Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  Secondly, there was a growing threat on the ‘right’, from ‘reactionary’ elements around Vice-Chancellor Papen and his associates, who aimed to win Hindenburg back to their side and restore the shackles on Hitler in the cabinet. They were suspected of enjoying covert support in Dollfuss’s Austria and even Mussolini’s Italy. In June 1934, the SA absorbed the Stahlhelm, increasing its numbers and equipment. That same month, Papen gave a much-discussed speech at Marburg University critical of Nazi terror measures, which also hinted at the restoration of the monarchy in Germany. Some of his collaborators, such as Edgar Jung, even had Habsburgist sympathies. Hitler was aware of these conservative conspiracies in broad outline.6 Tensions mounted still further as the Führer became convinced, or affected to be, that Röhm was plotting not only with retired General von Schleicher,7 but also with foreign powers,8 to effect his removal. One way or the other, the challenges from right and left, at home and abroad, were becoming increasingly fused in Hitler’s mind.

  To make matters worse for him, Hitler’s plans for a Reichsreform were beginning to run into trouble.9 In late January 1934, he promulgated the ‘Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich’. Hitler defined its aim as ‘a unified Reich with a unified administration’, which was to establish a ‘structure’ which would enable the German people to deploy its immense strength. Its ‘clarity’ would compensate for the ‘inadequacy of the individual’.10 The ‘prerogatives’ of the Länder were transferred to the Reich, and the state governments were directly subordinated to that of the Reich. The old Weimar Reichsrat, long defunct, was finally abolished on 14 February 1933. In practice, however, the Nazis were replicating many of the old features of German particularism, just as Hitler had feared. This was most pronounced, as one might expect, in Bavaria, where the local Nazi leadership began conspiring to subvert the authority of the Reich not long after the abolition of federalism. Throughout the Third Reich, German particularism remained alive and kicking in the form of the regional party structures.11

  In the summer of 1934, Hitler struck at home and abroad. He travelled to Venice in mid June for his first meeting with Mussolini.12 This was a big moment for Hitler, long awaited since 1922, and he had tears in his eyes when they shook hands. The meeting began badly, because the Führer’s unprepossessing dark suit, black shoes, soft hat and lightly coloured coat contrasted with the Duce’s bombastic uniform. They soon got down to business, however, especially when the two dictators went for a two-hour walk in the park on their own, without a translator. Nobody knows exactly what was said on that occasion, or whether the Duce, whose German was enthusiastic but far from perfect, and the Führer might have misunderstood each other. Hitler, at any rate, emerged from the meeting genuinely under the impression that Mussolini had agreed to the removal of Dollfuss, the installation of a new chancellor and NSDAP participation in a new Austrian government.13 On the strength of these apparent commitments, Hitler decided to move against Austria. Whether he conceived the putsch or approved one that was already in preparation is not clear. Either way, the two moves, against Röhm and Dollfuss, were, one must assume, part of an integrated strategy.

  Hitler first dealt with his domestic enemies. On 27 June 1934, Blomberg and Reichenau persuaded him that the SA was planning a coup against the army, and probably also against the regime.14 They promised to hold the ring while the SS moved against Röhm.15 Hitler was also told by Röhm’s deputy, Viktor Lutze, that there was something afoot.16 When Göring’s ‘Research Institute’ (Forschungsamt)–which conducted surveillance of domestic and foreign targets–reported that intercepts suggested Röhm was about to move, Hitler suddenly jumped from his chair. ‘I have enough,’ he announced. ‘I am going to make an example.’17 Hitler flew to Munich and then motored down to Bad Wiessee to confront Röhm. Pistol in hand, he supervised the arrest of the SA chief in person, running back up several flights of stairs when it appeared that their quarries might offer resistance. It was by any standards an extraordinary scene, in which Hitler behaved in ways more typical of a pre-1914 Balkan conspirator or Al Capone of Chicago than the leader of a major European power. Shortly after, Röhm was done to death in custody, protesting his innocence to the end. Elsewhere in Germany, the SS, the Gestapo, the police, and in places even the army, disarmed the brownshirts and incarcerated many of their leaders. Several dozen other SA leaders were also gunned down or summarily executed, as was Gregor Strasser.

  Simultaneously, Hitler also decapitated the ‘right’. Even before moving against Röhm, Hitler had ordered the arrest of Papen’s associate Dr Edgar Jung, the author of the Marburg speech, who was subsequently murdered.18 The former Generalstaatskommissar, Gustav von Kahr, Hitler’s betrayer in 1923, was killed along with a number of other Bavarian conservatives, including Hitler’s bête noire, Otto Ballerstedt.19 The motive here was partly revenge, but partly also to crush any remaining separatist tendencies. Two of Hitler’s military opponents, retired General von Schleicher and his associate Ferdinand von Bredow, were murdered. So were several other figures close to Vice-Chancellor Papen, including his main strategist, Herbert von Bose, and the Catholic politician Erich Klausener, who had contributed to the Marburg speech. Papen himself escaped elimination, but his future was now very uncertain. What stayed Hitler’s hand was the desire not to cloud his relationship with the ailing Hindenburg. ‘The Führer does not want to undertake anything yet against the reactionaries,’ Rosenberg wrote in his diary, ‘his consideration for Hindenburg is almost touching.’20 The events of the Röhm putsch were typical of Hitler. He had put off the showdown with Röhm as long as possible, and prepared the ground carefully. He then acted ruthlessly, crushing two serious challenges to his authority in one stroke.

  Despite the presentational difficulties involved, the regime made no attempt to hide Hitler’s central role in the death of his former comrades. ‘The Führer personally led the action,’ one official report announced, ‘and did not hesitate for a moment to confront the mutineers in person and to call them to account.’ ‘The behaviour of the Führer during this nocturnal flight into the unknown was one of the utmost determination,’ it continued, adding that ‘Röhm was personally arrested in his bedroom by the Führer’.21 In his justificatory speech to the Reichstag a fortnight after the events, the Führer did not mince his words. Not only had he ‘given the order to shoot dead those principally guilty of treason’, but he also instructed his men to crush any further resistance with violence.22 Hitler stressed that he had pre-empted an SA ‘night of the long knives’,23 a phrase which has since lived on in the literature, albeit as a description of his own actions and not those of Röhm.

  On the other hand, Hitler was under no illusions about how badly the murders had gone down at home and abroad; US Ambassador Dodd, a Southerner whose relations with Hitler were steadily deteriorating, boycotted his apologia to the Reichstag.24 Hitler therefore made considerable efforts in press communiqués and declarations and in the privacy of the cabinet to blacken the reputation of Röhm and his circle, by emphasizing their well-known homosexual tendencies and their–greatly exaggerated–connections to foreign powers.25 He stressed that he had acted in order to ‘cauterize the festering sores of our domestic poisoned wells and the poisoning by outside powers’.26 The Führer also made a hysterical speech to a closed session of party leaders shortly after the murders at which he threatened to shoot himself if the various pillars of the Reich could not act in a unified manner.27 He then reached out to the foreign press, especially in America, to push his version of events. A week after Röhm’s killing, Hitler gave an interview to the New York Herald which began with a robust defence of his actions.28

  The cornerstone of Hitler’s apologia, however, was his contention that the elimination of the SA restored domestic stability to the Reich after a period of cleansing but turbulent upheaval. ‘Revolution,’ he told the Reichstag in mid July 1934, ‘is not a permanent condition for us.’ Slow, evolutionary change was now the order of the day. Later that autumn, Hitler
promised that ‘there will not be another revolution in Germany for a thousand years’. ‘The National Socialist revolution is completed,’ he announced, adding that ‘it has achieved what could be expected of it as a revolution’.29 Whether Hitler was consciously echoing Napoleon’s similar pronouncement when he came to power is not known, but it is clear that Hitler was seeking to reassure the German people that he had completed the Nazi revolution and in doing so ended it.

  The Führer now turned to deal with the nearest external enemy, namely Dollfuss. He spent much of early July 1934 preoccupied with Austria and seems to have superintended the planned operation in some detail.30 It seems that a group of Austrian SS members managed to convince Hitler that they could stage a putsch with the assistance of parts of the military and the police. In the middle of the month, Hitler met with Theodor Habicht and the other conspirators in Munich, presumably to concert the final measures. As in 1923, the plan was to seize and impose one’s will on the political leadership. Hitler then headed for Bayreuth. It was the first festival that he had fundamentally shaped and he marked its importance by staying a full week. Jews were now banned from performing, and those associated with Bayreuth emigrated to the United States. That did not prevent Hitler from consorting openly with individual Jews, such as Alice Strauss, the Jewish daughter-in-law of the composer Richard Strauss. Artistically, the central focus of the festival was a new production of Parsifal, with sets designed by Alfred Roller, which the Führer funded. To show his reverence, the Führer attended in full evening dress, not just in dinner jacket. The production was condemned by traditionalists as ‘the de-Christianization of the most Christian of all dramatic works’,31 which was exactly what Hitler had intended. Not for him the preservation of a masterpiece in aspic; to Hitler art was a living, breathing organism, subject to constant change.

  In the late afternoon of 25 July 1934, Hitler was called to the phone. The news from Vienna was catastrophic. The cabinet meeting, during which the conspirators had hoped to capture the whole government, had been postponed by a day, and when the Nazis took over the Chancellery, most ministers had managed to escape. Showing a characteristic mixture of brutality and incompetence, the conspirators had so badly wounded Dollfuss during his arrest, probably unintentionally, that the chancellor had bled to death in custody. Hitler still ordered the Austrian SA to stage an uprising in the countryside. They made little headway in the capital, rather more in parts of the countryside, especially Styria. Most police and army units resisted fiercely. Soon, the surviving putschists were pinned against the Yugoslav border. There was no chance of securing even the minimal aims of a Nazi role in government. To make matters worse, Mussolini responded by sending troops to the Brenner Pass, warning Berlin not to intervene. Powerless to affect the outcome, and fearful of giving France the excuse to launch a preventive war, Hitler backed down. Even at the height of his humiliation, however, Hitler exerted control, vowing to avoid ‘a second Sarajevo’,32 meaning a general conflagration sparked by a minor event. He would make war on his terms, and not be bounced into it.

  Mussolini’s reaction baffled Hitler, as he believed that the move against Dollfuss had been agreed at Venice. ‘I don’t understand that,’ he remarked to Fritz Wiedemann. ‘I filled him in on all the details of our Austrian policy in Venice.’33 It also infuriated him, and sent German-Italian relations into a long decline. There was now no question of a return visit by Mussolini to Germany in the autumn. Instead, Hitler looked to the Balkans. ‘I debated for a long time with the Führer,’ Goebbels recorded in late July 1934. ‘He has finally broken with Rome’ and ‘will seek closer relations with Yugoslavia’.34 The economic relationship, which was already close thanks to the 1 May 1934 German-Yugoslav trade treaty, deepened further, though Hitler took little political interest in the region.35

  The failure of the coup left Hitler with a dim view of the local Nazis, and perhaps of the Austrians in general, whom he regarded with a mixture of affection and exasperation. He no longer relied on the Austrian party, which was in any case banned. ‘Habicht is finally finished with Hitler,’ Goebbels noted. Hitler told Reichenau that he intended ‘to liquidate the National Socialist policy towards Austria’, and ‘to disband the Austrian Legion’ which would be turned into a ‘purely humanitarian organization’ to look after Austrian refugees.36 At least nominally, the Legion became the ‘Hilfswerk Nordwest’ and was employed for public works. To ease the financial burden of maintaining a paramilitary force almost 10,000 strong, its members were increasingly integrated into the growing German economy. Hitler sent Papen to Vienna, partly to get him out of Berlin and partly in order to mend fences with the Austrian regime, at least for the time being.37 Still, German pressure on Austria, which had started in 1933 with the ‘1,000 mark prohibition’, a levy on Germans travelling to Austria in order to hit Austria’s tourism, and similar measures, continued for a while. It was only in July 1936 that Papen managed to negotiate a gentlemen’s agreement in which Hitler recognized the ‘complete sovereignty of the federal state of Austria’, promised better cultural relations and left Vienna free to deal with the Austrian Nazis as an internal matter, all in return for an amnesty for party members not accused of the most serious crimes. That said, Austria continued to be a concern after the failed putsch, not least because of continued rumours of a Habsburg restoration.38

  If Hitler had suffered a severe diplomatic setback, he continued to tighten his grip on Germany itself. First, after the events of 30 June 1934, the SS increasingly replaced the SA as the most important military party institution. On 20 July 1934, specifically citing the ‘great achievements of the SS especially in connection with the events of 30 June 1934’, Hitler elevated the Reichsführer SS to a position comparable to that of the chief of staff of the SA, that is, immediately responsible to Hitler.39 In theory, this put Himmler on the same level as Röhm’s replacement, Viktor Lutze. In practice, the events of 30 June, and Himmler’s own relentless empire-building, meant that the SS took on a far more dominant role in the Third Reich.

  Secondly, the elimination of the Papen wing of the conservative opposition left Hitler free to capitalize on the illness of Hindenburg, who finally died in early August 1934. There was now nobody else left to claim his legacy, or to take up his suggestion in a last posthumously sent letter to Hitler that he should restore the monarchy. Even before the field marshal had breathed his last, Hitler presented the cabinet with the draft of a ‘Law on the Head of State of the German Reich’, which simply amalgamated the office and powers of the presidency with those Hitler already possessed as ‘Führer and chancellor’ after Hindenburg’s death.40 He then organized a referendum to demonstrate, as he put it, the ‘unshakeable unity’ of the German people to the outside world and especially to ‘a particular international conspiracy [the Jews]’.41 Having long acted on the basis of presidential power, Hitler had now finally captured the presidency itself. The officials of the Imperial Chancellery swore an oath to Hitler.42 Seeing the writing on the wall, the Reichswehr leadership, at the initiative of Blomberg and Reichenau, suggested that the army swear its own personal oath of allegiance to the Führer.43

  All this was accompanied by the consolidation of Hitler’s authority within German society. Central to this was the ‘Führer’ myth, the charismatic hold which Hitler had long enjoyed over his followers, and now extended over much of the population.44 It was expressed every day in the form of the greeting ‘Heil Hitler’ in conversation or written communications. Hitler gave careful thought to the management of this cult of personality. He let it be known that ‘the German greeting “Heil Hitler” should become the credal greeting of the Germans among themselves’. Hitler also suggested that ‘in social written communications “Heil Hitler” should in principle by used in closing, without, however, completely excluding an alternative valediction’.45 He left it ‘to the tactfulness of the individual’ to decide when the use of his name at the end of his letter was appropriate or not, and stressed that there sho
uld be ‘no reproach’ against those who abstained from doing so for good reason. Hitler’s sense here of what was appropriate and enforceable is palpable. He was also determined to avoid the kind of exaggerated cult of the personality, bordering on deification, which might expose him to ridicule. When Hitler got wind of the fact that the non-Christian faith group ‘German Faith Movement’ was propagating the idea of a ‘divinely gifted’ and ‘divinely sent’ Führer, he insisted that this article of their creed be deleted.46

  Not everything went Hitler’s way. Many Germans remained immune to his appeal, even if very few resisted actively. In the plebiscite called on 19 August 1934 to approve his absorption of the presidency, which was hardly a free and fair vote, just over 10 per cent of those who turned out refused to do so. This was twice as many as had voted ‘no’ in the November 1933 referendum on leaving the League, and together with the greatly increased number of non-voters and spoiled ballots suggested unease either with the events of 30 June or perhaps with Nazi rule generally. There was no disguising the setback. The photograph of a consternated Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazis leaders receiving the results tells its own story.47 Towards the end of the month, the Führer vented his frustration in a speech at the Ehrenbreitstein fortress near Koblenz, vowing that he was ‘convinced’ that he would convert the ‘tenth man’, that is, the 10 per cent who had voted against him in the plebiscite.48 Clearly, he had some way to go before German national unity was complete.

  In terms of high politics, though, the Führer’s authority was now more or less absolute. ‘Now the Führer is the sole master in Germany,’ Rosenberg recorded in his diary, so that ‘all preconditions for a National Socialist state are finally in place’.49 The Reichstag was completely compliant,50 serving primarily as an acclamatory forum at which Hitler announced major policies or–later–issued declarations of war. Government departments did Hitler’s bidding,51 and were increasingly imbued with National Socialist spirit by Hess in the Party Chancellery, which had secured the right to be consulted on all government legislation by July 1934, and eventually also control over the appointment of senior officials.52