In Bavaria, however, the federal authorities still held out. The Bavarian minister of the interior, Karl Stützel, refused to bow to demands to curb the anti-Nazi press.42 In late February 1933, several weeks into Hitler’s tenure, the acting chief minister, Dr Heinrich Held, vowed in an interview with the New York Times that ‘in keeping with the letter of the constitution, I shall defend Bavarian independence at all costs, even in the face of force with which we may be confronted’.43 The BVP leader Fritz Schäffer even threatened to arrest any imperial commissar sent by the Nazis at the Bavarian border.44 With Held’s connivance, Schäffer met with Crown Prince Rupprecht to discuss the possibility of a Wittelsbach restoration to forestall a Nazi takeover in Munich. Held was summoned to Berlin. There was a heated discussion. Now the roles were reversed from their last meeting in 1924. Hitler held all the cards. He warned Held that any step towards a restoration of the monarchy would result in a ‘serious catastrophe’.45 The plan collapsed when Hindenburg refused to support it, vindicating Hitler’s strategy of embracing the president.46
The Reichstag election of March 1933 took place in an atmosphere of extreme intimidation, in which the instruments of government and the Nazi Party organizations were deployed to telling effect. Thousands of SA men were deputized as police officers in Prussia by Göring. Moreover, Hitler now had the endorsement of Hindenburg. Hitler himself was elected for the constituency of Oberbayern-Schwaben, his first and only Reichstag seat, and the Nazi vote in Bavaria rose to its highest level yet. Even so, the NSDAP fell short of the desired overall majority, securing nearly 44 per cent of the vote. This meant that Hitler would continue to base his authority not on a popular mandate, but on the presidential powers conferred by Hindenburg.
Once the votes were in, Hitler moved against his old enemy, German particularism. ‘What is required,’ he told the cabinet, was ‘an audacious approach’ to the relations between the Reich and the federal states, especially Bavaria.47 He began with the smaller and weaker states, installing an imperial commissar in Hamburg, followed by Bremen, Lübeck and Hessen. Then he crushed Württemberg, the weaker of the two southern German states. On 8 March, a Nazi Reichsstatthalter was installed in Stuttgart, as well as in Baden, Saxony and Schaumburg-Lippe. That same evening, Hitler finally decided to bite the bullet in Munich. ‘This evening we were all at the Führer’s,’ Goebbels noted in his diary. ‘There it was decided that it is now Bavaria’s turn.’48 This was not an easy decision, as there were some within the party who feared considerable resistance in Munich, no doubt recalling the fiasco of 1923.
Hitler, however, kept his nerve. He took personal charge of the negotiations with the BVP in Berlin, tellingly them bluntly that the election had seen a repudiation of separatism and particularism.49 Hitler also sent Röhm to Munich to deliver an ultimatum. The BVP did not attempt a Wittelsbach restoration, though Held initially resisted demands–backed up by the threat of force from the SA–to appoint Ritter von Epp as Reichsstaathalter in Munich. He even gave instructions for the Bavarian police to be put in state of readiness. Heavily armed units took up positions in front of the Bavarian Landtag, the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of the Interior, with instructions to open fire on the Nazis if necessary. Civil war seemed possible.50 Ten years earlier, the Bavarian police had not hesitated to shoot; this time they were overawed by the SA and SS. On 9 March, Bavarian autonomy was extinguished; control of the police went over to Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. The French envoy to Munich was sent packing. Foreign representation in individual German federal states – and thus any potential interference–ceased. In due course, the flying of the traditional blue and white Bavarian colours was forbidden, even at the traditional Oktoberfest.51 German federalism was dead.
It was a big moment for Hitler. He had imposed his will on an enemy which had defied him for more than a decade. It was also a watershed in German history. Hitler claimed that ‘what had been desired and attempted’ in vain ‘over centuries’ was ‘now reality’, namely ‘the coordination of the political will of the federal states with the will of the nation’. He promised that he ‘did not want to rape the federal states’ but to give them ‘the rank and the place’ to which ‘they were entitled by virtue of history and tradition’.52 That same day, the old red, white and black imperial flag and the Nazi swastika replaced the Weimar colours of black, red and gold (or ‘mustard’, as its enemies called it contemptuously) as the state flag. Significantly, Hitler did not revert to the old flag of the Second Reich, which could soon only be shown on special occasions such as the funerals of soldiers from the former imperial army.
The first phase of the seizure of power was complete. Hitler’s government controlled Germany not only from east to west, but also from north to south. On 13 March 1933, Goebbels was made Reich minister for people’s enlightenment and propaganda. Shortly afterwards, Hitler appointed Schacht president of the Reichsbank. The second phase was about to begin.
Central to the next stage was the passage of an enabling law, which would grant Hitler the power to legislate without recourse to the Reichstag. He also expected this measure to strengthen Germany against the outside world. The key to this was winning over the Centre Party, which would give Hitler valuable political cover.53 ‘The acceptance of the enabling law by the Centre Party,’ he told the cabinet, ‘would lead to an increase of prestige abroad.’54 Hitler, who was now domestically in a significantly stronger position, held out the prospect of a concordat between the new regime and the Catholic Church.55 Fearing the left, under severe political and often physical pressure from the Nazis, the Centre Party buckled. Through a mixture of political skill and brute force, Hitler was now on the verge of what had eluded Brüning, Papen and Schleicher before him, which was to turn a presidential cabinet into a broadly based authoritarian regime with the backing of a parliamentary majority.
Hitler consecrated this burgeoning German unity with an opening ceremony for the new Reichstag in the garrison church of Potsdam. This event, which has gone down in history as ‘The Day of Potsdam’, was intended to suggest a synthesis between the old Prussian traditions and the young National Socialist movement. Hitler and Hindenburg’s joint appearance was framed by old Prussian battle flags against the background of Frederick the Great’s bronze sarcophagus. Seats were reserved for the Hohenzollerns. One contained the crown prince, a Nazi sympathizer, in the uniform of a colonel of the Death’s Head Hussars; the place reserved for Wilhelm II was symbolically left empty, to suggest an emperor if not over the sea then at least beyond the Rhine in Holland. Catholic dignitaries rubbed shoulders with Protestants. The president delivered a speech invoking the glories of the Prussian past, especially its unification of the ‘German tribes’, and expressed the hope that it would serve as an example for the regeneration of Germany in present times. Hitler looked on in reverence, careful not to be seen to upstage the national treasure that was Hindenburg. With or without the consent of the older man, though, his charisma was already beginning to pass to the younger chancellor.56 The rift between German conservatism and the Nazis was symbolically healed by the public handshake between Hitler and Hindenburg–immortalized by a photograph–immediately after the ceremony. It was Hitler’s first major act of state choreography, which he had rehearsed incognito in the garrison church on the previous day.57
Once these opening ceremonies were over, the Reichstag returned to its temporary home in the Kroll Opera House to pass Hitler’s enabling law.58 This measure gave him the power to legislate without Reichstag approval. Hitler explained that he needed the powers in order to ‘rebuild people and Reich’ as well as ‘win over the German worker for the national state’. Hitler’s enduring concerns about German federalism, even after the co-ordination of Bavaria, came to the fore again when he warned that he would regard any attempt at a ‘monarchic restoration’ as an ‘attack on the unity of the Reich’ and ‘would respond accordingly’. Turning to the most pressing issue of the day for most Germans, the economy, Hitler de
fined his two main economic tasks as the ‘saving of the German farmer’ and the ‘integration of the army of unemployed into the production process’. In order to achieve all this, Hitler argued, it was necessary to bring the interminable cycle of voting which had characterized the last years of the Weimar Republic to an end. Anxious to reassure critics worried that the proposed law would give Hitler unprecedented power, he stressed its limited and temporary character. There had, in fact, been many enabling laws in the course of the Weimar Republic,59 but it should have been obvious, not least because Hitler had made no secret of his intentions in the past, that the Nazis would never voluntarily relinquish any power they were given.
Hitler was speaking to a largely captive audience. Together with the Centre Party, the Nazis and their conservative allies made up a majority of the Reichstag. The communists had been banned. The only voice of opposition came from the SPD deputies. Otto Wels, their chairman, gave an impassioned speech against the enabling law. Referring to the already intense wave of repression directed against his party, he announced in words that have since passed into legend that the Nazis could take their freedom but not their ‘honour’. When Wels had finished, Hitler leaped up to deliver a withering response. He lambasted the SPD for not having launched a communard-style revolt against the Versailles settlement in 1919. ‘It would have been equally possible,’ he said, to have given their revolution ‘the same elan and direction which France gave its rising in 1870.’ It was, as ever, the international connections of the SPD and not their socialism which affronted Hitler. He attacked them for spreading ‘untruths’ about the situation in Germany, and the fact that they–allegedly–‘constantly tried to run down Germany abroad’. This mattered to Hitler, because he wanted to avoid giving neighbouring powers an excuse to intervene.
There was a widespread expectation on the left that Nazism would simply be a repeat of the Bismarckian anti-socialist repression, which the movement had weathered successfully. Hitler told Wels that this was not the case. ‘Do not confuse us with the bourgeois world,’ he warned, and he also counselled the SPD against the hope ‘that their star might rise again’. In fact, Hitler warned, he was a very different proposition; there were no half measures for him. ‘I do not want to make the mistake,’ Hitler remarked menacingly, ‘of just provoking enemies rather than destroying or reconciling them.’ To the SPD rank and file he held out an olive branch. ‘I will shake hands with anyone who is committed to Germany,’ Hitler promised. But for the SPD leadership, the message was clear. ‘You gentlemen,’ Hitler hurled at Wels and his fellow deputies, ‘are no longer needed.’ Shortly afterwards, the enabling act passed with 441 votes in favour and 94 against, including that of Otto Wels. That same day it went through the completely Nazi-controlled Reichsrat unopposed and became law. German democracy was not simply done to death by a small clique of men in smoke-filled rooms. It committed suicide under duress in public.
Over the next fortnight, Hitler legalized the destruction of German federalism with two ‘laws for the coordination of the federal states with the Reich’. State legislatures were reconstituted on the basis of the proportion of each party (in so far as it still existed) had gained in the March Reichstag election. Their legislative powers were taken away and conferred upon the state governments, which in turn were to be appointed by the imperial commissars nominated by Hitler.60 In Prussia, the largest state, Hitler took on the role of imperial commissar himself, and conferred the powers back to Göring, underlining where the source of authority lay. ‘All power lies with the federal authority,’ he told the assembled Statthälter, adding that ‘it must be prevented that the centre of gravity of German life is ever again transferred to individual areas or even organizations’, another swipe at the BVP.61 All the switches, as the title of the laws suggested, were to be turned in the same direction. The Reichsrat was now defunct and was eventually abolished early in the following year. ‘Coordination’ was in a sense symbolic, since the state governments were by now all under Nazi control anyway, but it underlined Hitler’s determination to create a unified polity from which all regional political diversity had been eliminated.
Pulling down hundreds of years of German tradition was one thing, putting something else in its place was quite another. It soon became clear that there was no clarity over what was to come next. Some, such as the minister of the interior, Wilhelm Frick, wanted to turn the Third Reich into a unitary state and rationalize the territorial asymmetry of the Reich into supposedly more sensible administrative units. Hitler was not so sure. He felt that some of the damage done by the traditional ‘fragmentation’ had been compensated by the NSDAP, which had ‘never known regional associations’, but was instead based on the ‘Gau-system’, something which France had implemented.62 In other words, the National Socialist Gau–whatever its medieval German etymological origin–was in Hitler’s mind the new German equivalent to the French department. It was intended to represent a totally new principle of regional administration.
At the same time, Hitler was ambivalent about Frick’s vision, in which there was, as he put it, ‘a new current [which] wishes to clear away everything, to standardize everything, and to centralize everything across the Reich’. He urged caution. One would have to start from the facts of nature, and avoid behaving like a ‘bear who batters the hermit to death in order to kill a fly’. He therefore laid down that ‘the objective is to retain the existing construction so long as it is useful’, and to change it so that ‘in future the good is preserved and the useless is eliminated’. Here Hitler expounded a kind of National Socialist subsidiarity principle, which paralleled a very similar rule he had enunciated a year earlier for the NSDAP itself. ‘One must not ask “what can be removed”,’ he explained, ‘but what must be removed.’ The key thing, Hitler remarked presciently, was that ‘the particularism of the princes must not be replaced by the particularism of an ideology’. 63
Hitler’s real concern here was for the future, when the old guard had passed away, and there was a danger of falling back into bad old habits. ‘After our departure’, he predicted, there would be a ‘shift’ in the quality of leadership, which might lead to the ‘separation’ of parts of the Reich. Hitler clearly wanted to head off the danger that his new Reich would disintegrate, like that of Alexander or Charlemagne, into feuding successor states, thus refederalizing Germany. Avoiding such an outcome was a central part of his long-term programme. ‘Posterity,’ he reminded the Reichsstatthalter, ‘will judge us by the final result’ and not by ‘the revolution’ itself. Hitler did not quite put it this way himself, but he seems to have envisaged a Weberian shift from the largely charismatic rule of Führer and first-generation Gauleiter to a more legal and bureaucratic structure after his death. In the second generation, he suggested, the ‘authority’ of the party leadership would no longer be so ‘firm’, and a great deal would depend on the ‘general tendencies’ within the bureaucracy. This was why, Hitler argued, ‘the construction [of the state]’ would have to be sound so that the coherence of the unified national state could not be subverted. Hitler was thus under no illusion that the German tendency towards fragmentation had been banished by ‘coordination’; transcending particularism would be a project of many generations.
By the spring of 1933, the German left had been largely eliminated. Next in line were Hitler’s conservative allies. They shared many of his immediate internal and external aims, but in terms of style, background and world view the two were far apart.64 The NSDAP presented itself as not only an anti-capitalist but also an anti-bourgeois party. Picking up Hitler’s rhetoric before 1933, it lambasted the conservatives for their ‘reactionary’ nature and their ‘class snobbery’,65 which stood in the way of the creation of a true ‘People’s Community’. The violence meted out to conservatives, though never quantitatively as significant as that experienced by the communists and Social Democrats, escalated from isolated incidents in early 1933 to a systematic campaign. On 7 May, the leader of the DNVP par
ty caucus, Ernst Oberfohren–who had opposed Hugenberg’s policy of cooperation with Hitler–was found shot dead in his apartment. The official verdict spoke of suicide, but it was probably murder. Senior DNVP members had their houses searched by the police, or were accused of corruption. Party meetings were broken up by the SA. All this reflected Hitler’s growing view that the main internal challenge to his rule now came not from the German left more generally, but from the left inside the Nazi Party, and the German right in its many forms: federal, monarchic, aristocratic, clerical and conservative nationalist.
A network of camps was erected across the Reich. In late March 1933, the first prisoners were sent to Dachau outside Munich.66 Most were leftists of one sort or another, but there were also some conservatives and Catholic Bavarian federalists. The two sons of Hitler’s old adversary Heinrich Held were deemed ‘no better than Jews’ and placed in a punishment detail.67 The purpose of these early ventures was to persecute the political rather than the (perceived) racial enemies of the regime. While Hitler was aware of the existence of British concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War, and alluded to them on a number of other occasions, there is no evidence that these influenced the decision to set up Dachau and other places. There was no central coordination of the camp system at this stage,68 and Hitler does not seem to have played a direct role in either the establishment or the running of the camps.
In the summer of 1933, Hitler moved against the remnants of the Weimar system. He proclaimed 1 May a national holiday, fulfilling a longstanding left-wing demand. The day after, he abolished the trade unions. Over time, the NSBO were amalgamated into the new German Labour Front, under Robert Ley, which was given the job of organizing German workers. On 22 June 1933, the SPD was banned. Two days later, under pressure, the DNVP disbanded itself. A day later, the Staatspartei, the former DDP, followed suit. The two Catholic parties, the Centre Party and the BVP, were the last to wind themselves up, under severe pressure, in early July. On 14 July a law specifically banned the establishment of new political parties.
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