’ makeshift huts and setting them on fire. It was the end of the Bonus March, and, while the Secretary for Defense lauded MacArthur as the hero of the hour for saving the capital from the ravages of ‘communists and persons with criminal records… few if any of whom had ever worn an American uniform’, the truth wa
s that this down-at-heel, helpless and hopeless body was made up of men of whom, according to the veterans’ administration, 94 per cent had served in the armed forces, 67 per cent had served overseas and 20 per cent had been disabled by war service.
It was not a glorious chapter in the history of the United States Army and a public relations disaster at a time when its very existence and purpose were in question, but this was an army that was under-funded, ill-equipped and with little training, and certainly none in crowd control. The Bonus Expeditionary Force melted away, and the men the army had dispersed drifted back into the population of the nomadic unemployed. Eight years later, when the children of the Depression’s 15 million unemployed were conscripted, 40 per cent of them failed the medical examination: the chief reasons were rotting teeth, defective eyesight, heart problems, deformed limbs and mental instability.
In the presidential election of November 1932 the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated the Republican Hoover and became president in February 1933. His priorities were to stabilize the economy and prevent what many people thought was incipient revolution by the lower classes – by which was meant the manual workers and agricultural labourers. Roosevelt withdrew US participation in the International Monetary Conference – an attempt to fix exchange rates – and devalued the dollar. What became known as the New Deal brought the National Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority (state involvement in the production and distribution of electric power), the Wagner–Connery Act (to regulate labour disputes), the National Labour Relations Board and a flurry of legislation delving into matters that had hitherto been regarded as the responsibility of the private sector, business or the individual. It also took the United States off the gold standard and brought the repeal of the unpopular and increasingly unworkable Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution which banned the manufacture, import, export and sale (but not the possession or drinking) of alcohol. Some of Roosevelt’s measures were overturned by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional – leading to a long-running battle between president and court – and those that were not would take time to work through. Strikes by those who were in work became commonplace and increasingly threatening, with police or National Guard regularly opening fire, and self-help organizations sprang up, whereby barter, either of goods or of services, replaced money as the means of exchange.
Second World War, The Page 8