On 13 November, the German Christians organized a major event in the Sportpalast. There was a scandal when one of the speakers, the Gau chief of the Berlin German Christians, Reinhold Krause, publicly expounded völkisch religious principles. Also, the audience of 20,000 passed a resolution in which, among other things, they distanced themselves from the ‘Old Testament and its Jewish morality’, demanding a ‘militant and truly völkisch Church’, which alone would ‘reflect the National Socialist state’s claim to total domination’.22 The Pastors’ Emergency League then sent an ultimatum to Bishop Müller demanding that he publicly distance himself from this gross abandonment of the core principles of Christian belief. There was the threat of a split in the Church. Müller responded by stripping Krause of all his Church functions,23 suspending the Church’s ‘Aryan clause’, and reshuffling the Reich Church’s governing body, with German Christians in future being banned by Church law from membership of it.24 At the end of November, Hitler informed Müller in the course of a private conversation that he had no intention of intervening in the Church conflict, announcing this publicly in the Völkischer Beobachter.25 On 8 December, Goebbels noted in his diary that Hitler had ‘seen through . . . the unctuous parsons and Reich Bishop Müller’. Krause was ‘the most decent of them’. He ‘at least [had made] no bones about his contempt for the Jewish swindle of the Old Testament’.26
On 20 December, off his own bat, Müller ordered the integration of the Evangelisches Jugendwerk [Protestant Youth Organization] into the Hitler Youth. It was the umbrella organization for the Protestant Church’s youth work with a membership of around 700,000. Müller, however, was wrong in his assumption that this would win back Hitler’s trust. For, annoyed by the situation in the Protestant Church, for which he himself bore much of the responsibility, Hitler was not even prepared to send the letter of appreciation that Müller had requested.
On 25 January, with the aim of clarifying the whole situation, Hitler, accompanied by Frick, Göring, Hess, and the head of the Interior Ministry’s religious affairs department, Rudolf Buttmann, received a delegation from the Protestant Church composed of German Christians and their opponents. Reich Bishop Müller was present, as was Pastor Niemöller.27 At the meeting Göring, who had used the Gestapo to spy on the Church opposition,28 began by reading out the report of a recording of a telephone conversation Niemöller had had that morning. Niemöller had discovered that, as a result of an intervention by the Church opposition, the Reich President had suddenly summoned his Reich Chancellor on the morning of the 25th. Niemöller had then said on the telephone that Hitler was being given the ‘last rites’ before the meeting with the Church representatives. With this revelation Hitler was able to dominate proceedings right from the start. He took Niemöller to task in front of his colleagues and made further accusations against his visitors during the course of the meeting, forcing them continually to justify themselves. Finally, he ended by appealing to them to cooperate, effectively demanding that the Church representatives should subordinate themselves to his regime.
Hitler’s annoyance at Niemöller’s contemptuous remark was definitely not simply tactically motivated in order to dominate the meeting. It arose from his deeply rooted fear of being humiliated or shamed in front of others, a fear he characteristically tried to overcome by means of a massive attack on Niemöller. Niemöller was now on the list of enemies Hitler intended to destroy. The fact that, a few years later, Hitler had Niemöller incarcerated in a concentration camp as his personal prisoner until the end of his regime was almost certainly largely the result of his disrespectful comment on 25 January, for which Hitler could not forgive him.
Göring’s dossier and Hitler’s appeal to the ‘patriotic sense of responsibility’ of the Church leaders finally persuaded them after the meeting to issue a declaration of loyalty both to Hitler’s regime and to the Reich Bishop.29 The conflict in the Protestant Church was, however, by no means settled.
Party and state
Hitler used his government statement on 30 January 1934, the first anniversary of the seizure of power, above all to settle scores with various regime opponents and other unreliable ‘elements’. However, he did not mention the SA; his criticisms were aimed at a very different target. First, he silenced those who had hoped that his regime would bring about the restoration of the monarchy. The issue of the final constitution of the German Reich was ‘not up for discussion at the present time’. He saw himself as merely the ‘nation’s representative, in charge of implementing the reforms that will eventually enable it to reach a conclusive decision about the German Reich’s final constitutional form’.30 Hitler’s statement had an immediate effect: four days later, the Reich Interior Minister banned all monarchist associations.31
Then, in his speech, Hitler went on to tackle in a highly sarcastic and disdainful manner ‘the numerous enemies’, who had attacked the regime during the past year. Among them were the ‘depraved émigrés’, ‘some of them communist ideologists’, whom they would soon sort out. By the end of 1933, 37,000 Jews and between 16,000 and 19,000 other people – the estimates vary – had emigrated, mainly for political reasons. The majority were communists but there were also around 3,500 trade unionists and Social Democrats, as well as pacifists, liberals, conservatives, and Christians.32 Hitler also attacked members of our ‘bourgeois intelligentsia’, who rejected ‘everything that is healthy’, embracing and encouraging ‘everything that is sick’. A few days earlier in a lengthy interview with the Nazi poet, Hanns Johst, he had violently attacked ‘un-political’ people.33 Relying on the result of the November 1933 ‘election’, Hitler claimed that all these opponents ‘did not even amount to 2.5 million people’. They could not be ‘considered an opposition, for they are a chaotic conglomeration of views and opinions, completely incapable of pursuing a positive common goal, able only to agree on opposition to the current state’. However, more dangerous than these opponents were ‘those political migrant birds, who always appear when it’s harvest time’, ‘who are great at jumping on the bandwagon’, ‘parasites’, who had to be removed from the state and the Party.
Thus, according to Hitler, apart from the communists who had survived the persecution of the first year of the regime, there was a diffuse agglomeration of opponents, people standing on the sidelines, and opportunists; they did not pose an existential threat to the regime, but obstructed the development of the Nazi state. He did not mention the fact that there were millions of other people – for example, Social Democrats or Christians of both confessions – who did not support his regime for other reasons. Despite his attempts to ridicule, belittle, and marginalize this combination of opponents and ‘grumblers’, his strained rhetoric betrayed considerable uncertainty. The first anniversary of the seizure of power was by no means a brilliant victory celebration.
In his speech Hitler specifically defended the regime’s policy of taking action against those whose ‘birth, as a result of hereditary predispositions’, had ‘from the outset had a negative impact on völkisch life’, and announced that, after its ‘first assault’ on this phenomenon – the previous summer’s Sterilization Law – his government was intending ‘to adopt truly revolutionary measures’. In this context, he strongly criticized the Churches for their objection to such interventions: ‘It’s not the Churches who have to feed the armies of these unfortunates; it’s the nation that has to do it.’
Following this speech, the Reichstag adopted the Law concerning the Reconstruction of the Reich, which, among other things, abolished the state parliaments, enabled the Reich government to issue new constitutional law without the need for Reichstag approval, and subordinated the Reich Governors, most of whom were Gauleiters, to the Reich Interior Ministry when performing their state functions.34 This meant that Hitler had succeeded to a large extent in ‘integrating’ the regional Party agencies into the state apparatus. A few days later, on 2 February, he made this crystal clear by telling a meeting of Gauleiters that the Party�
��s ‘vital main task’ was ‘to select people, who, on the one hand, had the capacity, and, on the other, were willing to implement the government’s measures with blind obedience’.35
At the end of February, Hitler’s position as absolute leader of the Party was demonstrated in a large-scale symbolic act. On 25 February, Rudolf Hess presided over a ceremony, which was broadcast, in which leaders in the Party’s political organization, and leaders of its ancillary organizations at all levels were assembled throughout the Reich to swear personal allegiance to Hitler; according to the Völkischer Beobachter, it was the greatest oath-taking ceremony in history. On the previous evening, Hitler had given his usual speech in the Munich Hofbräuhaus to commemorate the official founding of the NSDAP fourteen years before, and once again defined the Party’s future function: ‘The movement’s task is to win over Germans to strengthen the power of this state’.36
The subordination of the Reich Governors to the Reich Interior Ministry raised the fundamental question as to whether the Reich Governors were also subordinate to the other Reich departmental ministers. On 22 March, Hitler explained his basic approach in a speech to the Reich Governors in Berlin in which he clarified their ‘political task’: it was not the job of the Reich Governors to represent ‘the states vis-à-vis the Reich , but the Reich vis-à-vis the states’.37 In June 1934, he made his position absolutely clear in a written order. The Reich Party leaders were, in principle, subordinate to the ministries; however, in matters of ‘special political importance’, he would himself decide on disputes between the Governors and ministers. He would also decide whether a matter was ‘of special political importance’. This instance shows how skillfully Hitler exploited the rivalry between the state apparatus and the Party in order to enhance his position as the final arbiter.38
The strengthening of the Reich government in Berlin also served gradually to undermine the Prussian government; this was the only way of preventing a rival government from emerging under Göring. In September 1933, Göring had attempted to raise his status as Prime Minister of Prussia by creating a Prussian State Council; significantly, Hitler had not attended the inauguration. Now Göring was forced to agree to the amalgamation of the Prussian ministries with their Reich counterparts. Thus, in February the Prussian Ministry of Justice was combined with the Reich Justice Ministry; and, on 1 May 1934, Hitler appointed the Prussian Culture Minister, Bernhard Rust, to be Reich Minister of Science, Education, and Further Education, thereby transferring his previous Prussian responsibilities to the Reich. At the same time, he appointed Reich Interior Minister Frick to be Prussian Interior Minister; by November 1934 both ministries had been amalgamated. However, as Prime Minister, Göring continued to be responsible for the Prussian state police, while, even after Himmler had taken over the Gestapo in April 1934, he continued to claim the formal status of ‘chief’ of the Prussian secret police. As compensation for his loss of power in Prussia Göring was put in charge of a new central Reich body, the Reich Forestry Office. Finally, during 1934–35, the personal union of the Reich and Prussian Ministries of Agriculture (Darré) and of Economics (Schacht) was brought to an end with the amalgamation of each of these two sets of ministries.39
More and more ‘grumblers and whingers’
Hitler’s commitment in October 1933 to establish a 300,000-strong army on the basis of conscription for one year, and the measures taken by the Reichswehr during the following two months to put that commitment into effect represented a definite decision against the model of an SA militia, as envisaged by Röhm. Nevertheless, on 1 February, Röhm presented the Defence Minister with a memorandum in which he described the future role of the Reichswehr as a training school for the SA. Blomberg responded by informing a meeting of military commanders that the attempt to achieve an agreement with Röhm had failed and Hitler must now decide between them.40 At the same time, an increasing number of incidents was occurring between members of the Reichswehr and the SA.41
On 2 February, Hitler told the Gauleiters that ‘those who maintained that the revolution was not over’ were ‘fools’42 and, on 21 February, he informed a British visitor, Anthony Eden, that he did not approve of an armed SA. However, on 28 February he went further: he summoned the leadership of the SA and the Reichswehr and spelled out to them the basic outlines of the future military arrangements. He argued that a militia, such as that envisaged by Röhm, was unsuitable as the basis for a new German army. The nation’s future armed force would be the Reichswehr, to be established on the basis of general conscription. The ‘nationalist revolution’, as he made absolutely clear, was over. Immediately after the meeting, Röhm and Blomberg signed an agreement containing the guidelines for future cooperation between the SA and Reichswehr, which involved the subordination of the Party troops to the generals. Röhm had to recognize their sole responsibility for ‘preparing the defence of the Reich’; the SA was left with the pre-military training of young people, the training of those eligible for military service who had not been drafted into the Reichswehr, and a number of other auxiliary services.43
Röhm pretended to accept Hitler’s decision, but at the same time made it very obvious that he was claiming a greater role for his SA within the state. Thus, in a number of widely reported speeches he called the SA the embodiment of the National Socialist revolution, for example in an address to the diplomatic corps on 18 April, which he had published as a pamphlet.44 Moreover, in spring 1934, the SA organized major field exercises and parades,45 and established armed units in the shape of so-called ‘staff guards’, about which Defence Minister Blomberg submitted a written complaint to Hitler at the beginning of March.46 On 20 April, on the occasion of Hitler’s 45th birthday, Röhm issued an order of the day, which could be read as an enthusiastic declaration of loyalty to the ‘Führer’. However, it contained a distinctly provocative sentence: ‘for us political soldiers of the National Socialist revolution’ Hitler ‘embodies Germany’.47 A few days earlier, Hitler had been sailing through Norwegian waters on the battleship ‘Deutschland’, discussing his military plans with Blomberg, Admiral Erich Raeder, and other high-ranking Reichswehr officers.48
In the meantime, the domestic opponents of the SA had been mobilizing. The Nazi Party bosses in the individual states tried to form a counterweight to the growing ambitions of the SA by supporting the SS. They began handing over to Himmler control over their political police departments; indeed, with his take-over of the Prussian Gestapo on 20 April 1934, he had finally become head of a Reich-wide secret police.49 The political police and the Nazi Party’s security service (SD) were collecting material to use against the SA; the same was true of the Reichswehr, at the latest from April 1934 onwards; and, from May 1934, Göring, the SS, and the military appear to have been passing information about the SA to Hitler. Röhm responded by giving instructions in May for evidence to be collected concerning ‘hostile actions’ against the SA.50
This complex power struggle in spring 1934 was occurring at the same time as a serious crisis of confidence was emerging between the regime and the German people, resulting above all from significant socio-economic failures. This provides the background to the escalation in the conflict over the SA during the spring and early summer of 1934.51 The main danger did not arise from the issue on which the regime had been concentrating its efforts since 1933: unemployment. The number of those registered as unemployed had reduced from six million in January 1933 to under 2.8 million in March 1934 and declined further depending on the season. Of the 3.2 million who were no longer recorded in the statistics over a million were employed in various work creation projects.52 However, an important reason for the reduction in the unemployment statistics was that they were being rigged; the regime defined the term ‘unemployed’ in such a way that certain groups of employees no longer appeared in the unemployment insurance statistics.53 Hitler proclaimed the ‘second battle of work’ with the start of the construction of the Munich–Salzburg autobahn on 21 March 1934,54 and the regime high
lighted this topic in its socio-political propaganda during the following weeks with some success.55 However, any further positive economic developments had for a long time been under threat from another quarter altogether.
For during 1933–34 German exports had been in continual decline.56 There were various reasons for this. The world economic crisis had led to protectionist trade restrictions, in which Germany had also been involved. Germany’s unilateral debt moratorium in summer 1933 had provoked counter-measures abroad that had further damaged German exports. After the pound and dollar devaluations in autumn 1931 and spring 1933, the Mark became relatively overvalued; however, Schacht and Hitler rejected a devaluation of the Mark because of Germany’s large foreign debt and for fear of inflation.57 The incipient rearmament programme guaranteed the domestic market, diverting attention from attempts to increase exports. The international movement to boycott German goods, a reaction to the regime’s arbitrary and oppressive behaviour and, in particular, the persecution of the Jews, also had a negative impact. At the same time, Germany was heavily dependent on raw material and food imports. As a result, by the beginning of 1934, the Reichsbank’s foreign exchange reserves had been reduced to almost zero. Germans travelling abroad were subjected to drastic foreign currency restrictions.58
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