11
THE MAKING OF THE DICTATOR

‘It can’t be denied: he has grown. Out of the demagogue and party leader, the fanatic and agitator, the true statesman… seems to be developing.’

Diary entry of the writer Erich Ebermayer,
for 21 March 1933

‘What the old parliament and parties did not accomplish in sixty years, your statesmanlike foresight has achieved in six months.’

Letter to Hitler from
Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, 24 July 1933

‘In nine months, the genius of your leadership and the ideals which you have newly placed before us have succeeded in creating, from a people inwardly torn apart and without hope, a united Reich.’

Franz von Papen, 14 November 1933,
speaking on behalf of the members of the Reich Government

Hitler is Reich Chancellor! And what a cabinet!!! One such as we did not dare to dream of in July. Hitler, Hugenberg, Seldte, Papen!!! A large part of my German hopes are attached to each. National Socialist drive, German National reason, the non-political Stahlhelm, and – not forgotten by us – Papen. It is so unimaginably wonderful… What an achievement by Hindenburg!¹

This was the ecstatic response of Hamburg schoolteacher Luise Solmitz to the dramatic news of Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship on 30 January 1933. Like so many who had found their way to Hitler from middle-class, national-conservative backgrounds, she had wavered the previous autumn when she thought he was slipping under the influence of radical socialist tendencies in the party. Now that Hitler was in office, but surrounded by her trusted champions of the conservative Right, heading a government of ‘national concentration’, her joy was unbounded. The national renewal she longed for could now begin. Many, outside the ranks of diehard Nazi followers, their hopes and ideals invested in the Hitler cabinet, felt the same way.

But millions did not. Fear, anxiety, alarm, implacable hostility, illusory optimism at the regime’s early demise, and bold defiance intermingled with apathy, scepticism, condescension towards the presumed inability of the new Chancellor and his Nazi colleagues in the cabinet – and indifference.

Reactions varied according to political views and personal disposition. ‘What will this government do?’ asked Julius Leber, SPD Reichstag deputy, before, his immunity ignored, being taken into custody the very night after Hitler’s accession to power after being beaten up by a group of Nazi thugs. ‘We know their aims. Nobody knows what their next measures will be. The dangers are enormous. But the firmness of German workers is unshakeable. We don’t fear these men. We are determined to take up the struggle.’²Alongside such misplaced hopes in the strength and unity of the labour movement went the crass misapprehension of Hitler as no more than the stooge of the ‘real’ wielders of power, the forces of big capital, as represented by their friends in the cabinet. Leber’s fellow SPD – deputy Kurt Schumacher’s assessment was: ‘The cabinet is called after Adolf Hitler. But the cabinet is really Alfred Hugenberg’s. Adolf Hitler may speak; Alfred Hugenberg will act. With the construction of this government, the last veil has fallen. National Socialism has openly showed itself as that which we always took it for, the high-capitalist nationalist party of the Right. National Capitalism is the true firm!’³ The lurid rhetoric of the Communist proclamation of 30 January was closer to the mark: ‘Shameless wage robbery and boundless terror of the brown murderous plague smash the last pitiful rights of the working class. Unrestrained course towards imperialist war. All this lies directly ahead.’⁴

The leadership of the Zentrum concentrated on seeking assurances that unconstitutional measures would be avoided.⁵ The Catholic hierarchy remained reserved, its disquiet about Hitler and the anti-Christian tendencies of his movement unchanged.⁶ Influenced by years of warnings from their clergy, the Catholic population were apprehensive and uncertain. Among many Protestant church-goers there was, according to the later recollections of one pastor, a great optimism that national renewal would bring with it inner, moral revitalization: ‘It is as if the wing of a great turn of fate is fluttering above us. There was to be a new start.’⁷ The Land Bishop of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, soon to run into conflict with the new rulers, also recalled how the Protestant Church welcomed the Hitler Chancellorship since the National Socialists had resolutely fought Marxist ‘anti-Church agitation’, and now offered new hope for the future and the expectation of a ‘favourable impact on the entire people’.⁸ One of the leading Protestant theologians, Karl Barth, later dismissed from his Chair at Bonn University for his hostility to the ‘German Christians’ (the nazified wing of the Protestant Church), took a different view, airly dismissing any major significance in Hitler’s appointment. ‘I don’t think that this will signify the start of great new things in any direction at all,’ he wrote to his mother on 1 February 1933.⁹

Many ordinary people, after what they had gone through in the Depression, were simply apathetic at the news that Hitler was Chancellor. According to the British Ambassador in Berlin, Horace Rumbold, people throughout the country ‘took the news phlegmatically’.¹⁰ Those in provincial Germany who were not Nazi fanatics or committed opponents often shrugged their shoulders and carried on with life, doubtful that yet another change of government would bring any improvement. Some thought that Hitler would not even be as long in office as Schleicher, and that his popularity would slump as soon as disillusionment set in on account of the emptiness of Nazi promises.¹¹ But perceptive critics of Hitler were able to see that, now he enjoyed the prestige of the Chancellorship, he could swiftly break down much of the scepticism and win great support by successfully tackling mass unemployment – something which none of his predecessors had come close to achieving. ‘The Hitler cabinet will be aware that nothing could bring it so much trust as success here,’ noted a hostile journalist on 31 January 1933. Should it indeed succeed, ‘then no German will deny the new cabinet the thanks which it should be its first endeavour to earn,’ he concluded.¹²

For the Nazis themselves, of course, 30 January 1933 was the day they had dreamed about, the triumph they had fought for, the opening of the portals to the brave new world – and the start of what many hoped would be opportunities for prosperity, advancement, and power. Wildly cheering crowds accompanied Hitler on his way back to the Kaiserhof after his appointment with Hindenburg. ‘Now we’ve got there,’ Hitler declared, carried away with the euphoria around him, as he stepped out of the lift on the first floor of the Kaiserhof to be greeted, alongside Goebbels and other Nazi leaders, by waiters and chambermaids, all anxious to shake his hand.¹³ By seven o’clock that evening Goebbels had improvised a torchlight procession of marching SA and SS men through the centre of Berlin that lasted beyond midnight.¹⁴ He wasted no time in exploiting the newly available facilities of state radio to provide a stirring commentary.¹⁵ Goebbels claimed a million men had taken part. The Nazi press halved the number. The British Ambassador estimated a maximum figure of some 50,000. His military attaché thought there were around 15,00ο.¹⁶ Whatever the numbers, the spectacle was an unforgettable one – exhilarating and intoxicating for Nazi followers, menacing for those at home and abroad who feared the consequences of Hitler in power.¹⁷ One fifteen-year-old girl was mesmerized by what she saw. For Melita Maschmann, the marching columns gave ‘magical splendour’ to the idea of the ‘national community’ which had fascinated her. Afterwards, she could scarcely wait to join the BDM (Bund deutscher Mädel, the German Girls’ League, the female section of the Hitler Youth organization).¹⁸ Her idealism was shared by many, particularly among the young, who saw the dawn of a new era symbolized in the spectacular torchlight procession through the centre of Berlin.

The seemingly endless parade was watched from his window in the Wilhelmstraße by Reich President Hindenburg. Berliners later joked that the President liked torchlight processions because he was allowed to stay up late when they took place.¹⁹ There were respectful shouts when the procession passed him by.²⁰ But when the marchers came to the window a little farther on, where Hitler was standing, the respect gave way to wild acclaim.²¹ For Papen, a few feet behind Hitler, it symbolized the transition ‘from a moribund regime to the new revolutionary forces’.²²

The day of Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship became immediately stylized in Nazi mythology as the ‘day of the national uprising’.²³ Hitler even contemplated – so, at least, he claimed later – changing the calendar (as the French revolutionaries had done) to mark the beginning of a ‘new world order’.²⁴ At the same time he – and other Nazi spokesmen generally followed suit – avoided the term ‘seizure of power’, with its putschist connotations, and preferred the more descriptive ‘takeover of power’ to underline the formal legality of his accession to the highest office of government.²⁵ Power had indeed not been ‘seized’. It had been handed to Hitler, who had been appointed Chancellor by the Reich President in the same manner as had his immediate predecessors. Even so, the orchestrated ovations, which put Hitler himself and other party bosses into a state of ecstasy,²⁶ signalled that this was no ordinary transfer of power. And almost overnight, those who had misunderstood or misinterpreted the momentous nature of the day’s events would realize how wrong they had been. After 30 January 1933, Germany would never be the same again.

That historic day was an end and a beginning. It denoted the expiry of the unlamented Weimar Republic and the culminating point of the comprehensive state crisis that had brought its demise. At the same time Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor marked the beginning of the process which was to lead into the abyss of war and genocide, and bring about Germany’s own destruction as a nation-state. It signified the start of that astonishingly swift jettisoning of constraints on inhumane behaviour whose path ended in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, and the other death camps whose names are synonymous with the horror of Nazism.

As earlier chapters have tried to show, what made Hitler’s triumph possible were important strands of continuity in German political culture stretching back beyond the First World War – chauvinistic nationalism, imperialism, racism, anti-Marxism, glorification of war, the placing of order above freedom, caesaristic attractions of strong authority are some of them – as well as the specific and more short-term consequences of the multi-layered crises that afflicted Weimar democracy from the start.²⁷ But if such continuities helped ‘make Hitler possible’, and if his triumph can at least partially be explained by his unique capacity in 1933 to bind together for a time all the strands of continuity with ‘old Germany’,²⁸ the following twelve years would see these elements of continuity exploited, warped and distorted out of all recognition by the ever intensifying radicalism of the regime, then ultimately broken in the maelstrom of defeat and destruction in 1945 that Hitler’s rule had produced.

The rapidity of the transformation that swept over Germany between Hitler’s takeover of power on 30 January 1933 and its crucial consolidation and extension at the beginning of August 1934, after Reich President Hindenburg’s death and following close on the major crisis of the ‘Röhm affair’, was astounding for contemporaries and is scarcely less astonishing in retrospect. It was brought about by a combination of pseudo-legal measures, terror, manipulation – and willing collaboration. Within a month, civil liberties – as protected under the Weimar Constitution – had been extinguished. Within two months, with most active political opponents either imprisoned or fleeing the country, the Reichstag surrendered its powers, giving Hitler control of the legislature. Within four months the once powerful trade unions were dissolved. In less than six months, all opposition parties had been suppressed or gone into voluntary liquidation, leaving the NSDAP as the only remaining party. In January 1934, the sovereignty of the Länder – already in reality smashed the previous March – was formally abolished. Then, in the summer, the growing threat from within Hitler’s own movement was ruthlessly eliminated in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ on 30 June 1934.

By this time, almost all organizations, institutions, professional and representative bodies, clubs, and societies had long since rushed to align themselves with the new regime. ‘Tainted’ remnants of pluralism and democracy were rapidly removed, nazified structures and mentalities adopted. This process of ‘coordination’ (Gleichschaltung) was for the most part undertaken voluntarily and with alacrity.

The Christian churches were exceptions to the process. Attempts to ‘coordinate’ the divided Protestant Church caused great conflict and had eventually to be abandoned. No attempt was even made to alter the organizational framework of the Catholic Church. The lasting tension and frequent clashes between the churches – especially the Catholic Church – and the regime in the following years were rooted in alternative sources of loyalty which the Christian denominations continued to command. But the political compromises which each of them made with the new rulers in the first months nevertheless pushed them on to the defensive, forcing them to become largely reactive and inward-looking.

The army, too, remained ‘uncoordinated’, its officer corps still largely national-conservative, not Nazi. Without the army’s backing, Hitler could not rule. But however contemptuous many of the reactionary and conservative officers, often from aristocratic backgrounds, were of the upstart former corporal now running the government, his offer of ‘everything for the armed forces’, and his readiness to eradicate those forces in his own movement that threatened the army’s position, won him their support. The oath of allegiance which the army swore to Hitler personally at the death of the Reich President and war-hero Field Marshal Hindenburg on 2 August 1934 symbolically marked its full acceptance of the new order. With this act, Hitler’s dictatorship was firmly established.

The speed of the transformation, and the readiness of the army and other traditionally powerful groups to put themselves at the service of the new regime, derived in no small measure from the conditions in which Hitler took power. The weakness of the established élites of the ‘old order’ had eventually led to Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship. The traditional power-groups had helped undermine and destroy the democracy they so detested. But they had been incapable of imposing the type of counter-revolution they had wanted. Hitler had needed them in order to gain power. But they had needed Hitler, too, to provide mass support for their intended counter-revolution. This was the basis of the ‘entente’ that put Hitler in the Chancellor’s seat.

The balance of power in the ‘entente’ between Hitler and his conservative partners was nevertheless tilted from the outset towards the new Chancellor. In particular, the anxiety of the army to avoid civil strife and to attain domestic peace as a prerequisite of remilitarization assured its cooperation and willingness to support Hitler’s brutal deployment of the power of the state. For only Hitler, and the huge – if potentially unstable – mass movement he headed, could ensure control of the streets and bring about the ‘destruction of Marxism’, the basis of the desired counter-revolution. Yet precisely this dependence on Hitler and eagerness to back the most ruthless measures adopted in the early weeks and months of the new regime guaranteed that the weakness of the traditional élite groups would become laid bare in the years to come as the intended counter-revolution gave way to the attempted Nazi racial revolution in Europe and opened the path to world conflagration and genocide.²⁹

Remarkable in the seismic upheavals of 1933–4 was not how much, but how little, the new Chancellor needed to do to bring about the extension and consolidation of his power. Hitler’s dictatorship was made as much by others as by himself. As the ‘representative figure’ of the ‘national renewal’, Hitler could for the most part function as activator and enabler of the forces he had unleashed, authorizing and legitimating actions taken by others now rushing to implement what they took to be his wishes. ‘Working towards the Führer’ functioned as the underlying maxim of the regime from the outset.

Hitler was, in fact, in no position to act as an outright dictator when he came to office on 30 January 1933. As long as Hindenburg lived, there was a potential rival source of loyalty – not least for the army. But by summer 1934, when he combined the headship of state with the leadership of government, his power had effectively shed formal constraints on its usage. And, by then, the personality cult built around Hitler had reached new levels of idolatry and made millions of new converts as the ‘people’s chancellor’ – as propaganda had styled him – came to be seen as a national, not merely party, leader. Disdain and detestation for a parliamentary system generally perceived to have failed miserably had resulted in willingness to entrust monopoly control over the state to a leader claiming a unique sense of mission and invested by his mass following with heroic, almost messianic, qualities. Conventional forms of government were, as a consequence, increasingly exposed to the arbitrary inroads of personalized power. It was a recipe for disaster.

I

There were few hints of this at the beginning. Aware that his position was by no means secure, and not wanting to alienate his coalition partners in the government of ‘national concentration’, Hitler was at first cautious in cabinet meetings, open to suggestions, ready to take advice – not least in complex matters of finance and economic policy – and not dismissive of opposing viewpoints. This only started to change in April and May.³⁰ In the early weeks, Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk, who had met Hitler for the first time when the cabinet was sworn in, was not alone in finding him ‘polite and calm’ in the conduct of government business, well-briefed, backed by a good memory, and able to ‘grasp the essentials of a problem’, concisely sum up lengthy deliberations, and put a new construction on an issue.³¹

Hitler’s cabinet met for the first time at five o’clock on 30 January 1933. The Reich Chancellor began by pointing out that millions greeted with joy the cabinet now formed under his leadership, and asked his colleagues for their support. The cabinet then discussed the political situation. Hitler commented that postponing the recall of the Reichstag – due to meet on 31 January after a two-month break – would not be possible without the Zentrum’s support. A Reichstag majority could be achieved by banning the KPD, but this would prove impracticable and might provoke a general strike. He was anxious to avoid any involvement of the Reichswehr in suppressing such a strike – a comment favourably received by Defence Minister Blomberg. The best hope, Hitler went on, was to have the Reichstag dissolved and win a majority for the government in new elections. Only Hugenberg – as unwilling as Hitler to have to rely on the Zentrum, but also aware that new elections would be likely to favour the NSDAP – spoke out expressly in favour of banning the KPD in order to pave the way for an Enabling Act. He doubted that a general strike would take place. He was appeased when Hitler vouched for the fact that the cabinet would remain unchanged after the election. Papen favoured proposing an Enabling Act immediately and reconsidering the position once it had been rejected by the Reichstag. Other ministers, anticipating no promises of support from the Zentrum, preferred new elections to the threat of a general strike. The meeting was adjourned without firm decisions.³² But Hitler had already outflanked Hugenberg, and won support for what he wanted: the earliest possible dissolution of the Reichstag and new elections.

Hitler was keen to prevent any dependence upon the Zentrum. The meeting with Zentrum representatives Prälat Ludwig Kaas (the party leader) and Dr Ludwig Perlitius (who headed the party’s Reichstag fraction) the following morning was predictably fruitless.³³ The Zentrum would only consider a postponement of the Reichstag for two months, not the twelve months which Hitler – knowing full well what the answer would be – had requested. Hitler was in effect asking for the Zentrum’s full backing, without guarantees.³⁴ All that he offered in return – and there were valid doubts as to the seriousness of his offer – was the possibility of including a Zentrum member in the cabinet as Minister of Justice, something to which Hugenberg had strenuously objected.³⁵ The lack of serious intent behind Hitler’s approach to the negotiations was shown by how quickly he took the opportunity to break them off. The written questions which the Zentrum then submitted on the future conduct of the new government he simply left unanswered.³⁶Hitler reported back to the cabinet already that day, 31 January, that further negotiations with the Zentrum were pointless. New elections were now unavoidable. But Hitler’s dealings with the Zentrum had sounded alarm bells among the conservatives that he might indeed rule with the backing of the Zentrum after the election, remove the German Nationalists and Stahlhelm from the cabinet, and thereby free himself from his dependence on Papen and Hugenberg.³⁷ Once more, therefore, it was a conservative, not a Nazi, who sounded most radical. Papen sought, and was promptly given, an assurance ‘that the coming election to the Reichstag would be the last one and a return to the parliamentary system would be avoided for ever’.³⁸

That evening, Hindenburg was persuaded to grant Hitler that which he had refused Schleicher only four days earlier: the dissolution of the Reichstag. Hitler had argued, backed by Papen and Meissner, that the people must be given the opportunity to confirm its support for the new government. Though it could attain a majority in the Reichstag as it stood, new elections would produce a larger majority, which in turn would allow a general Enabling Act to be passed, giving a platform for measures to bring about a recovery.³⁹The dissolution scarcely conformed to the spirit of the constitution. Elections were turned into a consequence, not a cause, of the formation of a government. The Reichstag had not even been given the opportunity of demonstrating its confidence (or lack of it) in the new government. A decision which was properly parliament’s had been placed directly before the people. In its tendency, it was already a step towards acclamation by plebiscite.⁴⁰

Hitler’s opening gambit stretched no further than new elections, to be followed by an Enabling Act.⁴¹ His conservative partners, as keen as he was to end parliamentarism and eliminate the Marxist parties, had played into his hands. On the morning of 1 February he told the cabinet of Hindenburg’s agreement to dissolve the Reichstag. The elections were set for 5 March. The Reich Chancellor himself provided the government’s slogan: ‘Attack on Marxism.’ Göring immediately stated that it was necessary, in view of the rising number of ‘acts of terror’ by the Communists, to promulgate without delay the decree prepared under the Papen administration at the time of the Berlin transport strike, providing for restrictions on press freedom and introduction of ‘protective custody’.⁴²Slightly amended, Papen’s draft decree was to come into force on 4 February as the ‘Decree for the Protection of the German People’, and serve during the election campaign as an important weapon used to ban opposition newspapers and meetings.⁴³

At the second cabinet meeting on 1 February, at seven o’clock that evening, Hitler read out the draft of a proclamation to the German people to be broadcast three hours later.⁴⁴ Papen had contributed some passages upholding conservative values on Christianity and the family.⁴⁵ But the language of the draft plainly bore Hitler’s hallmark. Later that evening, with his cabinet standing behind him in his room in the Reich Chancellery, wearing a dark blue suit with a black and white tie, sweating profusely from nervousness, and speaking- unusually – in a dull monotone, Hitler addressed the German people for the first time on the radio.⁴⁶ The ‘Appeal of the Reich Government to the German People’ that he read out was full of rhetoric but vacuous in content – the first propaganda shot in the election campaign rather than a stated programme of political measures. Since the ‘days of treachery’ fourteen years earlier, ‘the Almighty has withdrawn his blessing from our people,’ he began. National collapse had opened the way for ‘the Communist method of madness finally to poison and undermine the inwardly shaken and uprooted people’. Nothing had been spared the pernicious Communist influence, which had afflicted the family, all notions of honour and loyalty, people and Fatherland, culture and economy down to the basis of morality and belief. ‘Fourteen years of Marxism have ruined Germany. One year of Bolshevism would annihilate Germany,’ Hitler continued. Reich President Hindenburg had entrusted the national government with the ‘mission’ of rescuing Germany. The inheritance was a terrible one, the task more difficult than any in memory facing German statesmen. National unity, resting on the protection of Christianity ‘as the basis of our entire morality’ and the family ‘as the germ of our body of nation and state’, would be restored. ‘Spiritual, political, and cultural nihilism’ challenging this aim would be mercilessly attacked to prevent Germany sinking into Communist anarchism. Hitler then announced – it smacked of Soviet methods to Papen⁴⁷– two ‘big four-year plans’ to tackle ‘the great work of the reorganization of the economy’. ‘Within four years,’ he proclaimed, ‘the German peasant must be saved from impoverishment. Within four years unemployment must be finally overcome.’ No hints were given as to how this would be achieved, other than on the basis of restored financial stability (it was wholly misleadingly asserted), and through the introduction of labour service and a settlement policy for farmers, neither of which ideas was novel. In foreign policy, the aspirations of the new government were no more precise. The government saw its ‘highest mission’ in upholding ‘the rights of existence (Lebensrechte) and thereby the reattainment of the freedom of our people’. Full of pathos, Hitler appealed on behalf of the government to the people to overcome class divisions, and to sign alongside the government an act of reconciliation to permit Germany’s resurgence. ‘The parties of Marxism and those who went along with them had fourteen years to see what they could do. The result is a heap of ruins. Now, German people, give us four years and then judge and sentence us,’ he declared. He ended, as he often concluded major speeches, in pseudo-religious terms, with an appeal to the Almighty to bless the work of the government.⁴⁸ With that, the election campaign had begun. It was to be a different campaign to the earlier ones, with the government – already enjoying wide backing – clearly separating itself from all that had preceded it in the Weimar Republic.

Towards the end of his proclamation, Hitler had posed for the first time as a man of peace, stating, despite love of the army as the bearer of arms and symbol of Germany’s great past, how happy the government would be ‘if through a restriction of its armaments the world should make an increase of our own weapons never again necessary’.⁴⁹ His tone when invited by Blomberg to address military leaders gathered in the home of the head of the army (Chef der Heeresleitung) General Kurt Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord on the evening of 3 February was entirely different.⁵⁰

The atmosphere was cool, the attitude of many of the officers reserved, when Hitler began his lengthy speech. The overall political aim, he stated, was to regain political power. Everything was to be directed towards this end. Internally, there had to be a complete reversal of the current circumstances, no tolerance of opposition. ‘Those unwilling to be converted must be crushed. Extermination of Marxism root and branch.’ Youth, and the population in general, had to come to see that struggle alone was the salvation. Everything had to be subordinated to this idea. Training of youth and strengthening of the will to fight should be advanced with all means possible. Firmest authoritarian leadership and ‘removal of the damaging cancer of democracy’ were the bases of the internal recovery. Hitler then turned to foreign and economic policy. The struggle at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva against Versailles and for Germany’s equality was pointless, he said, if the people were not indoctrinated with the will to fight. In the economic sphere, he ruled out increasing exports as a solution on the grounds that world capacity was limited. Settlement policy was the only way to save the peasantry and incorporate many of the jobless. But this would take time, and in any case was not an adequate solution ‘since the living-space for the German people is too small’.

Hitler turned to the area of greatest interest to his audience. What he said could not fail to find appeal. The build-up of the armed forces was the most important premiss to the central aim of regaining political power. General conscription had to be brought back. But before that, the state leadership had to see to it that all traces of pacifism, Marxism, and Bolshevism were eradicated from those eligible for military service. The armed forces – the most important institution in the state – must be kept out of politics and above party. The internal struggle was not its concern, and could be left to the organizations of the Nazi movement. Preparations for the build-up of the armed forces had to take place without delay. This period was the most dangerous, and Hitler held out the possibility of a preventive strike from France, probably together with its allies in the east. ‘How should political power, once won, be used?’ he asked. It was still too early to say. Perhaps the attainment of new export possibilities should be the goal, he hinted. But since earlier in the speech he had already dismissed the notion of increasing exports as the solution to Germany’s problems, this could not be taken by his audience as a favoured suggestion. ‘Perhaps – and probably better – conquest of new living-space in the east and its ruthless Germanization’ was his alternative.⁵¹ The officers present could have been left in no doubt that this was Hitler’s preference.

Hitler had not put forward a plan for war to his generals. Nor had he outlined a stage-by-stage programme for the acquisition of ‘living-space’. In broad terms, he had restated the fixed ideas he had held to since the mid-1920s at the latest. A war for ‘living-space’ in the east was certainly implicit in what he was saying. But few had taken his earlier utterances and writings as a serious statement of intent. And few of the generals now regarded ‘living-space’ as more than a loose metaphor for expansionism – of which they did not disapprove.

Hitler’s sole aim at Hammerstein’s had been to woo the officers and ensure army support. He largely succeeded. The military leaders’ reaction to the speech was mixed. General Ludwig Beck later claimed he had immediately forgotten its content – an indication, if true, that he was unconcerned by what Hitler had to say. Others, such as Werner von Fritsch, Friedrich Fromm, and Eugen Ott, were apparently worried initially by what they heard. Erich Freiherr von dem Bussche-Ippenburg thought Hitler spoke nonsense for an hour, before coming on to the matters concerning the army. Generalleutnant Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb commented acidly that a businessman with a good product did not need to shout about it like a market seller. But there was no opposition to what Hitler had said. And many of those present, as Admiral Erich Raeder later commented, found Hitler’s speech ‘extraordinarily satisfying’.⁵² This was hardly surprising. However disdainful they were of the vulgar and loudmouthed social upstart, the prospect he held out of restoring the power of the army as the basis for expansionism and German dominance accorded with aims laid down by the army leadership even in what they had seen as the dark days of ‘fulfilment policy’ in the mid-1920s.⁵³ And Hitler’s promises to remove the army from internal politics, place it above party, and to build up the armed forces as the pillar of a militarized nation were music to the ears of the generals – according completely with what Blomberg had told Group- and Army District Commanders earlier in the day.⁵⁴ Hitler was, in effect, protecting the army from any possible involvement in a civil war – a danger taken most seriously in late 1932.⁵⁵ From the point of view of the army leadership, rearmament and rebuilding the armed forces (predicated on removal of the shackles of Versailles) as the vehicle for restoring Germany’s great-power status through expansion (accepting the risk of war) had remained unbroken aims throughout the 1920s and had been restated with new urgency towards the end of the decade. They went hand in hand with the axiom that the officer caste (which was in reality now greatly altered – less ‘feudal’, more professionally ‘modern’, youthful, and bourgeois)⁵⁶ would regain the status and power in the state that it had traditionally wielded before the Revolution, but which had been threatened and partially undermined by ‘Marxism’ and democracy. Whatever the generals’ scepticism about Hitler, the mass support he commanded offered the prospect of these aims now being fulfilled. While their aims were not identical, it meant that there was a significant overlap in what Hitler and the army leadership wanted. The ‘pact’ of 1933 was founded on this ‘partial identity’.⁵⁷

The strong man in Blomberg’s ministry, his Chief of the Ministerial Office, Colonel Walther von Reichenau – bright, ambitious, ‘progressive’ in his contempt for class-ridden aristocratic and bourgeois conservatism, and long a National Socialist sympathizer – was sure of how the army should react to what Hitler offered. ‘Into the new state and uphold there the position due to us,’ he is reported to have stated.⁵⁸ Never before had the armed forces been ‘so identical with the state’, he went on, indicating the clear aim, if not the full reality of the position, at the very beginning of the Third Reich.⁵⁹ The real meaning of keeping the army out of politics was also made plain by Reichenau, when – in the midst of Göring’s unleashed police terror against the Left in Prussia – he remarked at a meeting of army commanders: ‘It has to be recognized that we are in a revolution. What is rotten in the state has to go, and that can only happen through terror. The party will ruthlessly proceed against Marxism. Task of the armed forces: stand at ease. No support if those persecuted seek refuge with the troops.’⁶⁰ Some of those present were concerned at what they heard. But the message got through, and was passed on. Only one of the officers there protested, and lost his command as a consequence.⁶¹ Though not for the most part as actively sympathetic towards National Socialism as was Reichenau, the leaders of the army which had blocked by force Hitler’s attempt to seize power in 1923 had now, within days of his appointment as Chancellor, placed the most powerful institution in the state at his disposal.

Hitler, for his part, lost no time in making plain to the cabinet that military spending was to be given absolute priority. During a discussion in cabinet on 8 February on the financial implications of building a dam in Upper Silesia, he intervened to tell his cabinet colleagues that ‘the next five years must be devoted to the restoration of the defence capacity (Wiederwehrhaftmachung) of the German people’. Every state-funded work-creation scheme had to be judged with regard to their necessity for this end. ‘This idea must always and everywhere be placed in the foreground.’⁶²

At a meeting the next day of the Committee for Work Creation to deal with the expenditure envisaged of the 500 million RM available under the revamped Immediate Programme for Work Creation, which Reichskommissar Gereke had prepared for the Schleicher administration, Blomberg expressed his readiness to accept for rearmament purposes the 50 million RM assigned to him by the Finance Minister, while the newly created Reich Commissary for Air Travel was allocated 42.3 million RM in 1933 (out of 127 million RM over a three-year period). Hitler could not contain his impatience. He referred to his comments of the previous day on the absolute priority for rearmaments and the need to assess all public spending on the Immediate Programme in that light. ‘For Germany’s rearmament,’ the Reich Chancellor continued, according to the minutes of the meeting,

billions (Milliardenbeträge) are necessary. The sum of 127 million RM for aviation purposes was the minimum that one could consider at all. Germany’s future depended exclusively and solely on rebuilding the armed forces. All other expenditure had to be subordinated to the task of rearmament. He could only be satisfied with the petty funds requested by the Defence Ministry on the grounds that the tempo of rearmament could not be more sharply accelerated during the coming year. At any rate he took the view that in any future clash between demands of the armed forces and demands for other purposes the interest of the armed forces had, whatever the circumstances, to take precedence. The provision of funds from the Immediate Programme had also to be decided on this understanding. He viewed the combating of unemployment through the provision of public orders as the most suitable means of aid. The 500-Million Programme was the greatest of its kind and specially suited to be placed at the service of the interests of rearmament. It best allowed the camouflage of works for improving the defence of the country. It was necessary to place special weight on this camouflage in the immediate future since he was convinced that the period between the theoretical recognition of equal military rights of Germany and the re-attainment of a certain level of armament would be the most difficult and most dangerous one. Only when Germany had rearmed to such a level that it was capable of alliance with another power, if need be also against France, would the main difficulties of rearmament have been overcome.⁶³

These early meetings, within days of Hitler becoming Chancellor, were crucial in determining the primacy of rearmament. They were also typical of the way Hitler operated, and of the way his power was exercised. Keen though Blomberg and the Reichswehr leadership were to profit from the radically different approach of the new Chancellor to armaments spending, there were practical limitations – financial, organizational, and not least those of international restrictions while the disarmament talks continued – preventing the early stages of rearmament being pushed through as rapidly as Hitler wanted. But where Blomberg was content at first to work for expansion within the realms of the possible, Hitler thought in different – initially quite unrealistic – dimensions. He offered no concrete measures. But his dogmatic assertion of absolute primacy for rearmament, opposed or contradicted by not a single minister, set new ground-rules for action. It changed the concept of the Gereke-Programme for work creation entirely, turning it into a framework for rearmament. It provided, whatever the early practical limits on the scope of rearmament, immediate opportunities for new planning and rebuilding within the armed forces. It prompted by the beginning of April the ‘Second Armaments Programme’, with funding provided outside the state budget and placed in the hands of the army itself. With Hjalmar Schacht succeeding Hans Luther in March as President of the Reichsbank, Hitler found the person he needed to mastermind the secret and unlimited funding of rearmament. Where the Reichswehr budget had on average been 700–800 million RM a year, Schacht, through the device of Mefo-Bills – a disguised discounting of government bills by the Reichsbank – was soon able to guarantee to the Reichswehr the fantastic sum of 35 billion RM over an eight-year period.⁶⁴

Given this backing, after a sluggish start, the rearmament programme took off stratospherically in 1934. The result, as Schacht later acknowledged, was an inevitable collision between armaments and consumer spending, which would eventually lead to major economic difficulties.⁶⁵ These were to surface in the first substantial economic impasse of 1935 – 6 that culminated in the Four-Year Plan. But since that Plan underlined and reaffirmed the absolute primacy of rearmament, the problem could only deepen in the remaining peacetime years and not be resolved outside war. The ruination of state finances was implicit in the decision – taken on political and ideological grounds at the very outset of Hitler’s Chancellorship – to make unlimited funding available for rearmament, whatever the consequences for the economy. Though war was not actually planned in February 1933, the rearmament policy then adopted tilted the economy in a direction which could only be remedied either by a re-entry into the international economy or by conquest and domination attained through the gamble of war. Hitler had never made a secret of which option he would prefer.

The decision to give absolute priority to rearmament was the basis of the pact, resting on mutual benefit, between Hitler and the army which, though frequently troubled, was a key foundation of the Third Reich. Hitler established the parameters in February 1933. But these were no more than the expression of the entente he had entered into with Blomberg on becoming Chancellor.⁶⁶ The new policy was possible because Hitler had bound himself to the interests of the most powerful institution in the land. The army leaders, for their part, had their interests served because they had bound themselves, in their eyes, to a political front-man who could nationalize the masses and restore the army to its rightful power-position in the state. What they had not reckoned with was that within five years the traditional power-élite of the officers corps would be transformed into a mere functional élite, serving a political master who was taking it into uncharted territory.⁶⁷

II

In the first weeks of his Chancellorship, Hitler took steps to bring not just the ‘big battalions’ of the army leadership behind the new regime, but also the major organizations of economic leaders. Landholders needed little persuasion. Their main organization, the Reich Agrarian League (Reichslandbund) – dominated by East Elbian estate-owners – had been strongly pro-Nazi before Hitler became Chancellor. Hitler left agrarian policy in its initial stage to his German National Coalition partner Hugenberg. Early measures taken in February to defend indebted farm property against creditors and to protect agricultural produce by imposing higher import duties and provide support for grain prices ensured that the agrarians were not disappointed.⁶⁸ With Hugenberg at the Economics Ministry, their interests seemed certain to be well looked after.

Tensions between agrarians and industrialists over the vexed issue of protection of agriculture had existed since the 1890s. The new favouritism shown to agriculture seemed destined to sour relations with big business. The initial scepticism, hesitancy, and misgivings of most business leaders immediately following Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship were not dispelled overnight. There was still considerable disquiet in the business community when Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, head of the mighty Krupp iron and steel concern and chairman of the Reich Association of German Industry, and other leading industrialists received invitations to a meeting at Göring’s official residence on 20 February, at which Hitler would outline his economic policy.⁶⁹ Krupp, up to then critical of Hitler, went to the meeting prepared, as he had done at meetings with previous Chancellors, to speak up for industry. In particular, he intended to stress the need for export-led growth and to underline the damaging consequences of protectionism in favour of agriculture. In the event, he could make neither point. The businessmen were kept waiting by Göring, and had to wait even longer till Hitler appeared. They were then treated to a classic Hitler monologue. In a speech lasting an hour and a half, he barely touched on economic matters, except in the most general sense. He assuaged his business audience, as he had done on earlier occasions, by upholding private property and individual enterprise, and by denying rumours of planned radical experimentation in the economy. The rest was largely a restatement of his views on the subordination of the economy to politics, the need to eradicate Marxism, restore inner strength and unity, and thus be in a position to face external enemies. The coming election marked a final chance to reject Communism by the ballot-box. If that did not happen, force – he darkly hinted – would be used. It was a fight to the death between the nation and Communism, a struggle that would decide Germany’s fate for the next century.⁷⁰ When Hitler had finished, Krupp felt in no position to deliver his prepared speech. He merely improvised a few words of thanks and added some general remarks about a strong state serving the well-being of the country.⁷¹ At this point, Hitler left.

The hidden agenda of the meeting became clear once Göring started speaking. He repeated Hitler’s assurances that economic experiments need not be feared, and that the balance of power would not be altered by the coming election – to be the last for perhaps a hundred years. But the election, he claimed, was nonetheless crucial. And those not in the forefront of the political battle had a responsibility to make financial sacrifices.⁷² Once Göring, too, had left, Schacht bade those present to visit the cash-till. Three million marks were pledged, and within weeks delivered.⁷³ With this donation, big business was helping consolidate Hitler’s rule. But the offering was less one of enthusiastic backing than of political extortion.⁷⁴

Despite their financial support, industrialists continued at first to look with a wary eye at the new regime. Some drew satisfaction from Hitler’s vague expression of support for export trade and commitment to currency stability in his speech on 23 March, and the Reich Association correspondingly voiced its support for the new government. But its members were already realizing that their position was also not left untouched by the changes sweeping over Germany. In early April, Krupp capitulated to Nazi pressure to replace the Reich Association by a new, nazified body. He also agreed to the dismissal of Jewish employees, and the removal of all Jewish businessmen from representative positions in commerce and industry. The following month, the once-mighty Association dissolved itself and was replaced by the nazified Reich Estate of German Industry (Reichsstand der Deutschen Industrie). Alongside such pressure, business recovery, high profits, secure private property (apart from that of Jewish businessmen), the crushing of Marxism, and the subduing of labour saw big business increasingly content to adjust to full collaboration with the new regime, whatever the irksome bureaucratic controls imposed on it.⁷⁵

Hitler’s style, as the industrialists experienced on 20 February, was certainly different to that of his predecessors in the Chancellor’s office. His views on the economy were also unconventional. He was wholly ignorant of any formal understanding of the principles of economics. For him, as he stated to the industrialists, economics was of secondary importance, entirely subordinated to politics. His crude social-Darwinism dictated his approach to the economy, as it did his entire political ‘world-view’. Since struggle among nations would be decisive for future survival, Germany’s economy had to be subordinated to the preparation, then carrying out, of this struggle. That meant that liberal ideas of economic competition had to be replaced by the subjection of the economy to the dictates of the national interest. Similarly, any ‘socialist’ ideas in the Nazi programme had to follow the same dictates. Hitler was never a socialist. But although he upheld private property, individual entrepreneurship, and economic competition, and disapproved of trade unions and workers’ interference in the freedom of owners and managers to run their concerns, the state, not the market, would determine the shape of economic development. Capitalism was, therefore, left in place. But in operation it was turned into an adjunct of the state. There is little point in inventing terms to describe such an economic ‘system’. Neither ‘state capitalism’, nor a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism suffices. Certainly, Hitler entertained notions of a prosperous German society, in which old class privileges had disappeared, exploiting the benefits of modern technology and a higher standard of living. But he thought essentially in terms of race, not class, of conquest, not economic modernization. Everything was consistently predicated on war to establish dominion. The new society in Germany would come about through struggle, its high standard of living on the backs of the slavery of conquered peoples. It was an imperialist concept from the nineteenth century adapted to the technological potential of the twentieth.⁷⁶

Lacking, as he did, a grasp of even the rudiments of economic theory, Hitler can scarcely be regarded as an economic innovator.⁷⁷ The extraordinary economic recovery that rapidly formed an essential component of the Führer myth was not of Hitler’s making. He showed no initial interest in the work-creation plans eagerly developed by civil servants in the Labour Ministry. With Schacht (at this stage) sceptical, Hugenberg opposed, Seldte taking little initiative, and industry hostile, Hitler did nothing to further the work-creation schemes before the end of May. By then, they had been taken up by the State Secretary in the Finance Ministry, Fritz Reinhardt, and put forward as a programme for action. Even at this stage, Hitler remained hesitant, and had to be convinced that the programme would not lead to renewed inflation. Wilhelm Lautenbach, a senior civil servant in the Economics Ministry whose own full-scale programme had had no chance of implementation under Brüning in 1931, persuaded him that, though he was the most powerful man in Germany, even he could not produce inflation in the prevailing economic circumstances.⁷⁸ Finally, on 31 May, Hitler summoned ministers and economic experts to the Reich Chancellery, and heard that all but Hugenberg were in favour of the Reinhardt Programme. The following day, the ‘Law for Reduction of Unemployment’ was announced. Within a month or so, Schacht’s early scepticism had turned into enthusiasm. Through the device of exchange-bills underwritten by the government (an idea earlier developed under Papen by Lautenbach, and the forerunner of the Mefo-Bills, soon to be introduced as a way of funding the early stages of rearmament), Schacht now conjured up the necessary short-term credits.⁷⁹ The rest was largely the work of bankers, civil servants, planners and industrialists.⁸⁰ As we have noted, Hitler saw the work-creation programme (which simply extended the earlier schemes devised under Papen and Schleicher) merely in the context of rearmament plans. Otherwise, his main interest was in its propaganda value. And, indeed, as public works schemes initially, then increasingly rearmament, began to pull Germany out of recession and wipe away mass unemployment more quickly than any forecasters had dared speculate, Hitler garnered the full propaganda benefit.⁸¹

But indirectly Hitler did make a significant contribution to the economic recovery by reconstituting the political framework for business activity and by the image of national renewal that he represented. The ruthless assault on ‘Marxism’ and reordering of industrial relations which he presided over, the work-creation programme that he eventually backed, and the total priority for rearmament laid down at the outset, helped to shape a climate in which economic recovery – already starting as he took office as Chancellor – could gather pace. And in one area, at least, he provided a direct stimulus to recovery in a key branch of industry: motor-car manufacturing.

Hitler’s propaganda instinct, not his economic know-how, led him towards an initiative that both assisted the recovery of the economy (which was beginning to take place anyway) and caught the public imagination. On 11 February, a few days before his meeting with the industrialists, Hitler had sought out the opportunity to deliver – instead of Reich President Hindenburg, who was unwell – the opening address at the International Automobile and Motor-Cycle Exhibition on the Kaiserdamm in Berlin. That the German Chancellor should make the speech was itself a novelty: this alone caused a stir. The assembled leaders of the car industry were delighted. They were even more delighted when they heard Hitler elevate car manufacture to the position of the most important industry of the future and promise a programme including gradual tax relief for the industry and the implementation of a ‘generous plan for road-building’. If living-standards had previously been weighed against kilometres of railway track, they would in future be measured against kilometres of roads; these were ‘great tasks which also belong to the construction programme of the German economy’, Hitler declared.⁸² The speech was later stylized by Nazi propaganda as ‘the turning-point in the history of German motorization’.⁸³ It marked the beginning of the ‘Autobahn-builder’ part of the Führer myth.

Hitler had, in fact, offered no specific programme for the car industry; merely the prospect of one.⁸⁴ The ideas for tax relief for the industry had, not surprisingly, come from the car manufacturers themselves.⁸⁵ The tax reductions actually implemented in spring 1933 did not represent a preconceived Nazi motorization programme, but were part of a wider framework of measures to stimulate the economy.⁸⁶ What road-building plans were in Hitler’s mind were not made clear in his speech. In all likelihood they were those that the Munich road-engineer Fritz Todt had outlined in a brief memorandum composed in December 1932, and sent shortly afterwards to Hitler, arguing for the construction of 5–6,000 kilometres of motorway to be built within the framework of ‘a National Socialist construction programme’.⁸⁷ It was conceived on a scale that could not rely on private companies, but had to have state planning and control. Moreover, Todt envisaged his scheme needing up to 600,000 unemployed workers – some 10 per cent of the total number of unemployed – and thus contributing to the combating of unemployment. Todt himself was, in fact, no outright innovator in his motorization schemes. Autostradas were already being built in Fascist Italy. And Todt was taking up and greatly expanding ideas for a north-south Autobahn of 881 kilometres advanced in the 1920s by the clumsily entitled ‘Association for the Preparation of the Motorway (Autostraße) Hansestädte-Frankfurt-Basel’ (HAFRABA for short).⁸⁸ But Hitler was impressed – not least at the grandiosity of Todt’s scheme, and its implications for reducing unemployment. It made good propaganda in the election campaign.

Even so, the significance of Hitler’s speech on 11 February should not be underrated. It sent positive signals to car manufacturers. They were struck by the new Chancellor, whose long-standing fascination for the motor-car and his memory for detail of construction-types and – figures meant he sounded not only sympathetic but knowledgeable to the car bosses.⁸⁹ The Völkischer Beobachter, exploiting the propaganda potential of Hitler’s speech, immediately opened up to its readers the prospect of car-ownership. Not a social élite with its Rolls-Royces, but the mass of the people with their people’s car (Volksauto), was the alluring prospect.⁹⁰ It was an idea – a car for everyman, at a price of no more than 1,000 Reich Marks – that Hitler, with his eye on propaganda more than the automobile market, was already advancing early in 1933.⁹¹

In the weeks following his speech, there were already notable signs that the car industry was picking up. More than twice as many four-wheeled vehicles were produced in the second quarter of 1933 compared with the same period in the previous year.⁹² The removal of car licence tax for vehicles registered after 31 March gave the industry a further boost. The beginnings of recovery for the automobile industry had spin-off effects for factories producing component parts, and for the metal industry.⁹³ The recovery was not part of a well-conceived programme on Hitler’s part. Nor can it be wholly, or even mainly, attributed to his speech. Much of it would have happened anyway, once the slump had begun to give way to cyclical recovery.⁹⁴ It remains the case, however, that the car manufacturers were still gloomy about their prospects before Hitler spoke.

Hitler, whatever importance he had attached to the propaganda effect of his speech, had given the right signals to the industry. Car manufacturers and others with a vested interest lost no time in interpreting the signals to their own advantage – and to the advantage of the regime. Unsolicited, the business manager of HAFRABA provided Hitler already in March with detailed plans for a stretch of motorway in the Main-Neckar valley. Hitler took up the plan ‘with great enthusiasm’, called it ‘a gigantic idea’ which would open up a ‘new epoch’ and declared his readiness to ensure its implementation.⁹⁵ After the ‘gigantic progamme’ of road-building he announced on 1 May had met substantial obstacles in the Transport Ministry (backed by the German Railways, the Reichsbahn), which argued that the ordinary road network should first be improved and indicated principled doubts about the virtues of a motorway programme, Hitler insisted that the ‘Enterprise Reich Motorways’ (Unternehmen Reichsautobahnen) be carried through. This was eventually placed at the end of June in the hands of Fritz Todt as General Inspector for German Roadways (Generalinspektor für das deutsche Straßenwesen). Further objections to Todt’s new powers raised by Interior Minister Frick and Transport Minister Eltz-Rübenach were swept aside by Hitler. By the end of November, Todt had been given wide-ranging powers, answering only to Hitler himself in the road-construction programme, and was provided by Reichsbank President Schacht with extensive funding credit.⁹⁶

In the stimulus to the car trade and the building of the motorways – areas which, inspired by the American model, had great popular appeal and appeared to symbolize both the leap forward into an exciting, technological modern era and the ‘new Germany’, now standing on its own feet again – Hitler had made a decisive contribution.⁹⁷

III

By the time Hitler addressed the leaders of the automobile industry on 11 February, the Reichstag election campaign was under way. Hitler had opened it the previous evening with his first speech in the Sportpalast since becoming Chancellor. The enormous hall was packed to the rafters. With the mass media now at his disposal, the speech was carried live on radio to the whole country. Under great banners attacking Marxism, Goebbels set the scene in graphic detail for radio listeners, numbering, he claimed, as many as 20 million. Skilfully, he built up the expectations of the massive radio audience:

I ask you to let your fantasy take hold [the Propaganda Minister told his listeners]. Imagine: this enormous building, down below a huge stalls arena, flanked with side aisles, the circle, the upper circle – all one mass of people! You can’t recognize individuals, you see only (shouts and choruses of voices rise up) people, people, people – a mass of people. You can hear how out of the masses the cries ‘Germany arise!’ ring out, how shouts resound of ‘Heil’ to the Leader of the Movement… to the Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler. The SA leader – Standartenführer Voß – now gives the signal for the entry of the flags and standards. Down there, from the end of the Sportpalast, the four Berlin standards are moved, followed by the hundreds of Berlin party banners. (The German anthem sounds out and is sung.)… Amid the tones of the German anthem the flags are borne through the wide hall. The entire mass is rapturously singing the German anthem… The Sportpalast offers a wonderful, imposing picture of the mass demonstration. The people stand and wait and sing with raised hands. You see only people, people, people. All around the galleries are decked with swastika flags. The mood intensifies, the expectancy is full of tension… Any moment the Reich Chancellor can arrive…

Then Hitler came. ‘A crescendo of shouts of “Heil” and rapturous cheering’ could be heard over Goebbels’s broadcast. ‘You can hear it,’ the Propaganda Minister exulted. ‘The Führer has arrived!’⁹⁸

Hitler began quietly, almost hesitantly. For fourteen years the Weimar parties had ruined Germany. Rebuilding the country had to begin from the bottom. He promised a government that would not lie to and swindle the people as Weimar governments had done. Rebuilding could only be done by the people itself, by its own efforts, by its will, without any help from outside. Not class theories but ‘eternal laws’ would be the basis of the recovery: the struggle to sustain the German people’s existence was the goal. And only strength would bring world peace. He raised the tempo. Parties of class division would be destroyed. ‘Never, never will I depart from the task of eradicating from Germany Marxism and its accompaniments,’ he declared. ‘One must be the victor here: either Marxism or the German people. And Germany will be victorious.’ National unity, resting on the German peasant and the German worker – restored to the national community – would be the basis of the future society. The value of personality, the creative strength of the individual, would be upheld. All manifestations of a parliamentary democratic system would be combated. The end of corruption in public life would go hand in hand with a ‘restoration of German honour’. Not least, young people would have instilled in them the great traditions of the German past. It was, he declared, ‘a programme of national revival (Wiedererhebung) in all areas of life, intolerant towards anyone who sins against the nation, brother and friend to anyone willing to fight alongside for the resurrection of his people, of our nation’. Hitler reached the rhetorical climax of his speech. ‘German people, give us four years, then judge and sentence us. German people, give us four years, and I swear that as we and I entered into this office, I will then be willing to go.’ The pathos of his finale included an adaptation of the ending of the ‘Our Father’ (in its Protestant form). ‘I can’t free myself from belief in my people, can’t get away from the conviction that this nation will once again arise, can’t distance myself from the love of this, my people, and hold as firm as a rock to the conviction that some time the hour will come when the millions who today hate us will stand behind us and with us will welcome what has been created together, struggled for under difficulty, attained at cost: the new German Reich of greatness and honour and strength and glory and justice. Amen.’⁹⁹

‘A fantastic speech’, Goebbels called it. ‘Wholly against Marxism. At the end great pathos. “Amen”. That has force and strikes home.’¹⁰⁰ It was indeed a powerful piece of rhetoric. But it was little more than that. The ‘programme’ offered nothing concrete – other than the showdown with Marxism. National ‘resurrection’ to be brought about through will, strength, and unity was what it amounted to. Jews were not mentioned. For all nationalists – not just for Nazis – the sentiments Hitler expressed could not fail to find appeal. ‘Exactly the right mixture for his listeners: brutality, threats, display of strength, then again humility before the often cited “Almighty”. The masses in the Sportpalast go into a frenzy,’ commented one of the 20 million or so radio listeners, a cultured member of the Leipzig bourgeoisie, unsympathetic to the Nazis. ‘The man grows visibly through the task which has fallen on him,’ he remarked.¹⁰¹ For another listening to his speech over the radio, the Hamburg middle-class nationalist, not Nazi, Luise Solmitz, Hitler’s castigation of ‘the dirt of these dreadful fourteen years’ was ‘what we felt’. ‘Not a speaker, but leader of genius’ was how she described him.¹⁰²

The accompaniment to the campaign (during which Hitler once more was tireless in his propaganda efforts, speaking to huge audiences in numerous cities) was a wave of unparalleled state-sponsored terror and repression against political opponents in states under Nazi control. Above all, this was the case in the huge state of Prussia, which had already come under Reich control in the Papen takeover of 20 July 1932. The orchestrator here was the commissary Prussian Minister of the Interior Hermann Göring. Under his aegis, heads of the Prussian police and administration were ‘cleansed’ (following the first purges after the Papen coup) of the remainder of those who might prove obstacles in the new wind of change that was blowing. Göring provided their successors with verbal instructions in unmistakably blunt language as to what he expected of police and administration during the election campaign. And in a written decree of 17 February, he ordered the police to work together with the ‘national associations’ of SA, SS, and Stahlhelm, support ‘national propaganda with all their strength’, and combat the actions of ‘organizations hostile to the state’ with all the force at their disposal, ‘where necessary making ruthless use of firearms’. He added that policemen using firearms would, whatever the consequences, be backed by him; those failing in their duty out of a ‘false sense of consideration’ had, on the contrary, to expect disciplinary action.¹⁰³ Unsurprisingly in such a climate, the violence unleashed by Nazi terror bands against their opponents and against Jewish victims was uncontrolled. This was especially the case once the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm had been brought in on 22 February as ‘auxiliary police’ on the pretext of an alleged increase in ‘left-radical’ violence. Intimidation was massive. Communists were particularly savagely repressed. Individuals were brutally beaten, tortured, seriously wounded, or killed, with total impunity. Communist meetings and demonstrations were banned, in Prussia and in other states under Nazi control, as were their newspapers. Bans, too, on organs of the SPD and restrictions on reporting imposed on other newspapers effectively muzzled the press, even when the bans were successfully challenged in the courts as illegal, and the newspapers reinstated.¹⁰⁴

During this first orgy of state violence, Hitler played the moderate. His acting ability was undiminished. He gave the cabinet the impression that radical elements in the movement were disobeying his orders but that he would bring them under control, and asked for patience to allow him to discipline the sections of the party that had got out of hand. ‘We all agreed that there was no reason to doubt Hitler’s intentions, and hoped that experience in the Cabinet would have a beneficial effect on him,’ recalled Papen.¹⁰⁵ When the Zentrum – which Hitler knew he might still need on his side – protested to Hindenburg and Papen at ‘the unbelievable conditions’, Hitler put out a party proclamation denouncing ‘provocatory elements’ who had broken up Zentrum meetings, and ordering ‘extreme discipline’. All the energies of the campaign had to be directed against Marxism, he added.¹⁰⁶In actual fact, the violence directed at the Zentrum had been in no small measure attributable to Hitler’s own tirade against the head of the Zentrumrun state government of Württemberg a week earlier, a speech whose radio transmission – to Hitler’s fury – had been abruptly ended when unknown persons severed the radio cable.¹⁰⁷

Hitler had no need to involve himself in the violence of February 1933. Its deployment could be left safely to Göring, and to leading Nazis in other states. In any case, it needed only the green light to Nazi thugs, sure now of the protection of the state, to unleash their pent-up aggression against those well known to them as long-standing enemies in their neighbourhoods and work-places. The terror-wave in Prussia in February was the first sign that state-imposed constraints on inhumanity were now suddenly lifted. It was an early indicator of the ‘breach of civilization’ that would give the Third Reich its historical character.

But it was not that the brutality and violence damaged Hitler’s reputation in the population. Many who had been initially sceptical or critical were beginning, during February, to think that Hitler was ‘the right man’, and should be given a chance.¹⁰⁸ A slight upturn in the economy helped. But the fervent anti-Marxism of much of the population was more important. The long-standing hatred of Socialism and Communism – both bracketed together as ‘Marxism’ – was played upon by Nazi propaganda and turned into outright anti-Communist paranoia. Pumped up by the Nazis, fear of a Communist rising was in the air. The closer the election came, the shriller grew the hysteria. The full-scale assault on the Left was, therefore, sure of massive popular support. One characteristic report from a Catholic area, where ‘Marxists’ were seen as the enemies of religion, order and the nation, lauded the strong-arm tactics in Prussia, and gave direct credit for them to Hitler himself. ‘Hitler’s clearing up nicely in Prussia. He’s throwing the parasites and spongers on the people straight out on their ear. He should follow it up in Bavaria, too, especially in Munich, and carry out a similar purge… If Hitler carries on the work as he has done so far, he’ll have the trust of the great proportion of the German people at the coming Reichstag election.’¹⁰⁹

The violence and intimidation would probably have continued in much the same vein until the election on 5 March. Nothing suggests the Nazi leadership had anything more spectacular in mind.¹¹⁰ But on 27 February, Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag.

Marinus van der Lubbe came from a Dutch working-class family, and had formerly belonged to the Communist Party youth organization in Holland. He had eventually broken with the Communist Party in 1931. He arrived in Berlin on 18 February 1933. He was twenty-four years old, intelligent, a solitary individual, unconnected with any political groups, but possessed of a strong sense of injustice at the misery of the working class at the hands of the capitalist system. In particular, he was determined to make a lone and spectacular act of defiant protest at the ‘Government of National Concentration’ in order to galvanize the working class into struggle against their repression. Three attempts at arson on 25 February in different buildings in Berlin failed.¹¹¹ Two days later he succeeded in his protest – though the consequences were scarcely those he had envisaged.¹¹²

On the evening of 27 February, Putzi Hanfstaengl should have been dining at Goebbels’s house, along with Hitler. But, suffering from a heavy cold and high temperature, he had taken to his bed in a room in Göring’s official residence, where he was temporarily accommodated, in the immediate vicinity of the Reichstag building. In mid-evening he was awakened by the cries of the housekeeper: the Reichstag was on fire. He shot out of bed, looked out of the window, saw the building in flames, and immediately rushed to ring up Goebbels, saying, breathlessly, that he urgently had to speak to Hitler. When Goebbels asked what it was about, and whether he could pass on a message, Hanfstaengl said: ‘Tell him the Reichstag is burning.’ ‘Is that meant to be a joke?’ was Goebbels’s reply.¹¹³ Goebbels thought it was ‘a mad fantasy report’ and refused at first to tell Hitler. But his inquiries revealed that the report was true. At that, Hitler and Goebbels raced through Berlin, to find Göring already on the scene and ‘in full flow’ (ganz groß in Fahrt).Papen soon joined them. The Nazi leaders were all convinced that the fire was a signal for a Communist uprising – a ‘last attempt’, as Goebbels put it, ‘through fire and terror to sow confusion in order in the general panic to grasp power for themselves’.¹¹⁴ Fears that the Communists would not remain passive, that they would undertake some major show of force before the election, had been rife among the Nazi leadership – and among non-Nazi members of the national government. A police raid on the KPD’s central offices in Karl-Liebknecht-Haus on 24 February had intensified the anxieties. Though they actually found nothing of note, the police claimed to have found vast amounts of treasonable material, including leaflets summoning the population to armed revolt. Göring added to this with a statement to the press. The police discoveries showed that Germany was about to be cast into the chaos of Bolshevism, he alleged. Assassinations of political leaders, attacks on public buildings, and the murder of wives and families of public figures were among the horrors he evoked. No evidence was ever made public.¹¹⁵ The fears – genuine and fabricated – were in some ways a direct continuation of the anxieties about a Communist-led general strike that had been the basis of the Reichswehr’s ‘war-games’ scenario which had brought down the Papen government at the beginning of December 1932. They were also fuelled by Hitler’s lasting phobia about November 1918. The anti-Communist hysteria of late February 1933 gave such fears an altogether sharper edge.¹¹⁶The panic reaction of the Nazi leadership to the Reichstag fire, and the rapidity with which the draconian measures against the Communists were improvised, derived directly from those fears.

The first members of the police to interrogate van der Lubbe, who had been immediately apprehended and had straight away confessed, proclaiming his ‘protest’, had no doubt that he had set fire to the building alone, that no one else was implicated.¹¹⁷ But Göring, whose first reactions to learning of the fire appear to have been concern for the precious tapestries in the building, took little convincing from officials on the spot that the fire must have been the product of a Communist plot.¹¹⁸ Hitler, who arrived towards 10.30p.m., an hour or so after Göring, was rapidly persuaded to draw the same conclusion. Göring told him that the fire was unquestionably the work of the Communists. One arsonist had already been arrested and several Communist deputies had been in the building only minutes before the blaze.¹¹⁹ It was the beginning of the Communist uprising, claimed Göring. Not a moment must be lost.¹²⁰ Hitler told Papen: ‘This is a God-given signal, Herr Vice-Chancellor! If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist!’¹²¹ When Rudolf Diels, later to become the first head of the Prussian Gestapo, tried to tell Hitler about the interrogation of van der Lubbe, he found the Reich Chancellor in a near-hysterical state. Diels tried to say that the fire was the work of a ‘madman’ (einen Verrückten). But Hitler brusquely interrupted, shouting that it had been planned long in advance. The Communist deputies were to be hanged that very night, he raged. Nor was any mercy to be shown to the Social Democrats or Reichsbanner.¹²² Hitler’s furious tirades, intent on terroristic revenge against the Communists, dominated a hastily convened consultation, involving Göring, Goebbels and Frick, in Göring’s official residence. Good actor though he was, Hitler was not feigning. Nor was he sufficiently in control of himself to give clear orders.¹²³ It was Göring who emitted a frenzied stream of confused directions to Diels, ordering a full-scale police alert, unsparing use of firearms, and mass arrests of Communists and Socialists. Diels thought the whole atmosphere resembled that of a madhouse.¹²⁴

Hitler then went to an improvised meeting around 11.15p.m. in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, dealing mainly with security implications for Prussia, and from there accompanied Goebbels to the Berlin offices of the Völkischer Beobachter, where an inflammatory editorial was rapidly prepared and a new front page of the party newspaper made up.¹²⁵

At the meeting in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, it was the German National State Secretary Ludwig Grauert, firmly convinced himself that the Communists had set the Reichstag alight, who proposed an emergency decree for the State of Prussia aimed at arson and acts of terror.¹²⁶ By the following morning, however, Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick had come up with the draft of a decree ‘For the Protection of People and State’ which extended the emergency measures to the whole of the Reich – something attributed by Blomberg to Hitler’s presence of mind – and gave the Reich government (in the initial draft it was the Reich Minister of the Interior) powers of intervention in the Länder. Frick could use as his basis draft schemes for a state of emergency prepared at the time of the Papen coup against Prussia the previous July and the ‘war-games’ of Colonel Ott in December.¹²⁷ But a crucial difference was that under Frick’s draft decree emergency executive power was placed not in the hands of the Reichswehr, but given to the Reich Minister of the Interior (later altered to the Reich Government). A military state of emergency would have limited Hitler’s power. It might also have jeopardized the holding of the elections on which the Chancellor was relying. As it was, with one move, the improvised emergency decree had decisively strengthened Hitler’s hand. The road to dictatorship was now wide open.¹²⁸

The emergency decree ‘For the Protection of People and State’ was the last item dealt with by the cabinet at its meeting on the morning of 28 February.¹²⁹ With one brief paragraph, the personal liberties enshrined in the Weimar Constitution – including freedom of speech, of association and of the press, and privacy of postal and telephone communications – were suspended indefinitely. With another brief paragraph, the autonomy of the Länder was overridden by the right of the Reich government to intervene to restore order.¹³⁰ This right would be made ample use of in the immediate aftermath of the election to ensure Nazi control throughout all the German states. The hastily constructed emergency decree amounted to the charter of the Third Reich.

By the time of the cabinet meeting, Hitler’s near-hysterical mood of the previous evening had given way to colder ruthlessness. The ‘psychologically correct moment for the showdown’ with the KPD had arrived. It was pointless to wait longer, he told the cabinet. The struggle against the Communists should not be dependent on ‘juristical considerations’.¹³¹ There was no likelihood that this would be the case. The rounding up of Communist deputies and functionaries had already been set in train by Göring during the night in raids carried out with massive brutality.¹³²Communists were the main targets. But Social Democrats, trade unionists, and left-wing intellectuals such as Carl Ossietzky were also among those dragged into improvised prisons, often in the cellars of SA or SS local headquarters, and savagely beaten, tortured, and in some cases murdered.¹³³ By April, the number taken into ‘protective custody’ in Prussia alone was some 25,000.¹³⁴

The violence and repression were widely popular. The ‘emergency decree’ that took away all personal liberties and established the platform for dictatorship was warmly welcomed. A provincial newspaper from the alpine out-reaches of Bavaria – though long sympathetic towards the Nazis almost certainly reflecting feelings extending beyond the immediate support for the NSDAP – declared that the ‘Emergency Decree’ had ‘finally got to the centre of the German disease, the ulcer which had for years poisoned and infected the German blood, Bolshevism, the deadly enemy of Germany… This Emergency Decree will find no opponent despite the quite draconian measures which it threatens. Against murderers, arsonists, and poisoners there can only be the most rigorous defence, against terror the reckoning through the death penalty. The fanatics who would like to make a robbers’ cave out of Germany must be rendered harmless.’ The whole of western culture, resting on Christianity, was at stake, the leading article concluded. ‘And for this reason we welcome the recent Emergency Decree.’¹³⁵ The tone directly reflected Göring’s account of the supposed findings in the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus.¹³⁶

From the other end of the country, the Hamburg former schoolteacher Luise Solmitz also swallowed Göring’s story in its entirety: ‘They wanted to send armed gangs into the villages to murder and and start fires. Meanwhile, the terror was to take over the large cities stripped of their police. Poison, boiling water, all tools from the most refined to the most primitive, were to be used as weapons. It sounds like a robbers’ tale – if it were not Russia that had experienced asiatic methods and orgies of torture that a Germanic mind, even if sick, cannot imagine, and if healthy cannot believe.’¹³⁷

Luise Solmitz, like her friends and neighbours, was persuaded to cast her vote for Hitler. ‘Now it’s important to support what he’s doing with every means,’ an acquaintance who had up to then not supported the NSDAP told her.¹³⁸ ‘The entire thoughts and feelings of most Germans are dominated by Hitler,’ Frau Solmitz commented. ‘His fame rises to the stars, he is the saviour of a wicked, sad German world.’¹³⁹

On 4 March, Hitler made a final, impassioned plea to the electorate in a speech broadcast from Königsberg. At the end, he stated with great pathos that the Reich President, the liberator of East Prussia, and he, the ordinary soldier who had done his duty on the western front, had joined hands. As the speech ended, the sounds of the ‘Niederländisches Dankgebet’, the ‘chorale of Leuthen’ associated with Frederick the Great’s victory over the Austrians in 1757, blended with the bells of Königsberg Cathedral. Goebbels had left nothing out in the suggested uniting of the old and the new Germany. Loudspeakers stationed in the streets allowed those marching in the torchlight processions all over Germany on the ‘Day of the Awakening Nation’ to listen to their Leader.¹⁴⁰

When the results were declared the next day, the Nazis had won 43.9 per cent of the vote, giving them 288 out of 647 seats in the new Reichstag. Their nationalist coalition partners had gained 8.0 per cent. Despite the draconian terror, the KPD had still managed an astonishing 12.3 per cent, and the SPD 18.3 per cent – together the parties of the Left, even now, gaining almost a third of all votes cast. The Zentrum received only a marginally smaller proportion of the vote (11.2 per cent) than it had done the previous November. Support for the remaining parties had dwindled almost to nothing.¹⁴¹ Goebbels claimed the result as a ‘glorious triumph’.¹⁴² It was rather less than that. Substantial gains had been certain. They had undoubtedly been assisted by a late surge following the Reichstag fire. Hitler had hoped for an absolute majority for the NSDAP. As it was, the absolute majority narrowly attained by the government coalition left him dependent on his conservative allies. He would now not be rid of them at least as long as Hindenburg lived, he was reported as saying on hearing the results.¹⁴³ Still, even allowing for the climate of intense repression against the Left, 43.9 per cent of the vote was not easy to attain under the Weimar electoral system. The NSDAP had profited above all from the support of previous non-voters in a record turn-out of 88.8 per cent.¹⁴⁴ And though the heaviest support continued to come from Protestant parts of the country, sizeable gains had this time also been made in Catholic areas which the NSDAP had earlier found difficult to penetrate. In Lower Bavaria, for instance, the Nazi vote rose from 18.5 per cent in November 1932 to 39.2 per cent; in Cologne-Aachen from 17.4 to 30.1 per cent.¹⁴⁵ Not least: leaving aside the Left, not all those who voted for parties other than the NSDAP were opposed to everything that Hitler stood for. Once Hitler, the pluralist system liquidated, was able to transform his public image from party to national leader, a potentially far larger reservoir of support than that given to him in March 1933 would be at his disposal.

IV

The election of 5 March was the trigger to the real ‘seizure of power’ that took place over the following days in those Länder not already under Nazi control. Hitler needed to do little. Party activists needed no encouragement to undertake the ‘spontaneous’ actions that inordinately strengthened his power as Reich Chancellor.¹⁴⁶

The pattern was in each case similar: pressure on the non-Nazi state governments to place a National Socialist in charge of the police; threatening demonstrations from marching SA and SS troops in the big cities; the symbolic raising of the swastika banner on town halls; the capitulation with scarcely any resistance of the elected governments; the imposition of a Reich Commissar under the pretext of restoring order. The ‘coordination’ process began in Hamburg even before the election had taken place. In Bremen, Lübeck, Schaumburg-Lippe, Hessen, Baden, Württemberg, Saxony, and finally Bavaria – the largest state after Prussia – the process was repeated. Between 5 and 9 March these states, too, were brought in line with the Reich government. In Bavaria, in particular, long-standing acolytes of Hitler were appointed as commissary government ministers: Adolf Wagner in charge of the Ministry of the Interior, Hans Frank as Justice Minister, Hans Schemm as Education Minister. Even more significant were the appointments of Ernst Röhm as State Commissar without Portfolio, Heinrich Himmler as commander of the Munich police, and Reinhard Heydrich – the tall, blond head of the Party’s Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, SD), a cashiered naval officer, still under thirty, in the early stages of his meteoric rise to command over the security police in the S S empire – as head of the Bavarian Political Police. The weakening of Prussia through the Papen coup and the effective Nazi takeover there in February provided the platform and model for the extension of control to the other Länder. These now passed more or less completely into Nazi hands, with little regard for their German Nationalist partners. Despite the semblance of legality, the usurpation of the powers of the Länder by the Reich was a plain breach of the Constitution. Force and pressure by the Nazi organizations themselves – political blackmail – had been solely responsible for creating the ‘unrest’ that had prompted the alleged restoration of ‘order’. The terms of the emergency decree of 28 February provided no justification since there was plainly no need for defence from any ‘communist acts of violence endangering the state’. The only such acts were those of the Nazis themselves.¹⁴⁷

In the triumphalist atmosphere following the election, the open violence of rampant bands of Nazi thugs prompted protests from high quarters to the Reich President as well as to Hitler himself.¹⁴⁸ Hitler responded in characteristic vein with an aggressive defence of his SA men in response to Papen’s complaints about affronts to foreign diplomats, prompted by an incident where a mob (including S A and SS men) had behaved threateningly towards the wives of prominent diplomats, beating up one of their chauffeurs, and tearing the flag from the car of the Rumanian ambassador. He had the impression, he said, that the bourgeoisie had been rescued too early. Had they experienced six weeks of Bolshevism, then they would have ‘learnt the difference between the red revolution and our uprising. I once graphically saw this difference in Bavaria and have never forgotten it. And I will not let myself be taken away by anyone at all from the mission that I repeatedly announced before the election: the annihilation and eradication of Marxism.’¹⁴⁹Even so, the violence was becoming counter-productive. On 10 March, directly referring to harassment of foreigners but blaming it on Communist provocateurs, Hitler proclaimed that from this day on, the national government controlled executive power in the whole of Germany, and that the future course of the ‘national uprising’ would be ‘directed from above, according to plan’. All molesting of individuals, obstruction of automobiles, and disturbances to business life had to stop as a matter of principle.¹⁵⁰ He repeated the sentiments in a radio address two days later.¹⁵¹ The exhortations had little effect.

The levels of terror and repression experienced in February in Prussia had by then wracked the rest of the country. Conditions in Bavaria, wrote the former peasant leader Dr Georg Heim to Hindenburg, were worse than ‘under the terror regime of the Communists’.¹⁵² Under the aegis of Himmler and Heydrich, the scale of arrests in Bavaria was proportionately even greater than it had been in Prussia. Around 10,000 Communists and Socialists were arrested in March and April. By June, the numbers in ‘protective custody’ – most of them workers – had doubled.¹⁵³ A good number of those arrested were the victims of denunciations by neighbours or workmates. So great was the wave of denunciations following the Malicious Practices Act of 21 March 1933 that even the police criticized it.¹⁵⁴ Just outside the town of Dachau, about twelve miles from Munich, the first concentration camp was set up in a former powder-mill on 22 March.

There was no secret about the camp’s existence. Himmler had even held a press conference two days earlier to announce it. It began with 200 prisoners. Its capacity was given as 5,000. It was intended, stated Himmler, to hold the Communist and, if necessary, Reichsbanner and Marxist (i.e. Social Democrat) functionaries. Its establishment was announced in the newspapers.¹⁵⁵ It was meant to serve as a deterrent, and did so. Its dreaded name soon became a byword for the largely unspoken horrifying events known or presumed to take place within its walls. ‘Keep quiet or you’ll end up in Dachau’ was soon to join common parlance. But apart from the political enemies and racial targets of the Nazis, few were disconcerted at the foundation of the camp, and others like it. The middle-class townsfolk of Dachau, watching the column of their Communist fellow-citizens from the town being marched to the nearby camp as political prisoners, thought them troublemakers, revolutionaries, ‘a class apart’, simply not part of their world.¹⁵⁶

The day after Himmler had announced the creation of Dachau concentration camp, the regime showed its other face. If keen to keep at one remove from the shows of terror, Hitler was again in his element at the centre of another propaganda spectacular. This was the ‘Day of Potsdam’, a further masterly concoction of the newly appointed Reich Minister of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. In complete detachment from the sordid bestialities in the brutal showdown with the Left, National Socialism here put on its best clothes, and proclaimed its union with Prussian conservatism. The ‘comedy of Potsdam’, as the French ambassador called it, captured the imagination of the German public, diverted attention from the unseemly events of the previous weeks, and, not least, helped further to cement the alliance of the army and the new regime.¹⁵⁷

The decision to have the opening ceremony of the new Reichstag in Potsdam was taken at a meeting between the Reich President and Hitler, Papen, Frick, Blomberg and Göring on 7 March. The broad contours of the ceremonials were agreed at this meeting. The opening was originally scheduled for the week between 3 and 8 April.¹⁵⁸ The date was then changed to 21 March – the start of a new spring, and the date on which the first Reichstag had met after Bismarck’s foundation of the Reich.¹⁵⁹ The ‘great plan’ for a symbolic festive opening of the Reichstag was worked out in meticulous detail by Goebbels five days before the event.¹⁶⁰ The ‘Day of Potsdam’ was to represent the start of the new Reich, building upon the glories of the old. It was also to denote the forging of the links between the new Germany and the traditions of Prussia. The Garnisonkirche (garrison church) in Potsdam, where the main ceremony was to take place, had been founded by the Hohenzollern kings of Prussia in the early eighteenth century. Household guards had dedicated themselves there to service to God and the King. Frederick Wilhelm I, the ‘Soldier King’, and his son Frederick the Great were buried in the crypt. The church symbolized the bonds between the Prussian military monarchy, the power of the state, and the Protestant religion.

On 21 March 1933, Reich President Hindenburg, in the uniform of a Prussian field-marshal and raising his baton to the empty throne of the exiled Kaiser, represented those bonds: throne, altar, and the military tradition in Prussia’s glory. He was the link between the past and the present. Hitler marked the present and the future. Dressed not in party uniform but in a dark morning-suit, he played the part of the humble servant, bowing deeply before the revered and elderly Reich President and offering him his hand.¹⁶¹National renewal through unity was the theme of Hitler’s address. Only with one phrase did he mention those who formed no part of that unity: they were to be rendered ‘unharmful’. Hindenburg was elevated to the protector of the ‘new uprising of our people’. He it was who had ‘entrusted on 30 January the leadership of the Reich to this young Germany’.¹⁶²‘It can’t be denied,’ wrote one non-Nazi observer, impressed by the ‘moderation’ of Hitler’s speech, ‘he has grown. Out of the demagogue and party leader, the fanatic and agitator, the true statesman seems – for his opponents surprisingly enough – to be developing.’¹⁶³ The blending of Prussian tradition and the National Socialist regime was underlined at the end of the ceremony by the laying of wreaths on the tombs of the Prussian kings, while the ‘Niederländisches Dankgebet’ rang through the church and outside a twenty-one gun salute sounded.¹⁶⁴ Afterwards, Hindenburg took the salute at a parade, lasting several hours, of the army and the ‘national associations’ of SA, SS, and Stahlhelm. Hitler stood modestly with his ministers several rows behind the military guests of honour.¹⁶⁵

Two days later, it was a different Hitler, brown-shirted again and imperious, who entered the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, where Reichstag meetings were now to be held, to the jubilant cheers of serried ranks of uniformed Nazi deputies to propose the Enabling Act that he had wanted since the previous November. The atmosphere for their opponents, particularly the SPD deputies, was menacing. A giant swastika dominated the chamber. Armed men from the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm guarded all exits and surrounded the building. They were giving a hint to opposition deputies of what would be the outcome were the Enabling Act not to find the necessary level of support. In the absence of the eighty-one Communist deputies who had been arrested or taken flight, the Nazis were now in a majority in the Reichstag. But to pass the Enabling Act a two-thirds majority was necessary.¹⁶⁶

Already on 7 March, Hitler – now visibly more self-confident among the conservative ministers – had told the cabinet that he expected to gain the two-thirds majority for an Enabling Act since the Communist deputies were in custody and would not be attending.¹⁶⁷ Just over a week later, on 15 March, he informed his ministers that the political situation had now been clarified. ‘The national revolution had taken place without great shocks.’ It was now necessary, he cynically continued, ‘to divert the entire activity of the people on to the purely political plane (auf das rein Politische abzulenken) because economic decisions had still to be awaited’. Hitler then came to the Enabling Act. Its passage with a two-thirds majority would in his opinion not meet with any difficulties. Frick explained that the Zentrum was not ill-disposed towards the idea of an Enabling Act, but merely sought an audience first with the Chancellor. Frick advocated – making no bones about the intention behind the act – an act so widely framed that subsequent deviations from the Reich Constitution would be possible. He suggested a three-line draft, though in the event that scarcely sufficed and the final version was substantially longer. To ensure the two-thirds majority, Frick had worked out that if the Communist deputies were simply deducted from the total membership of the Reichstag, only 378, not 432, votes would be needed. Göring added that, if necessary, some Social Democrats could be ejected from the chamber. That is how little the Nazis’ ‘legal revolution’ had to do with legality. But the conservatives present raised no objections. Nor did they to Meissner’s acknowledgement that the Reich President’s involvement in the passage of acts under the Enabling Act would not be necessary.¹⁶⁸ By 20 March, Hitler could confidently report to the cabinet that, following his discussions, the Zentrum had seen the necessity of the Enabling Act. Their request for a small committee to oversee the measures taken under the Act should be accepted. There would then be no reason to doubt the Zentrum’s support. ‘The acceptance of the Enabling Act also by the Zentrum would signify a strengthening of prestige with regard to foreign countries,’ Hitler commented, aware as always of the propaganda implications.¹⁶⁹ Frick then introduced the draft of the bill, which was eventually accepted by the cabinet. The Reich Minister of the Interior also proposed a blatant manipulation of the Reichstag’s procedures to make certain of the two-thirds majority. Deputies absent without excuse should now be counted as present.¹⁷⁰ There would, therefore, be no problem about a quorum. Absenteeism as a form of protest abstention was ruled out. Again the conservatives raised no objections.¹⁷¹

The way was clear. On the afternoon of 23 March 1933, Hitler addressed the Reichstag. The programme he outlined in his tactically clever two-and-a-half-hour speech, once he had finished painting the grim picture of the conditions he had inherited, was framed in the broadest of terms. He promised ‘far-reaching moral renewal’ supported by the whole sphere of education, the media and the arts. The national government saw in both Christian denominations, he declared, ‘the most important factors for upholding our nationhood’. Their rights would not be touched: words of a German Chancellor intended to weigh, and weighing, with the Zentrum deputies. Judges would have to show some ‘elasticity of judgement’ for the good of society – an attack on liberal legal principles that earned warm applause. Business, too, would be made to serve the people, not the interests of capital. Experiments with the currency would be avoided. The salvation of the peasantry and Mittelstand and removal of unemployment, at first through work-creation schemes and labour service, were the main economic aims. The army was held up for praise. But Hitler said the government had no intention of increasing its size and weaponry if the rest of the world would undertake a radical disarmament. Germany wanted no more than similar rights and freedom. At the end of his speech, Hitler made what appeared to be important concessions. The existence of neither the Reichstag nor the Reichsrat was threatened, he stated. The position and rights of the Reich President remained untouched. The Länder would not be abolished. The rights of the Churches would not be reduced and their relations with the state not altered.¹⁷²

All the promises were soon to be broken. But for the time being they served their purpose. They appeared to give the binding declarations safeguarding the position of the Catholic Church which the Zentrum had demanded in its discussions with Hitler. Even so, the Zentrum deputies, meeting before the vote was taken, were divided. There was talk of civil war, of a resort to force, if the Enabling Act were not granted. Once more, Hitler’s implicit blackmailing tactic had worked. The party leader, Prälat Kaas, argued that ‘the Fatherland is in the greatest danger. We dare not fail.’ Eventually, with the greatest reservations and evincing their feelings of responsibility for the nation, other leading figures, such as Heinrich Brüning (the former Chancellor) and Joseph Ersing (one of the party’s most prominent trade unionists), and the rest of the Zentrum deputies supported him.¹⁷³

It was shortly after six o’clock when the Reichstag resumed its business. The SPD leader, Otto Wels, spoke courageously, given the menacing atmosphere. Though most of his speech was low-key, he ended movingly, upholding the principles of humanity, justice, freedom, and socialism held dear by Social Democrats.¹⁷⁴ Hitler had made notes as Wels spoke. He now returned to the rostrum, to storms of applause from NSDAP deputies, to make the most savage of replies, every sentence cheered to the rafters. Departing now from the relative moderation of his earlier prepared speech, Hitler showed more of his true colours. A sense of law was alone not enough; possession of power was decisive. There had been no need to put the current bill before the Reichstag: ‘we appeal in this hour to the German Reichstag to grant us that which we could have taken anyway’. He would not fall into the error of simply irritating opponents instead of either destroying them or making amends with them. He would offer his hand to those who differed from him but were committed to Germany. But this did not apply to the Social Democrats. They should not misunderstand him. He did not recognize the dictates of the International. The mentality of the Social Democrats was quite incapable of grasping the intentions behind the Enabling Act. He did not even want them to vote for the bill. ‘Germany will become free, but not through you,’ he concluded to wild cheering.¹⁷⁵After Kaas for the Zentrum, without any guarantees beyond the verbal assurances Hitler had given in his speech, had declared his party’s readiness to support the bill, and other party leaders had followed suit, the vote was taken.¹⁷⁶ With 441 votes to the ninety-four votes of the Social Democrats, the Reichstag, as a democratic body, voted itself out of existence.

The ‘Act for the Removal of Distress from People and Reich’ – the Enabling Act – went into effect the next day.¹⁷⁷ Hitler’s bullying tactics had worked – for neither the first nor the last time. Power was now in the hands of the National Socialists. It was the beginning of the end for political parties other than the NSDAP. The Zentrum’s role had been particularly ignominious. Fearing open terror and repression, it had given in to Hitler’s tactics of pseudo-legality. In so doing, it had helped in the removal of almost all constitutional constraints on his power. He needed in future to rely neither on the Reichstag, nor on the Reich President. Hitler was still far from wielding absolute power. But vital steps towards consolidating his dictatorship now followed in quick succession.

V

During the spring and summer of 1933, Germany fell into line behind its new rulers. Hardly any spheres of organized activity, political or social, were left untouched by the process of Gleichschaltung – the ‘coordination’ of institutions and organizations now brought under Nazi control. Pressure from below, from Nazi activists, played a major role in forcing the pace of the ‘coordination’. But many organizations showed themselves only too willing to anticipate the process and to ‘coordinate’ themselves in accordance with the expectations of the new era. By the autumn, the Nazi dictatorship – and Hitler’s own power at its head – had been enormously strengthened. What is striking is not how much, but how little, Hitler needed to do to bring this about. Beyond indications that his instinct for the realities of power and the manipulative potential of propaganda were as finely tuned as ever, Hitler took remarkably few initiatives.

One initiative that did come from Hitler was, however, the creation of Reich Governors (Reichsstatthalter) to uphold the ‘lines of policy laid down by the Reich Chancellor’ in the Länder.¹⁷⁸ Referring to them at first as ‘State Presidents’, Hitler pressed for their instalment in the Länder at a cabinet meeting on 29 March.¹⁷⁹ With their hastily contrived establishment in the ‘Second Law for the Coordination of the Länder with the Reich’ of 7 April 1933, the sovereignty of the individual states was decisively undermined.¹⁸⁰ All indications are that Hitler was anxious, with the establishment of the Reich Governors, to have trusted representatives in the Länder who could counter any danger that the grass-roots ‘party revolution’ might run out of control, ultimately even possibly threatening his own position. The position in Bavaria, where the SA and SS had their headquarters and where radicals had effected an actual ‘seizure of power’ in the days since the March election, was especially sensitive. The improvised creation of the Reich Governors was brought about with Bavaria, in particular, in mind, to head off the possibility of a party revolution against Berlin. The former Freikorps ‘hero’ of the crushing of the Räterepublik, Ritter von Epp, was already appointed as Reich Governor on 10 April. A further ten Reich Governors were installed less hurriedly, during May and June, in the remaining Länder, apart from Prussia, and were drawn from the senior and most powerful Gauleiter. Their dependence on Hitler was no less great than his on them. They could be relied upon, therefore, to serve the Reich government in blocking the revolution from below when it was becoming counter-productive.¹⁸¹ Their creation hardly, however, provided a guarantee of coherent government administration in the regions. Superimposed on existing structures, and uneasily straddling the divisions of party and state, the Reich Governors soon became unclear themselves about their precise function. This was all the less clear once the abolition of the autonomy of the Länder in January 1934 had in theory removed the very need for Reich representatives.¹⁸² Typically, however, once created, the position of Reich Governor was not abolished. ‘Elbow-power’, as usual, was what counted. Each of the ‘viceroys’ of the Reich should make out of his position what he could, was Hitler’s characteristic definition of their role.¹⁸³ In cases of dispute of Reich Governors with Reich Ministers in ‘questions of special political significance’, Hitler reserved to himself the final decision. ‘Such a ruling corresponds in the view of the Reich Chancellor to his position as leader,’ Frick was told.¹⁸⁴

In Prussia, Hitler reserved the position of Reich Governor for himself. This effectively removed any purpose in retaining Papen as Reich Commissioner for Prussia.¹⁸⁵ Possibly Hitler was contemplating reuniting the position of head of government in Prussia with that of Reich Chancellor, as had been the position under Bismarck. If so, he reckoned without Göring’s own power ambitions. Since Papen’s coup the previous July, there had been no Minister President in Prussia. Göring had expected the position to become his following the Prussian Landtag elections on 5 March. But Hitler had not appointed him. Göring therefore engineered the placing on the agenda of the newly-elected Prussian Landtag, meeting on 8 April, the election of the Minister President. Though he had only the previous day taken over the rights of Reich Governor in Prussia himself, Hitler now had to bow to the fait accompli. On 11 April, Göring was appointed Prussian Minister President (retaining his powers as Prussian Minister of the Interior), and on 25 April the rights of Reich Governor in Prussia were transferred to him. The ‘Second Coordination Law’ had indirectly but effectively led to the consolidation of Göring’s extensive power-base in Prussia, built initially on his control over the police in the most important of the German states. It was little wonder that Göring responded with publicly effusive statements of loyalty to Hitler, whom he served as his ‘most loyal paladin’.¹⁸⁶ The episode reveals the haste and confusion behind the entire improvised ‘coordination’ of the Länder. But at the price of strengthening the hand of Göring in Prussia, and the most thrusting Gauleiter elsewhere, Hitler’s own power had also been notably reinforced across the Länder.

During the spring and summer of 1933, Hitler stood between countervailing forces. The dilemma would not be resolved until the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. On the one hand, the pressures, dammed up for so long and with such difficulty before Hitler’s takeover of power, had burst loose after the March elections. Hitler not only sympathized with the radical assault from below on opponents, Jews, and anyone else getting in the way of the Nazi revolution; he needed the radicals to push through the upturning of the established political order and to intimidate those obstructing to fall in line. On the other hand, as the creation of the Reich Governors had shown, he was aware of the dangers to his own position if the radical upheaval got out of hand. And he was sensitive to the fact that the traditional national-conservative bastions of power, not least sceptics about National Socialism in the army and important sectors of business, while having no objections to violence as long as it was directed at Communists and Socialists, would look differently upon it as soon as their own vested interests were threatened. Hitler had no choice, therefore, but to steer an uncomfortable course between a party revolution which he could by no means fully control and the support of the army and business which he could by no means do without. Out of these inherently contradictory forces, the showdown with the SA would ultimately emerge. In the meantime, however, there were clear signs of what would become a lasting trait of the Third Reich: pressure from party radicals, encouraged and sanctioned at least in part by Hitler, resulting in the state bureaucracy reflecting the radicalism in legislation and the police channelling it into executive measures. The process of ‘cumulative radicalization’ was recognizable from the earliest weeks of the regime.¹⁸⁷

Hitler’s call for discipline on 10 March had itself been half-hearted, encouraging the immediate breaking of resistance to orders of the state leadership wherever encountered and exhorting his followers not to lose sight for a second of the task of the ‘annihilation of Marxism’.¹⁸⁸ The order, perhaps not surprisingly, had been widely ignored, as had subsequent attempts by Göring and Frick to ban ‘individual actions’ (Einzelaktionen) and impose harsh sentences on ‘excesses’ (Übergriffe) by party members.¹⁸⁹

Apart from the all-out assault on the Left in the first weeks of Nazi rule, many of the ‘individual actions’ had been outrages perpetrated by Nazi radicals against Jews. Since antisemitism had been the ‘ideological cement’ of the National Socialist Movement from the beginning, offering at one and the same time a vehicle for actionism and substitute for revolutionary leanings threatening the fabric of society, this was scarcely surprising. The takeover of power by the arch-antisemite Hitler had at one fell swoop removed constraints on violence towards Jews. Without any orders from above, and without any coordination, assaults on Jewish businesses and the beating-up of Jews by Nazi thugs became commonplace. As one of many such incidents, the Frankfurter Zeitung reported on 12 March how a Jewish theatre director in Breslau had been hustled into a car in broad daylight by five SA men before having his clothes removed and being beaten by rubber truncheons and thrashed with a dog-whip. He later suffered a nervous breakdown.¹⁹⁰ A Jewish eye-witness in the same city recounted groups of six to eight SA men, carrying coshes and revolvers, breaking into the houses of wealthy Jews, and extorting large sums of money from them. They even interrupted court proceedings to throw Jewish lawyers and judges out on to the streets, beating them up as they did so.¹⁹¹ Some Jews suffered an even worse fate. The German correspondent of theManchester Guardian described on 16 March how four men with guns had broken into the house of a Jewish businessman and money-lender in Straubing (Lower Bavaria), who had won a libel suit two years earlier against a Bavarian Landtag deputy, dragged him out of bed, forced him into a car, and driven him away. He was later found shot dead.¹⁹² Countless such atrocities took place in the weeks following Hitler’s assumption to power.

Many were carried out by members of the so-called Fighting League of the Commercial Middle Class (Kampfbund des gewerblichen Mittelstandes), in which violent antisemitism went hand in hand with equally violent opposition to department stores (many of them Jewish owned).¹⁹³ The extent of the anti-Jewish violence prompted Jewish intellectuals and financiers abroad, especially in the USA, to undertake attempts to mobilize public feeling against Germany and to organize a boycott against German goods – a real threat, given the weakness of the German economy. Beginning in mid-March, the boycott gathered pace and was extended to numerous European countries. The reaction in Germany, led by the Kampfbund des gewerblichen Mittelstandes, was predictably aggressive. A ‘counter-boycott’ of Jewish shops and departmental stores throughout Germany was demanded. The call was taken up by leading antisemites in the party, at their forefront and in his element the Franconian Gauleiter and pathological antisemite Julius Streicher. They argued that the Jews could serve as ‘hostages’ to force a halt to the international boycott.¹⁹⁴

Hitler’s instincts favoured the party radicals. But he was also under pressure to act. On the ‘Jewish Question’, on which he had preached so loudly and so often, he could scarcely now, once in power, back down in the face of the demands of the activists without serious loss of face within the party. When, on 26 March, it was reported through diplomatic contacts that the American Jewish Congress was planning to call the next day for a world-wide boycott of German goods, Hitler was forced into action.¹⁹⁵ As usual, when pushed into a corner Hitler had no half-measures. Goebbels was summoned to the Obersalzberg. ‘In the loneliness of the mountains,’ he wrote, the Führer had reached the conclusion that the authors, or at least beneficiaries, of the ‘foreign agitation’ – Germany’s Jews – had to be tackled. ‘We must therefore move to a widely framed boycott of all Jewish bsinesses in Germany.’¹⁹⁶ Streicher was put in charge of a committee of thirteen party functionaries who were to organize the boycott. The party’s proclamation of 28 March, prompted by the Reich Chancellor himself and bearing his imprint, called for action committees to carry out a boycott of Jewish businesses, goods, doctors and lawyers, even in the smallest village of the Reich.¹⁹⁷ The boycott was to be of indefinite duration. Goebbels was left to undertake the propaganda preparations. Behind the entire operation stood pressure from the Kampfbund des gewerblichen Mittelstandes.¹⁹⁸

Led by Schacht and Foreign Minister Neurath, counter-pressures began to be placed on Hitler to halt an action which was likely to have disastrous effects on the German economy and on Germany’s standing abroad. Hitler at first refused to consider any retreat. Even doubts about the boycott which the Reich President was said to have expressed met only the response from Hitler that ‘he had to carry out the boycott and was no longer in a position to hold up history’.¹⁹⁹ But by 31 March, Neurath was able to report to the cabinet that the British, French, and American governments had declared their opposition to the boycott of German goods in their country. He hoped the boycott in Germany might be called off.²⁰⁰ It was asking too much of Hitler to back down completely. The activists were by now fired up. Abandonment of the boycott would have brought not only loss of face for Hitler, but the probability that any order cancelling the ‘action’ would have been widely ignored.²⁰¹ However, Hitler did indicate that he was now ready to postpone the start of the German boycott from 1 to 4 April in the event of satisfactory declarations opposing the boycott of German goods by the British and American governments. Otherwise, the German boycott would commence on 1 April, but would then be halted until 4 April.²⁰² A flurry of diplomatic activity resulted in the western governments and, placed under pressure, Jewish lobby groups distancing themselves from the boycott of German goods. Hitler’s demands had largely been met. But by now Hitler had changed his mind, and was again insisting on the German boycott being carried out. Further pressure from Schacht resulted in the boycott being confined to a single day – but under the propaganda fiction that it would be restarted the following Wednesday, 5 April, if the ‘horror agitation’ abroad against Germany had not ceased altogether.²⁰³ There was no intention of that. In fact, already on the afternoon of the boycott day, 1 April, Streicher announced that it would not be resumed the following Wednesday.²⁰⁴

The boycott itself was less than the success that Nazi propaganda claimed.²⁰⁵ Many Jewish shops had closed for the day anyway. In some places, the SA men posted outside ‘Jewish’ department stores holding placards warning against buying in Jewish shops were largely ignored by customers. People behaved in a variety of fashions. There was almost a holiday mood in some busy shopping streets, as crowds gathered to see what was happening. Groups of people discussed the pros and cons of the boycott. Not a few were opposed to it, saying they would again patronize their favourite stores. Others shrugged their shoulders. ‘I think the entire thing is mad, but I’m not bothering myself about it,’ was one, perhaps not untypical, view heard from a non-Jew on the day.²⁰⁶ Even the SA men seemed at times rather half-hearted about it in some places. In others, however, the boycott was simply a cover for plundering and violence.²⁰⁷ For the Jewish victims, the day was traumatic – the clearest indication that this was a Germany in which they could no longer feel ‘at home’, in which routine discrimination had been replaced by state-sponsored persecution.²⁰⁸

Reactions in the foreign press to the boycott were almost universally condemnatory. A damage-limitation exercise had to be carried out by the new Reichsbank President Schacht immediately after the boycott to assure foreign bankers of Germany’s intentions in economic policy.²⁰⁹ But within Germany – something which would repeat itself in years to come – the dynamic of anti-Jewish pressure from party activists, sanctioned by Hitler and the Nazi leadership, was now taken up by the state bureaucracy and channelled into discriminatory legislation. The exclusion of Jews from state service and from the professions had been aims of Nazi activists before 1933. Now, the possibility of pressing for the implementation of such aims had opened up. Suggestions for anti-Jewish discriminatory measures came from various quarters. Preparations for overhauling civil service rights were given a new anti-Jewish twist at the end of March, possibly (though this is not certain) on Hitler’s intervention. On the basis of the notorious ‘Aryan Paragraph’ – there was no definition of a Jew – in the hastily drafted ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ of 7 April Jews as well as political opponents were dismissed from the civil service. An exception was made, on Hindenburg’s intervention, only for Jews who had served at the front. The three further pieces of anti-Jewish legislation passed in April – discriminating against the admission of Jews to the legal profession, excluding Jewish doctors from treating patients covered by the national insurance scheme, and limiting the number of Jewish schoolchildren permitted in schools – were all hurriedly improvised to meet not simply pressure from below but de facto measures which were already being implemented in various parts of the country. The legislation against Jews entering the legal profession followed steps already undertaken by the Prussian and Bavarian Justice Ministers, Hans Kerrl and Hans Frank, adopted by the Reich Justice Ministry, and passed on for Hitler’s approval. That against doctors was pushed forward by Reich Labour Minister Franz Seldte after Hitler had in fact indicated that there was no immediate necessity for legal regulation of the ‘doctor question’. The restrictions on numbers of places for Jewish schoolchildren represented an attempt by Reich Interior Minister Frick to give some legislative unity to the quite varied position which had arisen through arbitrary discriminatory measures being imposed even within different parts of the same state. Hitler’s role was largely confined to giving his sanction to the legalization of measures already often illegally introduced by party activists with vested interests in the discrimination running alongside whatever ideological motivation they possessed. These had shown themselves on occasion unprepared to recognize the Reich Chancellor’s tactical readiness to accept for the time being less than the most radical discriminatory measures.²¹⁰

The seismic shift in the political scene which had taken place in the month or so following the Reichstag fire had left the Jews fully exposed to Nazi violence, discrimination, and intimidation. It had also totally undermined the position of Hitler’s political opponents. Following the ruthless demolition of the KPD, which was never formally banned, the main blocks of potential resistance were those of the SPD and Free Trade Unions, political Catholicism (focused on the Zentrum), and the conservatives (still with their majority in the cabinet). In May and June, each of the blocks was eliminated. Intimidation certainly played its part. But there was now little fight left in oppositional parties. The readiness to compromise soon became a readiness to capitulate.

Already in March, Theodor Leipart, the chairman of the trade union confederation, the ADGB, had tried to blow with the wind, distancing the unions from the SPD and offering a declaration of loyalty to the new regime.²¹¹ By then, there had been frequent incidents in which union functionaries had been beaten up by squads of S A or NSBO men, and union offices ransacked. But, keen above all to protect the organization, and tempted by the prospect held out of a single, unified trade union for all sectors of theworking class, the ADGΒ was ready to cooperate with the still relatively insignificant NSBO to have ‘Marxist’ functionaries thrown off works councils.²¹² The planning of the destruction of the unions was undertaken by the NSBO boss Reinhold Muchow and, increasingly, by Robert Ley, the NSDAP’s Organization Leader. Hitler was initially hesitant, until the idea was proposed of coupling it with a propaganda coup.²¹³ Along the lines of the ‘Day of Potsdam’, Goebbels prepared another huge spectacular for 1 May, when the National Socialists usurped the traditional celebration of the International and turned it into the ‘Day of National Labour’. The ADGΒ took a full part in the rallies and parades. Over 10 million people altogether turned out – though for many a factory work-force attendance was scarcely voluntary. Hitler spoke, as on so many occasions, to the half million assembled on the Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin, the wide expanse of open land adjacent to the aerodrome, of the need to leave the divisions of class struggle behind and come together in a united national community.²¹⁴ Many who were far from sympathetic to National Socialism were moved by the occasion.²¹⁵

The following day, the razzmatazz over, SA and NSBO squads occupied the offices and bank branches of the Social Democratic trade union movement, confiscated its funds, and arrested its functionaries. Within an hour, the ‘action’ was finished. The largest democratic trade union movement in the world had been destroyed. In a matter of days, its members had been incorporated into the massive German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF), founded on 10 May under Robert Ley’s leadership.²¹⁶ By the autumn, the DAF had itself been emasculated as a trade union – even a Nazi one – and been turned into little more than a gigantic propaganda machine to organize the activities of the German work-force in the interests of the regime. Behind the propaganda, by then, the reordering of relations in the work-place was firmly under the direction of the bureaucracy of the Reich Labour Ministry. Workers now faced the reality of harsher, more aggressive industrial management, backed by the power of the state.²¹⁷

The once-mighty Social Democratic Party of Germany, the largest labour movement that Europe had known, was also at an end. It had been forced during the last years of Weimar into one unholy compromise after another in its attempts to uphold its legalistic traditions while at the same time hoping to fend off the worst. When the worst came, it was ill-equipped. The Depression years and internal demoralization had taken their toll. Otto Wels’s speech on 23 March had shown courage. But it was far too little, and far too late. Support was haemorrhaging away. During March and April, the SPD’s paramilitary arm, the huge Reichsbanner, was forced into dissolution. Party branches were closing down. Activists were under arrest, or had fled abroad. Some already began preparations for illegality. Optimists – there still were a few – expected the fascist hurricane quickly to blow itself out. The party had survived Bismarck’s repression in the 1880s. It would survive this. Most party members were more pessimistic, realizing it was high time to keep their heads below the parapet. Alongside the fear, there was wide disillusionment with Social Democracy. The flight into exile of many party leaders – necessary safety measure that it was – enhanced a sense of desertion. The SPD was by now a rudderless ship. Divisions in the party leadership over the decision – taken under duress – to back Hitler’s ‘peace speech’ on 17 May, in which the Reich Chancellor renounced war as the solution to Europe’s problems and demanded disarmament of the western powers,²¹⁸ led now to Otto Wels and other party leaders leaving for Prague, where a party headquarters in exile had already been established. The first publication in Prague of the exiled party’s weekly, Neuer Vorwärts, on 18 June was the pretext four days later for all party activities within the Reich to be banned, its parliamentary representation abolished, its assets confiscated.²¹⁹

The remaining parties now rapidly caved in, falling domino-style. The Staatspartei (formerly the DDP), which had entered into an electoral alliance with the SPD the previous March, dissolved itself on 28 June, followed a day later by the dissolution of the DVP. The Nazis’ conservative coalition partner, the DNVP – renamed in May the German National Front (Deutschnationale Front, DNF) – also capitulated on 27 June. It had been losing members to the NSDAP at an increasing rate; its grass-roots organizations had been subjected to repression and intimidation; the Stahlhelm – many of whose members supported the DNVP – had been placed under Hitler’s leadership in late April and was taken into the S A in June; and the party’s leader, Hugenberg, had become wholly isolated in cabinet, even from his conservative colleagues. Hugenberg’s resignation from the cabinet (which many had initially thought he would dominate), on 26 June, was inevitable after he had embarrassed the German government through his behaviour at the World Economic Conference in London earlier in the month. Without consulting Hitler, the cabinet, or Foreign Minister Neurath, Hugenberg had sent a memorandum to the Economic Committee of the Conference rejecting free trade, demanding the return of German colonies and land for settlement in the east. His departure from the cabinet signified the end for his party.²²⁰ Far from functioning as the ‘real’ leader of Germany, as many had imagined he would do, and far from ensuring with his conservative colleagues in the cabinet that Hitler would be ‘boxed in’, Hugenberg had rapidly become yesterday’s man. Few regretted it. Playing with fire, Hugenberg, along with his party, the DNVP, had been consumed by it.

The Catholic parties held out a little longer. But their position was undermined by the negotiations, led by Papen, for a Reich Concordat with the Holy See, in which the Vatican accepted a ban on the political activities of the clergy in Germany. This meant in effect that, in the attempt to defend the position of the Catholic Church in Germany, political Catholicism had been sacrificed. By that stage, in any case, the Zentrum had been losing its members at an alarming rate, many of them anxious to accommodate themselves to the new times. Its leader, Prälat Kaas, had already left Germany in April, and had taken a leading part in the Concordat discussions. Moreover the Catholic hierarchy, naïvely over-impressed by Hitler’s promises to uphold the position of the Church in his speech before the ‘Enabling Act’, had produced a rapid volte-face on 28 March, calling for loyal support of the new regime.²²¹ Thereafter, the Catholic bishops had taken over from the Zentrum leaders as the main spokesmen for the Church in dealings with the regime, and were more concerned to preserve the Church’s institutions, organizations and schools than to sustain the weakened position of the Catholic political parties. Intimidation and pressure did the rest. The arrest of 2,000 functionaries in late June by Himmler’s Bavarian Political Police concentrated minds and brought the swift reading of the last rites for the Β VP on 4 July. A day later, the Zentrum, the last remaining political party outside the NSDAP, dissolved itself.²²² Little over a week later, the ‘Law against the New Construction of Parties’ left the NSDAP as the only legal political party in Germany.²²³

VI

What was happening at the centre of politics was happening also at the grass-roots – not just in political life, but in every organizational form of social activity. Intimidation of those posing any obstacle and opportunism of those now seeking the first opportunity to jump on the bandwagon proved an irresistible combination. In countless small towns and villages, Nazis took over local government.²²⁴ Mayors and councillors who had belonged to the ‘Marxist’ parties were, of course, rapidly hounded out. With representativesfrom the bourgeois and Catholic parties there was often greater continuity in practice. Cases where a previous incumbent of the Bürgermeis-ter’s office was forcibly removed stood alongside instances where longstanding and respected local worthies, earlier members of one of the Catholic or bourgeois parties, turned coat and continued in office.²²⁵Teachers and civil servants were particularly prominent in the rush to join the Nazis. So swollen did the NSDAP’s membership rolls become with the mass influx of those anxious to cast in their lot with the new regime – the ‘March Fallen’ (Märzgefallene) as the ‘Old Fighters’ cynically dubbed them – that on 1 May a bar was imposed on further entrants. Two and a half million Germans had by now joined the party, 1.6 million of them since Hitler had become Chancellor.²²⁶

‘Coordination’ – meaning nazification – extended deep into the social fabric of every town and village. Few corners of the rich panoply of clubs and societies that formed the social network of every town in the country were left untouched. ‘Coordination(Gleichschaltung): The Veterans’ Association was coordinated on 6.8.33, on 7.8.33 the Singing Association in Theisenort. With the Shooting Club in Theisenort this was not necessary, since the board and committee are up to 80 per cent party members,’ ran an ‘activity report’ from a tiny community of 675 souls in Upper Franconia.²²⁷ A few months earlier, members of the ‘Small Garden Association’ in Hanover were told that ‘also in the area of small gardens the true national community now has to emerge in accordance with the will of the government of the national uprising’.²²⁸ Business and professional associations, sports clubs, choral societies, shooting clubs, patriotic associations, and most other forms of organized activity were taken under – or more frequently hastened to place themselves under – National Socialist control in the first months of the Third Reich.²²⁹ ‘There was no more social life; you couldn’t even have a bowling club’ that was not ‘coordinated’, was how one inhabitant of Northeim in Lower Saxony remembered it.²³⁰

Beyond the former clubs and societies associated with the left-wing parties, which had been dissolved, smashed, or forcibly taken over, there was a good deal of quite voluntary ‘adjustment’ to the new circumstances. Opportunism intermingled with genuine idealism.

Much the same applied also to the broad cultural sphere. Goebbels took up with great energy and enthusiasm his task of ensuring that the press, radio, film production, theatre, music, the visual arts, literature, and all other forms of cultural activity were reorganized in line with Hitler’s promise in March.²³¹ The aim, he had said in his first speech as Propaganda Minister, was ‘to work on people until they have capitulated to us’, ‘to unite the nation behind the ideal of the national revolution’ and to bring about a complete ‘mobilization of Spirit’.²³²

The reordering of German cultural life along Nazi lines was far-reaching indeed. But the most striking feature of the ‘coordination’ of culture was the alacrity and eagerness with which intellectuals, writers, artists, performers and publicists actively collaborated in moves which not only impoverished and straitjacketed German culture for the next twelve years, but banned and outlawed some of its most glittering exponents – fellow intellectuals, writers, artists, performers and publicists.

There were many illusions – in most cases rapidly to be shattered – and a good deal of misplaced idealism. But idealism often blended with careerism. Prominent actors like Gustav Gründgens, Werner Krauß or Emil Jannings felt flattered by the new regime’s favours – and put themselves at its disposal.²³³ The world-famous composer Richard Strauß, the leading conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, fèted by the regime, and the rising star conductor Herbert von Karajan continued to bestow distinction on German achievements in music; but the music of Arnold Schönberg or Kurt Weill was no longer acceptable, its composers forced into exile, as were leading conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, along with hundreds of other, mainly Jewish, musicians.²³⁴ The writer Gerhart Hauptmann had been honoured by the Weimar Republic on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1922. But he hastened to ingratiate himself with the new regime in 1933, openly giving the Nazi salute and joining in the singing of the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ at public gatherings.²³⁵ The brilliant essayist and poet Gottfried Benn, who had belonged to the Expressionist generation, also openly proclaimed his allegiance to National Socialism. High expectations, illusions and idealism played their part. ‘I declare myself quite personally to be in favour of the new state, because it is my people that lays out its path here… My mental and economic existence, my language, my life, my human contacts, the entire sum of my brain I owe in the first instance to this people,’ he emotively explained.²³⁶ In a radio address in April 1933, Benn equated the intellectual freedom of Weimar (Geistesfreiheit) with ‘freedom to subvert’ (Zersetzungsfreiheit) and saw the marching columns of the ‘brown battalions’ as the dawn of a new cultural era.²³⁷ He was impressed by Nazi notions of ‘eugenics’ and ‘racial hygiene’. But he was also delighted to be elevated to the Prussian Academy of Arts, and played an active role in its ‘coordination’, showing himself willing to cast aside his fellow-writers who were no longer comfortable bedfellows.²³⁸

The example set by such ‘glitterati’ was followed by lesser lights, falling under the spell of the ‘national rebirth’ – and with careers to gain or lose. The ‘Oath of Loyalty of German Poets to the People’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler’ in spring 1933 was a characteristic expression of eager and enthusiastic ‘self-coordination’ (Selbstgleichschaltung),²³⁹

It was no different among the intellectual leaders in universities. The most eminent philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and the best-known constitutional lawyer, Carl Schmitt, placed themselves behind the regime. Heidegger spoke in his inaugural lecture as Rector of Freiburg University on 27 May 1933 of German students ‘On the march’, leaving behind negative academic freedom, and placing themselves in the service of the völkisch state. He also helped to instigate a manifesto of German professors declaring their allegiance to ‘Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State’, which had brought about not simply a change of government, but ‘the entire upturning of our German existence (Dasein)’.²⁴⁰ Lesser-known academics were probably more representative than Heidegger. But the tune was much the same. In a lecture on 3 May, the Germanist Ernst Bertram spoke of the ‘uprising against rationality (ratio) inimical to life (lebensfeindlich), destructive enlightenment, alien political dogmatism, every form of the “ideas of 1789”, all anti-germanic tendencies and excessive foreign influences (Überfremdungen)’. Failure of the ‘struggle’ against such tendencies, he went on, would lead to ‘the end of the white world, chaos, or a planet of termites’.²⁴¹ The Berlin professor Julius Petersen declared, several months later, that ‘tomorrow had become today’, that the ‘end-of-the-world mood (Weltuntergangsstimmung) had been transformed into awakening(Aufbruch). The final goal moves into the vision of the present… The new Reich is planted. The Leader, yearned for and prophesied, has appeared.’²⁴²

Intellectuals were no exceptions in the rush to join the NSDAP after January 1933. But there were relatively few arch-Nazis among their ranks. For the most part, they were national-conservatives, steeped in the intellectual traditions of the ‘educated bourgeoisie’(Bildungsbürgertum) formed in the Wilhelmine era. Widespread detestation for the Revolution of 1918 and for the ‘un-German’ form of parliamentary democracy imported from the West made them open to the allure of a new start in 1933, blind or oblivious to the intellectual castration of their own profession, to the persecution of those from within their ranks who were politically or racially unacceptable to the new masters. Even one so contemptuous of the Nazis as Thomas Mann admitted to some initial uncertainties about the new regime, and hinted at approval of the anti-Jewish legislation of April 1933. His antipathy towards Hitler and the boycott against the Jews on 1 April is plain.²⁴³ But on 9 April, he confided to his diary: ‘… For all that, might not something deeply significant and revolutionary be taking place in Germany? The Jews… It is no calamity after all that… the domination of the legal system by Jews has been ended.’²⁴⁴

The hopes long cherished of the coming great leader eradicated the critical faculties of many intellectuals, blinding them to the magnitude of the assault on freedom of thought as well as action that they often welcomed. ‘Since this leader, from wherever he comes, can only be national, his way will be the right one because it will be the way of the nation,’ the influential editor of the neo-conservative Tat journal had written in October 1931. ‘In this moment an order of things which liberalism has sought to portray to us as dismal servitude (dumpfe Knechtschaft) will be to us freedom, since it is order, has meaning and provides an answer to questions which liberalism cannot answer: why, to what end, for what reason?’²⁴⁵

Many of the neo-conservative intellectuals whose ideas had helped pave the way for the Third Reich were soon to be massively disillusioned. Hitler turned out for them in practice to be not the mystic leader they had longed for in their dreams. But they had helped prepare the ground for the Führer cult that was taken up in its myriad forms by so many others. And their way of thinking – rejection of ‘ideas of 1789’ and the rationality and relativism of liberal thought in favour of a deliberate plunge into conscious irrationalism, the search for meaning not in individuality but in the ‘national community’, the sense of liberation through a ‘national awakening’ – was the platform on which so much of the German intellectual élite bound itself to the anti-intellectualism and primitive populism of Hitler’s Third Reich.²⁴⁶

Hardly a protest was raised at the purges of university professors under the new civil service law in April 1933 as many of Germany’s most distinguished academics were dismissed and forced into exile. The Prussian Academy of Arts had by then already undertaken its own ‘cleansing’, demanding loyalty to the regime from all choosing to remain within its hallowed membership. Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin were among those refusing to do so.²⁴⁷ Lists were drawn up and published of scholars and writers whose works were to be struck from those acceptable in the new order. Einstein, Freud, Brecht, Döblin, Remarque, Ossietzky, Tucholsky, Hofmannsthal, Kästner and Zuckmayer were among those whose writings were outlawed as decadent or materialistic, as representative of ‘moral decline’ or ‘cultural Bolshevism’.

The symbolic moment of capitulation of German intellectuals to the ‘new spirit’ of 1933 came with the burning on 10 May of the books of authors unacceptable to the regime.²⁴⁸ ‘Here sinks the intellectual basis of the November Revolution to the ground,’ proclaimed Goebbels at the spectacular scene at the Opernplatz in Berlin, as 20,000 books of poets and philosophers, writers and scholars, were cast into the flames of the vast auto-da-fé.²⁴⁹ But the ‘Action against the Ungerman Spirit’ – the burning of books which took place at all Germany’s universities that night of shame – had not been initiated by Goebbels but prompted by the leadership of the German Students’ Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) in an attempt to outflank the rival National Socialist German Student Federation (NSDStB). Not just Nazi student organizations had taken part. Others on the nationalist Right had also been involved. Local authorities and police had voluntarily assisted in clearing out the books to be burned from public libraries. University faculties and senates had hardly raised a protest of note at the ‘Action’. Their members, with few exceptions, attended the bonfires.²⁵⁰ The poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), whose works were among those consumed by the flames, had written: ‘Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.’²⁵¹

VII

Scarcely any of the transformation of Germany during the spring and summer of 1933 had followed direct orders from the Reich Chancellery. Hitler had rarely been personally involved. But he was the main beneficiary. During these months popular adulation of the new Chancellor had reached untold levels. The Führer cult was established, not now just within the party, but throughout state and society, as the very basis of the new Germany. Hitler’s standing and power, at home and increasingly abroad, were thereby immeasurably boosted.

Already in spring 1933, the personality cult surrounding Hitler was burgeoning, and developing extraordinary manifestations. ‘Poems’ – usually unctuous doggerel verse, sometimes with a pseudo-religious tone – were composed in his honour. ‘Hitler-Oaks’ and ‘Hitler-Lindens’, trees whose ancient pagan symbolism gave them special significance to völkisch nationalists and Nordic cultists, were planted in towns and villages all over Germany.²⁵² Towns and cities rushed to confer honorary citizenship on the new Chancellor. Streets and squares were named after him. Hitler let it be known that he had nothing against this, except in the case of the traditional names of long-standing historic streets or squares. He refused, accordingly, to allow the 700-year-old Marktplatz in Strausberg to be renamed. On the other hand, he had agreed to the renaming of the historic Hauptmarkt in Nuremberg as Adolf Hitler-Platz before deciding that old and historic names could not be altered. A request from the Organization Leader of the Deutsch-Völkische Freiheitsbewegung (German Ethnic Freedom Movement) in Franconia to revert to the original name of ‘Hauptmarkt’ did not, therefore, meet with his approval. In one case, an entire village – Sutzken in East Prussia – sought, and was given permission, to rename itself after the hero, and became ‘Hitlershöhe’, while in Upper Silesia, near Oppeln, a lake was renamed ‘Hitlersee’. But the mayor of Bad Godesberg was not allowed to advertise the elegant Rhineland resort as the ‘favourite place to stay of the Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler’. Nor were canny traders, seeking to use the Hitler cult for their own ends, successful in their attempts to name a café or a rose after the Chancellor.²⁵³ Even so, commercial exploitation of the Führer cult created an entire industry of kitsch – pictures, busts, reliefs, postcards, figurines, penknives, badges, illuminated buttons, zinc plates – until its tastelessness forced Goebbels in May 1933 to ban the use of Hitler’s image on commercial products.²⁵⁴

The levels of hero-worship had never been witnessed before in Germany. Not even the Bismarck cult in the last years of the founder of the Reich had come remotely near matching it. Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday on 20 April 1933 saw an extraordinary outpouring of adulation as the entire country glutted itself with festivities in honour of the ‘Leader of the New Germany’.²⁵⁵ However well orchestrated the propaganda, it was able to tap popular sentiments and quasi-religious levels of devotion that could not simply be manufactured. Hitler was on the way to becoming no longer the party leader, but the symbol of national unity.

And it became more and more difficult for bystanders who were less than fanatical worshippers of the new god to avoid at least an outward sign of acquiescence in the boundless adoration. The most banal expression of acquiescence, the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, now rapidly spread. For civil servants, it was made compulsory a day before Hitler’s party was established as the only one permissible in Germany. Those unable to raise the right arm through physical disability were ordered to raise their left arm.²⁵⁶ The ‘German Greeting’ – ‘Heil Hitler!’ – was the outward sign that the country had been turned into a ‘Führer state’.²⁵⁷

By the summer, the sense that recovery was under way, the new impressions of activity, energy, dynamism after years of Depression and hopelessness, the feeling that the government was doing something to tackle the problems and restore national pride all accrued directly to Hitler’s benefit. ‘Since the man has taken history into his hands, things work… At last things are happening,’ was how one provincial newspaper put it.²⁵⁸ The Obersalzberg, when Hitler took up residence in his house there during the summer, became ‘a sort of pilgrimage place’. Such were the crowds of admirers trying to glimpse the Reich Chancellor that Himmler, as Commander of the Bavarian Political Police, had to lay down special traffic restrictions for the Berchtesgaden area and to warn against the use of field-glasses by those trying to observe ‘every movement of the people’s Chancellor’.²⁵⁹

What of the man at the centre of this astonishing idolization? Putzi Hanfstaengl, by now head of the Foreign Press Section of the Propaganda Ministry, though not part of the ‘inner circle’, still saw Hitler at that time frequently and at close quarters. He later commented how difficult it was to gain access to Hitler, even at this early period of his Chancellorship. Hitler had taken his long-standing Bavarian entourage – the ‘Chauffeureska’ as Hanfstaengl called it – into the Reich Chancellery with him. His adjutants and chauffeurs, Brückner, Schaub, Schreck (successor to Emil Maurice, sacked in 1931 as chauffeur after his flirtation with Geli Raubal), and his court photographer Heinrich Hoffmann were omnipresent, often hindering contact, frequently interfering in a conversation with some form of distraction, invariably listening, later backing Hitler’s own impressions and prejudices. Even Foreign Minister Neurath and Reichsbank President Schacht found it difficult to gain Hitler’s attention for more than a minute or two without some intervention from one or other member of the ‘Chauffeureska’. Only Göring and Himmler, according to Hanfstaengl, could invariably reckon with a brief private audience on request with Hitler. Goebbels, at least, should be added to Hanfstaengl’s short list. Hitler’s unpredictability and lack of any form of routine did not help. As had always been the case, he tended to be late in bed – often after relaxing by watching a film (one of his favourites was King Kong) in his private cinema. Sometimes he scarcely appeared during the mornings, except to hear reports from Hans Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, and to look over the press with Goebbels’s right-hand man in the Propaganda Ministry, Walther Funk. The high-point of the day was lunch. The chef in the Reich Chancellery, who had been brought from the Brown House in Munich, had a difficult time in preparing a meal ordered for one o’clock but often served as much as two hours later, when Hitler finally appeared. Otto Dietrich, the press chief, took to eating in any case beforehand in the Kaiserhof, turning up at 1.30p.m. prepared for all eventualities. Hitler’s table guests changed daily but were invariably trusty party comrades. Even during the first months, conservative ministers were seldom present. Given the company, it was obvious that Hitler would seldom, if ever, find himself contradicted. Any sort of remark, however, could prompt a lengthy tirade – usually resembling his earlier propaganda attacks on political opponents or recollections of battles fought and won.

Plainly, in such circumstances, it would have been impossible for Hitler to have avoided the effects of the fawning sycophancy which surrounded him daily, sifting the type of information that reached him, and cocooning him from the outside world. His sense of reality was by this very process distorted. His contact with those who saw things in a fundamentally different light was restricted in the main to stage-managed interviews with dignitaries, diplomats or foreign journalists. The German people were little more than a faceless, adoring mass, his only direct relationship to them in now relatively infrequent speeches and radio addresses. But the popular adulation he received was like a drug to him. His own self-confidence was already soaring. Casual disparaging comments about Bismarck indicated that he now plainly saw the founder of the Reich as his inferior.²⁶⁰ What would turn into a fatal sense of infallibility was more than embryonically present.²⁶¹

How much of the adulation of Hitler that spread so rapidly throughout society in 1933 was genuine, how much contrived or opportunistic, is impossible to know. The result was in any case much the same. The near-deification of Hitler gave the Chancellor a status that left all other cabinet ministers and all other party bosses in the shade. Possibilities of questioning, let alone opposing, measures which Hitler was known to favour were becoming as good as non-existent. Already in April, Goebbels could note that the authority of the Führer was now fully established in the cabinet.²⁶² Hitler’s authority now opened doors to radical action previously closed, lifted constraints, and removed barriers on measures that before 30 January 1933 had seemed barely conceivable. Without direct transmission of orders, initiatives imagined to be in tune with Hitler’s aims could be undertaken – and have good chances of success.

One such case was the ‘sterilization law’ – the ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) – approved by the cabinet on 14 July 1933.²⁶³ As we have noted in earlier chapters, medical opinion had become strongly influenced by prevailing notions of ‘eugenics’ long before Hitler came to power. However, recommendations, including proposals for a draft Reich Sterilization Law presented to the Prussian government in July 1932, had never gone beyond the voluntary sterilization of those with hereditary illnesses. But now, within months of Hitler becoming Chancellor, the newly appointed special commissioner for medical affairs within the Prussian government, Dr Leonardo Conti – an arch-Nazi – placed a previous outsider in the medical profession, Dr Arthur Gütt, in an influential post in the medical department of the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Gütt, already a Nazi district leader in 1923 and author of ‘race-policy guidelines’ on ‘the sterilization of ill and inferior persons’, which he had sent to Hitler the following year, surrounded himself with a committee of ‘experts’ on population and race questions.²⁶⁴ By early July he and his committee had come up with the draft prepared in the Prussian Health Office the previous year, but now vitally amended to establish as its keystone the compulsory sterilization of those suffering from a wide array of hereditary illness, physical or mental (stretching to chronic alcoholism). Hitler had nothing directly to do with the preparation of the law (which was portrayed as having benefits for the immediate family as well as for society in general). But it was prepared in the knowledge that it accorded with his expressed sentiments. And when it came before the cabinet, it did meet with his outright approval in the face of the objections of Vice-Chancellor Papen, concerned about Catholic feeling regarding the law. Papen’s plea for sterilization only with the willing consent of the person concerned was simply brushed aside by the Chancellor. ‘All measures were justified which served the upholding of nationhood (Volkstum),’ was his terse response. Not only, he remarked, were the envisaged measures small-scale, but – he added, with bizarre logic – they were ‘also morally incontestable if acknowledged that hereditarily ill people reproduced themselves in considerable quantity (in erheblichem Maße) while in contrast millions of healthy children remained unborn’.²⁶⁵

Though from a Nazi point of view a modest beginning in racial engineering, the consequences of the law were far from minor: some 400,000 victims would be compulsorily sterilized under the provisions of the act before the end of the Third Reich.²⁶⁶

If Papen was hinting at the cabinet meeting that the Catholic Church might cause difficulties over the sterilization law, he knew better than anyone that this was unlikely to be the case. Less than a week before, he had initialled on behalf of the Reich Government the Reich Concordat with the Vatican which he himself had done so much to bring about.²⁶⁷ The Concordat would be signed among great pomp and circumstance in Rome on 20 July.²⁶⁸ Despite the continuing molestation of Catholic clergy and other outrages committed by Nazi radicals against the Church and its organizations, the Vatican had been keen to reach agreement with the new government. Even serious continued harassment once the Concordat had been signed did not deter the Vatican from agreeing to its ratification on 10 September.²⁶⁹ Hitler himself had laid great store on a Concordat from the beginning of his Chancellorship, primarily with a view to eliminating any role for ‘political Catholicism’ in Germany. As we have already seen, this aim was achieved with the dissolution of the Zentrum and ΒVP in early July. If Papen’s account is to be trusted, Hitler overrode objections among party radicals to a rapprochement with the Church, emphasizing the need for ‘an atmosphere of harmony in religious matters’.²⁷⁰ He was also directly involved in formulating the German terms which Papen negotiated, and, with other ministers, in vetting the draft treaty.²⁷¹ At the very same cabinet meeting at which the sterilization law was approved, he underlined the triumph which the Concordat marked for his regime. He rejected any debate on the detail of the treaty, emphasizing that it was necessary to keep in mind only its great success. It ‘gave Germany a chance’ and ‘created a sphere of trust which in the pressing struggle against international Jewry would be of especial significance’, he went on. Any defects in the treaty could be improved at a later date when the foreign-policy situation was better. Only a short time earlier, he remarked, he would not have thought it possible ‘that the Church would be ready to commit the bishops to this state. That this had happened, was without doubt an unreserved recognition of the present regime.’²⁷²

Indeed, it was an unqualified triumph for Hitler. The German episcopacy, which had changed course abruptly in its attitude towards the regime immediately after the passing of the Enabling Act, and had reinforced its positive stance – despite reservations about the anti-Catholic actions of the party – in a pastoral letter read out in most dioceses in early June 1933, now poured out effusive statements of thanks and congratulations to Hitler.²⁷³ Cardinal Faulhaber, the Catholic leader of Bavaria and long a thorn in the side of the National Socialists in Munich, congratulated Hitler in a handwritten letter: ‘What the old parliament and parties did not accomplish in sixty years, your statesmanlike foresight has achieved in six months.’ He ended his letter: ‘May God preserve the Reich Chancellor for our people.’²⁷⁴

Surprisingly, the Protestant Church turned out to be less easy to handle in the first months of Hitler’s Chancellorship. Hitler invariably assessed institutions, as he did individuals and social groups, in power-terms. And in contrast to his respect for the power of the unified international organization of the Catholic Church, and the strength of its hold over a third of the German population, he was little more than contemptuous of the German Evangelical Church. Though nominally supported by some two-thirds of the population, it was divided into twenty-eight separate regional Churches, with different doctrinal emphases. Theological and ideological rifts, opened up by the disarray within the Church following the 1918 Revolution, were wider than ever by 1933.

Perhaps Hitler’s scant regard led him to underestimate the minefield of intermingled religion and politics that he entered when he brought his influence to bear in support of attempts to create a unified Reich Church. His own interest, as always in such matters, was purely opportunistic. He was initially forced to intervene partly because of the actions of Nazi radicals in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who tried to take over Church affairs by the state in the province.²⁷⁵ Partly, too, the very divisions of the Church meant that the widespread desire for renewal and unification needed Hitler’s authority behind it if a centralized Church were to be brought about. From Hitler’s point of view, a national Church was of interest purely from the point of view of control and manipulation. Hitler’s choice – on whose advice is unclear – as prospective Reich Bishop fell on Ludwig Müller, a fifty-year-old former naval chaplain and head of the ‘German Christians’ in East Prussia, with no obvious qualifications for the position except a high regard for his own importance and an ardent admiration for the Reich Chancellor and his Movement. Hitler told Müller he wanted speedy unification, without any trouble, and ending with a Church accepting Nazi leadership.

Müller turned out, however, to be a disastrous choice. At the election of the Reich Bishop on 26 May by leaders of the Evangelical Church, he gained the support of the nazified German Christian wing but was rejected by all other sides. Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, director of the welfare centre in Bethel, Westphalia, and a strong upholder of the autonomy of the Church, was elected by fifty-two votes to eighteen instead of Hitler’s candidate.²⁷⁶ Hitler refused to meet Bodelschwingh, and expressed his extreme displeasure at the outcome. In the heated aftermath, the leaders of the Prussian Church (Altpreußische Union) resigned, and a heavy-handed takeover by the Prussian government – bringing the removal of Church administrators and forcing Bodelschwingh’s resignation as Reich Bishop-elect – resulted in direct intervention by Hindenburg, pressure from Hitler to have the state commissioners in Prussia removed, and announcement of Church elections to fill a range of vacancies of Church administrators. If occupied by the ‘right’ persons, these would, it was assumed, then provide the necessary backing for the restructuring of the Evangelical Church. Nazi propaganda supported the German Christians. Hitler himself publicly backed Müller and on the day before the election broadcast his support for the forces within the Church behind the new policies of the state.²⁷⁷

The German Christians swept to a convincing victory on 23 July. But it turned out to be a pyrrhic one. By September, Martin Niemöller, the pastor of Dahlem, a well-to-do suburb of Berlin, had received some 2,000 replies to his circular inviting pastors to join him in setting up a ‘Pastors’ Emergency League’, upholding the traditional allegiance to the Holy Scripture and Confessions of the Reformation.²⁷⁸ It was the beginning of what would eventually turn into the ‘Confessing Church’, which would develop for some pastors into the vehicle for opposition not just to the Church policy of the state, but to the state itself.

Ludwig Müller was finally elected Reich Bishop on 27 September. But by then, Nazi support for the German Christians – Müller’s chief prop of support – was already on the wane. Hitler was by now keen to distance himself from the German Christians, whose activities were increasingly seen as counter-productive, and to detach himself from the internal Church conflict. A German Christian rally, attended by 20,000 people, in the Sportpalast in Berlin in mid-November caused such scandal following an outrageous speech attacking the Old Testament and the theology of the ‘Rabbi Paul’, and preaching the need for depictions of a more ‘heroic’ Jesus, that Hitler felt compelled to complete his dissociation from Church matters. The ‘Gleichschaltung’ experiment had proved a failure. It was time to abandon it. Hitler promptly lost whatever interest he had had in the Protestant Church.²⁷⁹ He would in future on more than one occasion again be forced to intervene. But the Church conflict was for him no more than an irritation.

VIII

By autumn 1933, the discord in the Protestant Church was in any case a mere side-show in Hitler’s eyes. Of immeasurably greater moment was Germany’s international position. In a dramatic move on 14 October, Hitler took Germany out of the disarmament talks at Geneva, and out of the League of Nations. Overnight, international relations were set on a new footing. The Stresemann era of foreign policy was definitively at an end. The ‘diplomatic revolution’ in Europe had begun.²⁸⁰

Hitler had played only a limited role in foreign policy during the first months of the Third Reich. The new, ambitious revisionist course – aimed at reversion to the borders of 1914, re-acquisition of former colonies (and winning of some new ones), incorporation of Austria, and German dominance in eastern and south-eastern Europe – was worked out by foreign ministry professionals and put forward to the cabinet as early as March 1933.²⁸¹ By the end of April, Germany’s delegate to the Geneva disarmament talks, Rudolf Nadolny, was already speaking in private about intentions of building a large army of 600,000 men. If Britain and France were to agree to only a far smaller army of 300,000 while minimally reducing their own armed forces, or if they agreed to disarm substantially but refused to allow any German rearmament, Nadolny held out the prospect of Germany walking out of the disarmament negotiations, and perhaps of the League of Nations itself.²⁸² Meanwhile, the new, hawkish Reichswehr Minister, Blomberg, was impatient to break with Geneva without delay, and to proceed unilaterally to as rapid a rearmament programme as possible. Hitler’s own line at this time was a far more cautious one. He entertained real fears of intervention – the prospect he had held out to the military in his speech of 3 February – while German defences were so weak.²⁸³

The talks at Geneva remained deadlocked. A variety of plans were advanced by the British, French and Italians offering Germany some concessions beyond the provisions of Versailles, but retaining clear supremacy in armaments for the western powers. None had any prospect of acceptance in Germany, though Hitler was prepared to follow a tactically more moderate line than that pressed by Neurath and Blomberg. In contrast to the army’s impatience for immediate – but unobtainable – equality of armaments, Hitler, the shrewder tactician, was prepared to play the waiting game.²⁸⁴At this point, he could only hope that the evident differences between Britain and France on the disarmament question would play into his hands. Eventually, they would do so. Though both major western powers were anxious at the prospect of a rearming Germany, worried by some of the aggressive tones coming from Berlin, and concerned at the Nazi wave of terror activity in Austria, there were significant divisions between them. These meant there was no real prospect of the military intervention that Hitler so feared.²⁸⁵ Britain was prepared to make greater concessions to Germany. The hope was that through minor concessions, German rearmament could effectively be retarded. But the British felt tugged along by the French hard line, while fearing that it would force Germany out of the League of Nations.²⁸⁶

It was, however, Britain that took the lead, on 28 April, supported by France, in presenting Germany with only the minimal concession of the right to a 200,000-man army, but demanding a ban on all paramilitary organizations. Blomberg and Neurath responded angrily in public. Hitler, worried about the threat of sanctions by the western powers, and Polish sabre-rattling in the east, bowed to superior might.²⁸⁷ He told the cabinet that the question of rearmament would not be solved around the conference table. A new method was needed. There was no possibility at the present time of rearmament ‘by normal methods’. The unity of the German people in the disarmament question had to be shown ‘to the world’. He picked up a suggestion put to cabinet by Foreign Minister Neurath of a speech to the Reichstag, which would then find acclamation as government policy. He repeated that the greatest caution was needed about rearmament. The cabinet meeting ended with Blomberg and Neurath arguing for Germany withdrawing from participation in negotiations in Geneva.²⁸⁸ Hitler ignored them. His cautious approach persuaded him to take advice in the preparation of his speech from his old adversary Heinrich Brüning, who underlined the dangers of intervention by France and Poland, with Britain and the USA agreeing to do nothing.²⁸⁹ Hitler promised Brüning – of course, the promises meant nothing to him – that he would afterwards discuss with the former Chancellor ways of altering the restrictions on personal liberties introduced after the Reichstag fire. Brüning, to whom Hitler offered a position in the government,²⁹⁰ said he was ready to persuade his colleagues in the Zentrum, and even the SPD deputies, to support the government declaration.²⁹¹

This they did. ‘Even Stresemann could not have delivered a milder peace speech,’ later commented the SPD deputy Wilhelm Hoegner, an antagonist of Hitler for over a decade, who voted in favour of the resolution proposed by the Chancellor.²⁹² Indeed, Hitler had seemed to speak, in his address to the Reichstag on 17 May, in the diction of a statesman interested in securing the peace and well-being of his own country, and of the whole of Europe. ‘We respect the national rights also of other peoples,’ he stated, and ‘wish from the innermost heart to live with them in peace and friendship’. With an eye on Pilsudski’s Poland, he even rejected expressly ‘the concept of germanization’.²⁹³ His demands for equal treatment for Germany in the question of disarmament could sound nothing but justified to German ears, and outside Germany, too. He made a virtue out of emphasizing German weakness in armaments in contrast to French intransigence when superiority was so immense. Germany was prepared to renounce weapons of aggression, if other countries would do the same, he declared. Any attempt to force a disarmament settlement on Germany could only be dictated by the intention of driving the country from the disarmament negotiations, he claimed. ‘As a continually defamed people, it would be hard for us to stay within the League of Nations,’ ran his scarcely veiled threat.²⁹⁴ It was a clever piece of rhetoric. Whatever their political persuasion, it was difficult for patriotic members of the Reichstag to vote against such sentiments. And abroad, Hitler sounded the voice of reason, putting his adversaries in the western democracies on a propaganda defensive. Everywhere, Hitler had gained popularity and prestige.

The stalemated Geneva talks were postponed until June, then until October. During this period there were no concrete plans for Germany to break with the League of Nations. Blomberg continued to make hawkish noises, clamouring for Germany to pull out of the talks and undertake the full rearmament of the Reichswehr with heavy defensive weaponry. One of his right-hand men, Colonel Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, told the French attaché in early September that Germany would leave the rearmament conference in the near future. But even later that month, neither Hitler nor his Foreign Minister Neurath were reckoning with an early withdrawal.²⁹⁵ As late as 4 October, Hitler appears to have been thinking of further negotiations.²⁹⁶ But on that very day news arrived of a more unyielding British stance on German rearmament, toughened to back the French, and taking no account of demands for equality. That afternoon, Blomberg sought an audience with Hitler in the Reich Chancellery. Neurath later acknowledged that he, too, had advised Hitler at the end of September that there was nothing more to be gained in Geneva.²⁹⁷ By the time State Secretary Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow, nephew of Wilhelm II’s favourite Chancellor, from the Foreign Ministry, also supportive of the move, saw Hitler, the decision to withdraw from the disarmament talks and break with the League of Nations had been made. Bülow was left to work out the details.²⁹⁸ Hitler recognized that the time was now ripe to leave the League in circumstances which looked as if Germany was the wronged party. The propaganda advantage, especially at home where he could be certain of massive popular support, was too good a chance to miss. Once the decision was taken – only two ministers, Neurath and Blomberg, and seven people in all were fully informed – any moves that might provoke compromise or concessions from the western powers were avoided.²⁹⁹

The cabinet was finally informed on 13 October. With a sure eye as always on the propaganda value of plebiscitary acclaim, Hitler told his ministers that Germany’s position would be strengthened by the dissolution of the Reichstag, the setting of new elections, and ‘requiring the German people to identify with the peace policy of the Reich government through a plebiscite. With these measures we deprive the world of the possibility of accusing Germany of an aggressive policy. This procedure also provides the possibility of capturing the attention of the world in an entirely new way.’ No minister dissented.³⁰⁰

The following day, the Geneva Conference received official notification of the German withdrawal.³⁰¹ The consequences were far-reaching. The disarmament talks now lost their meaning. The League of Nations, which Japan had already left earlier in the year, was fatally weakened. The inaction of the western powers persuaded Pilsudski to commission the Polish ambassador to Berlin to explore the possibilities of coming to a diplomatic arrangement with Germany. The resulting ten-year non-aggression pact between Poland and Germany, eventually signed on 26 January 1934, pushed through by Hitler against the traditional anti-Polish thrust of the Foreign Ministry, was a serious blow to France’s alliance system in eastern Europe and freed Germany from encirclement.³⁰² All this had followed directly or indirectly from Hitler’s decision to take Germany out of the League of Nations. In that decision, the timing and propaganda exploitation were vintage Hitler. But, as we have noted, Blomberg, especially, and Neurath had been pressing for withdrawal long before Hitler became convinced that the moment had arrived for Germany to gain maximum advantage. Hitler had not least been able to benefit from the shaky basis of European diplomacy at the outset of his Chancellorship. The world economic crisis had undermined the ‘fulfilment policy’ on which Stresemann’s strategy, and the basis of European security, had been built. The European diplomatic order was, therefore, already no more stable than a house of cards when Hitler took up office. The German withdrawal from the League of Nations was the first card to be removed from the house. The others would soon come tumbling down.

On the evening of 14 October, in an astutely constructed broadcast sure of a positive resonance among the millions of listeners throughout the country, Hitler announced the dissolution of the Reichstag.³⁰³ New elections, set for 12 November, now provided the opportunity to have a purely National Socialist Reichstag, free of the remnants of the dissolved parties. Even though only one party was contesting the elections, Hitler flew once more throughout Germany holding election addresses.³⁰⁴ On one occasion, when the plane’s compass had failed, he assisted his pilot, Hans Baur, to locate his bearings through recognizing a hall in the town of Wismar where he had once spoken. Baur eventually landed in nearby Travemünde with scarcely any fuel left.³⁰⁵ The propaganda campaign directed its energies almost entirely to accomplishing a show of loyalty to Hitler personally – now regularly referred to even in the still existent non-Nazi press as simply ‘the Führer’.³⁰⁶ Hitler’s name did not appear in the loaded question posed on the plebiscite ballot-sheet: ‘Do you, German man, and you, German woman, approve this policy of your Reich government, and are you ready to declare it to be the expression of your own view and your own will, and solemnly to give it your allegiance?’³⁰⁷ It was, however, obvious that ‘Reich government’ and ‘Hitler’ were by now synonymous.

Electoral manipulation was still not as refined as it was to become in the 1936 and 1938 plebiscites. But it was far from absent. Various forms of chicanery were commonplace. Secrecy at the ballot-box was far from guaranteed.³⁰⁸ And pressure to conform was obvious.³⁰⁹ Even so, the official result – 95.1 per cent in the plebiscite, 92.1 per cent in the ‘Reichstag election’ – arked a genuine triumph for Hitler.³¹⁰ Abroad as well as at home, even allowing for manipulation and lack of freedom, it had to be concluded that the vast majority of the German people backed him. In a matter of national importance, in which even those who had rigorously opposed the NSDAP overwhelmingly favoured the stance taken towards the League of Nations, Hitler had won genuine acclaim. His stature as a national leader above party interest was massively enhanced.

The obsequious language used by Vice-Chancellor Papen at the first cabinet meeting after the plebiscite confirmed the total dominance Hitler had attained during his first months in office. Papen spoke of the ‘unique, most overwhelming profession of support(Bekenntnisses) that a nation has ever given to its leader’. ‘In nine months,’ he continued, ‘the genius of your leadership and the ideals which you have newly placed before us have succeeded in creating, from a people inwardly torn apart and without hope, a united Reich.’ He went on to portray Hitler as Germany’s ‘unknown soldier’ who had won over his people. ‘Probably never in the history of nations has such a measure of fervent trust been shown to a statesman. The German people has thereby let it be known that it has grasped the meaning of the changing times and is determined to follow the Leader on his path.’ The members of cabinet rose from their seats to salute their Chancellor. Hitler replied that the tasks ahead would be easier on the basis of the support that he now enjoyed.³¹¹

Hitler’s conquest of Germany was still, however, incomplete. Behind the euphoria of the plebiscite result, a long-standing problem was now threatening to endanger the regime itself: the problem of the SA.