Hitler
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However, the repression did not affect the Left only. On 15 February, Hitler used a big meeting in Stuttgart to mount strong attacks on the Centre Party, which in Württemberg formed the majority of the government. However, political opponents interrupted the broadcast of the meeting by cutting the main cable. The cabinet regarded this action as ‘sabotage’ and a ‘major blow against the authority of the Reich government’.31 Hitler’s Stuttgart attacks on the Centre marked the start of a Reich-wide campaign against the Catholic party, which in the light of the ‘Stuttgart act of sabotage’ increased in intensity and in some cases became violent. Centre Party meetings and newspapers were banned; civil servants who were party members were, like Social Democrats, suspended or dismissed;32 a torchlight procession of Centre Party supporters, following a meeting with Brüning in Kaiserslautern, suffered an armed attack. Following a subsequent complaint by the chairman of the Centre Party in the Rhineland to the Reich President and the Vice-Chancellor about the continuing ‘terror’, Hitler felt compelled to intervene.33 A major offensive against the Centre Party at this point did not suit his intentions. Thus, acting on his authority as Party leader, he ordered a stop to the attacks by Nazi activists with the statement: ‘The enemy that must be crushed on 5 March is Marxism! All our propaganda and thus the whole of the campaign must concentrate on that!’34
And that is exactly what happened during the remaining two weeks before the election. It now became apparent how Papen’s 1932 Prussian coup played into the hands of the NSDAP. Göring, who had taken over the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in an acting capacity, systematically purged the top ranks of the Prussian administration and police of democratic officials.35 On 17 February, he instructed the police to provide the ‘nationalist leagues’, the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm, and the propaganda of the government parties with wholehearted support. By contrast, they should proceed against the agitation of ‘organizations hostile to the state’ with all means at their disposal and, if necessary, ‘make ruthless use of their weapons’.36 On 22 February, he ordered the creation of (armed) auxiliary police units from members of the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm. Simply by putting on an arm band, members of paramilitary leagues became enforcers of state policy.37
On 27 February, the cabinet agreed a decree that not only increased the penalties for espionage, but was above all directed against ‘activities amounting to high treason’, including resistance to the police and military, as well as calls for general and mass strikes. The Justice Minister Gürtner’s desire to publish the decree before election day shows that the new government was hurriedly creating a new weapon that would enable it to crush any opposition effectively and conclusively.38
Meanwhile, Hitler had been continuing his election campaign with mass meetings that were broadcast on the radio.39 On 20 February, he was able to fill the NSDAP’s election campaign coffers; at Göring’s official residence in Berlin he addressed two dozen leading industrialists whom he promised that ‘Marxism’ would be ‘finished’ either in the coming elections, ‘or there will be a fight fought with other weapons’. In the end, he ensured that the guests agreed to put up a total of three million RM, which the NSDAP urgently needed to finance its election campaign.40
Stage 2: The removal of basic rights
During the night of 27/28 February, the Reichstag was set on fire. To this day the background to this event has remained obscure and may well remain so. The Nazis’ claim that the fire was started by the KPD as a signal for an uprising can be dismissed; it proved impossible to provide any decisive proof. On the contrary, the Reich Supreme Court was obliged to acquit the accused communist functionaries and it was to become clear that the communists were totally unprepared for an uprising.41 The second explanation, according to which the 24-year-old Dutch worker, Marinus van der Lubbe was solely responsible for the fire, has dominated research for a long time. Its main flaw is that it is difficult to see how a single individual could set fire to and destroy such a large building. The third explanation, which blames the fire on a Nazi plot, possibly organized by the President of the Reichstag, Hermann Göring, is plausible given the systematic persecution that followed, but cannot be adequately proved.
The debate between the supporters of the Nazi plot idea and those claiming a single individual was responsible has been shaped by two important alternative theories about the functioning of the Nazi state: on the one hand, the assumption that the seizure of power was carefully planned, and on the other that the Party leadership had largely improvised its take-over.42 However, these alternative explanatory models do not necessarily contribute much to answering the question: who started the fire? In fact, this question is basically of secondary importance for the history of the seizure of power and Hitler’s role in the process. What is decisive is the fact that, as early as that night, he used the situation to introduce extensive emergency powers, thereby removing legal restrictions on the persecution of his political opponents and establishing arbitrary rule.
Hitler was spending the evening of 27 February with Goebbels when he received the telephone call informing him of the Reichstag fire. They both quickly set off for the parliament, where Göring and Papen were already waiting for them. They soon agreed that the communists must have been responsible. After an initial consultation with Papen, Hitler met Goebbels, who, in the meantime, had mobilized the Gau headquarters, in the Kaiserhof. It is clear from Goebbels’s diary that they were not exactly concerned about a communist uprising: ‘Everyone’s delighted. That’s all we needed. Now we’re really in the clear.’43 Hitler and Goebbels drove from the Kaiserhof to the editorial offices of the Völkischer Beobachter, where Hitler personally took over redesigning the next issue.44
The impression given by Goebbels of a very calculating and determined Hitler, coolly using the situation for his own ends, is reinforced by the measures he took the following day. At the cabinet meeting on the morning of 28 February 1933 Hitler announced that ‘a ruthless confrontation with the KPD was now urgently necessary’, the ‘right psychological moment’ had arrived, and the fight against the communists must ‘not be made dependent on legal considerations’. Göring stated that ‘a single individual could not possibly have carried out the arson attack’.45 A second cabinet meeting, which took place in the afternoon, agreed the Decree for the Protection of People and State, thereafter often termed the Reichstag Fire Decree.46 Suspending ‘until further notice’ the basic rights of the Weimar constitution, it imposed restrictions on personal freedom, free speech, and freedom of association, and authorized interference with postal communications, house searches, confiscations, and limitations on property rights. In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over power in the individual states, on a temporary basis, in the event that the measures taken by the states proved inadequate ‘to restore law and order’. In effect, the government was usurping the Reich President’s constitutional right of intervention; the federal structure of the Weimar Republic, the careful balance between the Reich and the federal states, was history. Moreover, the death penalty was introduced for a whole series of offences, to enable the regime ruthlessly to crush resistance.47 The state of emergency created by the decree was to remain in force throughout the Third Reich. Hitler’s regime was based from start to finish on depriving the nation of its basic rights.
That very night thousands of KPD functionaries were arrested in Prussia, using comprehensive lists prepared under the Papen and Schleicher governments in case of a communist uprising; the other states soon followed suit. On 3 March, the police achieved an important coup by arresting the party’s chairman, Ernst Thälmann. The party machine was systematically destroyed just at the point when it was preparing to go underground.48 Göring also had the whole of the SPD press in Prussia banned for a period of fourteen days and renewed the ban several times until 10 May, when the party’s newspapers were confiscated. It was only outside Prussia that a few papers could continue to be published until the beginning of March.49 Philipp Sc
heidemann, Wilhelm Dittmann, and Arthur Crispien, all members of the SPD central committee, had fled to Austria before the Reichstag fire; at the beginning of March, the former Prussian prime minister Otto Braun and the former Berlin police president, Albert Grzesinski, went abroad too.50 The Reichstag Fire Decree also gave the government the pretext for arresting unpopular intellectuals, for example, Carl von Ossietsky, Erich Mühsam, Ludwig Renn, Egon Kisch, and the lawyer Hans Litten, who had caused Hitler so much embarrassment in a Berlin courtroom in 1931.51
After issuing the emergency decree, Hitler returned to the election campaign, speaking on 1 March in Breslau, the following day in the Berlin Sportpalast, and on 3 March in Hamburg.52 Finally, on 4 March – government propaganda declared the Saturday before the election to be the ‘Day of National Awakening’ – Hitler made an appeal to the electors from Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia. His speech was not only broadcast on the radio but was also carried over loud speakers, installed in public squares throughout the Reich. In Berlin alone Party formations were involved in twenty-four public demonstrations in various parts of the city. Hitler used his appearance above all as a massive denunciation of the ‘November criminals’ and, as usual, refrained from making any concrete statements about his government’s future policies. According to Hitler, when asked by his opponents about his ‘programme’, there could be ‘only one reply: “the opposite of yours”’.53 At the end, in a solemn conclusion, his audience in Königsberg, but also the masses all over the Reich listening to the loudspeakers, began singing the ‘Netherlands Prayer of Thanksgiving’, consciously taking up a tradition from pre-war Germany, when it was played on important occasions.54 The transmission ended with the pealing of the Königsberg church bells.
On election day, the new government was already in a position to dominate the streets throughout the Reich. Swastikas and black-white-and-red flags were ubiquitous; the coalition parties’ posters were prominent everywhere, while those of the opposition parties were banned. The streets were patrolled by the SA and the police, armed with rifles.55 In the end, the NSDAP managed to win 43.9 per cent of the vote. Together with their coalition partners, the DNVP, who had adapted themselves to the new era by fighting the election under the name Kampffront Schwarz-Weiss-Rot [Combat Front Black-White-Red (the colours of the pre-1919 Reich)], they had an overall majority of 51.9 per cent. This meant that the NSDAP had managed to increase its hitherto highest vote of July 1932 by 6.5 per cent (compared with its vote in November 1932, by 10.8 per cent). The biggest losses were suffered by the KPD (4.6 per cent) and SPD (2.1 per cent). In view of the massive obstacles placed in the way of the left-wing parties and the numerous advantages gained by the NSDAP since 30 January, the result was worse than expected by Hitler and the Party leadership. The NSDAP was still dependent on its coalition partner.
Stage 3: ‘Cold revolution’
Hitler was certainly exaggerating when he claimed in the cabinet meeting of 7 March that the election result was a ‘revolution’.56 But what followed – a mixture of illegal actions by the Party rank and file and quasi-legal measures by the government – did indeed, within a few weeks, revolutionize Germany’s political system.57 Goebbels described this process accurately as a ‘cold revolution’:58 through a series of actions resembling a coup d’état the government destroyed the constitutional order, concentrating power in its own hands.
To begin with, it set about ‘coordinating’* the states not yet controlled by the National Socialists. With the Reichstag Fire Decree the Reich government had expressly given itself the authority ‘temporarily’ to take over ‘the powers of the highest authorities in a state’ in order to ‘restore law and order’. Hamburg, which was ruled by a coalition of DVP, DSt.P, and SPD, was the first casualty of this clause.59 The Social Democrat members of the senate had already resigned on 3 March, in order to avoid giving the Reich a pretext to intervene in Hamburg’s affairs. The following day, the first or senior mayor, who was a member of the Deutsche Staatspartei, also resigned. This prompted the local National Socialists to demand the post of police chief and, when the senate refused, on 5 March – election day – the Reich Interior Minister, Frick, simply stepped in and appointed an SA leader as acting police chief. In February, with the aim of conciliating the bourgeois parties, the Hamburg Nazis had already proposed – naturally with Hitler’s approval60 – a non-Party figure and leading business man, Carl Vincent Krogmann, as first mayor. This proved successful: on 8 March, a new senate was formed under Krogmann’s leadership, including the bourgeois parties. During the following days, similar developments occurred in the other states: on 6 March in Bremen and Lübeck, on 7 March in Hesse, on 8 March in Schaumburg-Lippe, Baden, Württemberg, and Saxony. Only Bavaria was not yet subject to Nazi rule; but, on the evening of 8 March, Hitler and his closest advisors decided to put an end to this state of affairs.61
In Munich ‘coordination’ ran as smoothly as in the other states. The reassurances that the leader of the Bavarian People’s Party, Fritz Schäffer, had received from Hindenburg on 17 February, and prime minister Heinrich Held had received from Hitler on 1 March,62 that the Reich would not intervene in Bavaria proved completely worthless. As had been agreed in Berlin the previous evening, on 9 March an NSDAP delegation, led by SA chief Röhm and Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, demanded from prime minister Held that a member of the delegation, Ritter von Epp, be immediately appointed general state commissar. The large numbers of SA marching around the city provided a suitably threatening backdrop to their demand. The Bavarian government refused to agree; but that evening Frick transferred the powers of the state government to Epp on the grounds that ‘the maintenance of law and order in Bavaria is currently no longer being guaranteed’.63 That same evening Held complained both to Hitler and to Hindenburg. The Reich President instructed his state secretary to find out from Hitler what was going on, and then accepted his explanation that the situation could not be dealt with in any other way.64 Epp now took over power without more ado and, after a few days, Held was forced to go. This was the same Held who, eight years before, had made Hitler promise that his party would abide strictly by the law.65
At the beginning of March, in moves often directly linked to the ‘seizure of power’ in the states, the Nazis also took over the administration in numerous towns and cities. Typically, the SA occupied the town hall, drove out, and in some cases mistreated, the councillors, and hoisted a swastika on the roof. The local government elections, called by the new government for 12 March, were immediately followed by another wave of take-overs in numerous towns and villages in which the Nazis had hitherto been unable to make an impact.66
Immediately after their election victory of 5 March, the Nazis also increased their anti-Jewish attacks, directed above all against lawyers and businesses, throughout the Reich.67 But, department stores, one-price shops, co-op stores, in other words businesses (whether they were Jewish or not) which the Party had attacked for years as unfair competition for ‘German’ retailers, were also targeted by activists. Party supporters, above all Storm Troopers and members of the National Socialist small business association, demonstrated in front of the shops, prevented customers from entering, and stuck notices or scrawled slogans on the shop windows. This often led to disturbances. On 9 March, SA formations marched to the Berlin stock exchange to try – unsuccessfully – to force the resignation of the ‘Jewish’ board.68 While some leading National Socialists (for example Göring, with his announcement of 10 March that he refused to accept that ‘the police should be a protection force for Jewish department stores’69) encouraged such attacks, Hitler, conscious of the need to consider his conservative coalition partners and the economic situation, was obliged to calm things down. On 10 March, he issued a statement forbidding ‘individual actions’ and he used a radio broadcast on the ‘National Day of Mourning’ to underline this ban and to demand ‘the strictest and blindest [sic!] discipline’.70 As a result, with a few exceptions, the attacks decreased.
> The government responded differently to the attacks on Jewish lawyers. In this case, official statements actually encouraged the occupation of court buildings and the expulsion of Jewish judges, prosecutors, and attorneys. These attacks were not simply an expression of radical anti-Semitism; rather, they represented an early trial of strength with the state apparatus, for they challenged the rule of law, preparing the way for legal interventions in the judiciary and civil service.71
During this period, Hitler sought to demonstrate his solidarity with conservative Germany. On 10 March he ordered that all public buildings should fly the black-white-red flag to mark the National Day of Mourning.72 This was very much in accordance with the views of Hindenburg, who on the following, day sent a flag decree to the Reich Chancellery,73 which Hitler then announced in his radio broadcast of 12 March: ‘until the final decision concerning the Reich colours has been taken, the black-white-red flag and the swastika are to hang side by side’, as this would link ‘the proud history of the German Reich with the powerful rebirth of the German nation’. However, Hindenburg had also instructed that the Reichswehr was to use only the black-white-red flag, thereby demonstrating that he continued to regard the army as being above party. Hitler also announced a decree from Reich Interior Minister Frick that to ‘celebrate the victory of the nationalist revolution’ all public buildings should be decorated with flags in the new form for three days.74 This gesture was a foretaste of the ceremonies envisaged for the opening of the new Reichstag session on 21 March in Potsdam and intended to seal the alliance between Nazis and conservatives.