Legal Revolution

So then he reached his goal!

Reinhold Hanisch, 1933

 

That was no victory, for there were no opponents.

Oswald Spengler

 

In a tempestuous process lasting only a few months, Hitler both took power and put across a good part of his far-reaching totalitarian claims. According to the sneering commentaries published at the time of his accession to office, he would not survive as Chancellor for very long. Illusions were the order of the day; from the Center all the way to the Social Democratic and the Communist parties he was widely regarded as a “prisoner” of Hugenberg. Skeptical predictions were legion. He would run afoul of the power of his conservative partners in the coalition of Hindenburg and the army, of the resistance of the masses, of the multiplicity and difficulty of the country’s economic problems. Or else there would be foreign intervention. Or his amateurishness would be exposed at last. But Hitler gave all these prophecies the lie in an almost unprecedented process of conquering power. Granted, every detail of his actions was not so minutely calculated in advance as may sometimes appear in historical hindsight. But he never forgot for a moment what he was after, namely, to gather all the threads of power into his own hand by the time the eighty-five-year-old President died. And he knew how to go about it: namely, to continue to use those tactics of legality he had so successfully tested in past years. A dynamic program of surprise assaults enabled him to deliver blow upon blow, smashing open each new position the opponent occupied. The discouraged forces that tried to oppose him were given no opportunity to compose themselves and regroup their ranks. They unwittingly threw all kinds of chances into his path, and with growing cleverness he learned to seize them.

Hitler devoted the cabinet session of February 2, 1933, chiefly to preparations for the new elections, in which Hugenberg had reluctantly acquiesced shortly before the swearing-in on January 30. After the ceremony Hitler had promptly provided a reason for these elections by conducting sham negotiations with the Center and being unable to reach agreement. Here was his chance to repair the defeat of the preceding November. If the elections turned out well for him, and with his control of the machinery of government, such a result was assured, he would be able to shake off the control of his German-nationalist partner. Hitler’s old comrade Wilhelm Frick, now Minister of the Interior, proposed that the government set aside a million marks for the election campaign. This suggestion was rejected by Finance Minister von Schwerin-Krosigk. Nevertheless, with the power of the state behind him, Hitler no longer needed such additional help to put across that “masterpiece of agitation” foretold by Goebbels in one of his diary entries.

Characteristically, every tactical move henceforth was slanted toward the elections to be held on March 5. Hitler himself signaled the opening of the campaign with a “Proclamation to the German People,” which he read on the radio late in the evening of February 1. He had adapted swiftly to his new role and the pose it demanded. Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, was present at the reading and noted Hitler’s agitation; he has described how at times “his whole body quivered and shook.” But the document itself, which had been offered to all the cabinet members for their approval, adhered to the moderate tone of most proclamations by statesmen. Since the days of treachery in November, 1918, Hitler began, “the Almighty has withheld his blessing from our people.” Partisan dissension, hatred and chaos had converted the unity of the nation into “a confusion of political and personal opinions, economic interests, and ideological differences.” Since those days Germany “has presented a picture of heartbreaking disunity.” He deplored in general terms the inner decay, misery, hunger, lack of dignity, and the disasters of the recent past. He drew an eschatological picture of the last days of a 2,000-year-old culture faced with “a powerful and insidious attack” by Communism:

 

This negative, destroying spirit spared nothing of all that is highest and most valuable. Beginning with the family, it has undermined the very foundations of morality and faith and scoffs at culture and business, nation and Fatherland, justice and honor. Fourteen years of Marxism have ruined Germany; one year of Bolshevism would destroy her. The richest and fairest territories of the world would be turned into a smoking heap of ruins. Even the sufferings of the last decade and a half could not be compared to the misery of a Europe in the heart of which the red flag of destruction has been hoisted.

 

The new government would regard it as its task, he declared, “to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and co-operation.” He would be pledged to foster “Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of racial and political life.” He promised to eliminate class struggle and to restore traditions to honor. The economy would be reconstructed by means of two great Four Year Plans (the principle of which was borrowed from the Marxist enemy). As for foreign policy, Hitler spoke of Germany’s right to live, but reassured the foreign powers with placatory formulas of eagerness for reconciliation. His government, he concluded, was “determined to rectify in four years the ills of fourteen years.” But before going on to a pious appeal for God’s blessing on the work, he made it plain that his administration would not be bound by constitutional checks: “It cannot make the work of reconstruction dependent upon the approval of those who were responsible for the collapse. The Marxist parties and their leaders have had fourteen years to show what they can do. The result is a heap of ruins.”

On the whole, this address had demonstrated his capacity for restraint. But only two days later he threw off that restraint when he met with the commanders of the Reichswehr in the official residence of General von Hammerstein, the army commander in chief. Busy as he was, he had been impatient for this encounter. The reason lay not only in the key position he assigned to the military in his concept for the conquest of power. Rather, in the exhilaration of these first days in office he wanted to find others to share his grand perspectives—despite his usual bent for secrecy. In the grip of this feeling, Hitler unveiled his entire plan with remarkable candor to the army commanders.

According to one of the participants, von Hammerstein “somewhat condescendingly and ‘benevolently’ introduced the ‘Chancellor of the Reich’; the phalanx of generals responded with polite coolness; Hitler made modest, awkward bows in all directions and remained embarrassed until the time came for him to make a long after-dinner speech.” He assured the army, as the sole bearer of arms, a tranquil period of development and explained right at the outset his idea of the primacy of domestic politics. The most urgent aim of the new government was to recapture political power by the “complete reversal of present conditions in domestic politics,” by ruthless extermination of Marxism and pacifism, and by creation of a broadly based state of preparedness for attack and defense. This was to be done by “stringently authoritarian administration.” Only this, combined with a shrewd foreign policy, would put the country in a fit position to take up the struggle against the Versailles Treaty. This would be followed by a concentration of power for the “conquest of new living space in the East and its ruthless Germanization.”

By now Hitler was no longer content to justify his expansionist aims on grounds of military geography and the need to acquire new sources of food. To these arguments he now added the Depression, whose cause, he claimed to be lack of Lebensraum and whose cure lay in conquering Lebensraum. As he examined the situation, the only doubtful aspects seemed the coming years of concealed political and military rebuilding; during this period they would all find out whether France possessed statesmen. “If so, she will not allow us time, but will fall upon us (probably with eastern satellites),” one of those present recalled him saying.

This speech is another example of Hitler’s tendency to make new combinations out of disparate ideas. The structure of his thinking was such that he understood every phenomenon merely as a further argument for ideas long ago fixed—even if that involved grotesquely misunderstanding the nature of the phenomena, as he was doing with regard to the Depression. And, as always, the only solution he recognized was in the realm of violence. At the same time, the speech also reveals the continuity in Hitler’s thought. It gives the lie to those theorists who maintain that responsibility did indeed have a moderating effect upon him, and pretend to see a later change in Hitler’s personality—usually ascribed to the year 1938—when he fell back into the old aggressive hate complexes or, according to another version, into a new pathological system of delusions.

Though Hitler freely borrowed the well-tested Bolshevik and Fascist formulas for the coup d’état, he was highly original in the methods by which he consolidated his new-won power. He may be credited with inventing the classical method by which democratic institutions are crushed from within and totalitarian rule imposed with the full aid of the pre-existent state.

It was important, first of all, to adapt the terrorist practices of the preceding months to the new situation. Thus, while he continued to send his brown auxiliary troops on revolutionary rampages, he permitted a few of these “excesses” to be punished by legal action. In any particular case it would be difficult to say that justice was being done, but the impression was created that the Nazis were maintaining discipline. A convincing screen of legality concealed the real nature of the regime.

Similarly, many of the old institutional façades were left intact. In their shadow fundamental upheavals in all conditions and relationships could be carried on unhindered, until at last people no longer knew whether the system was acting justly or unjustly and could no longer decide between loyalty and opposition. Thus the paradoxical concept of the legal revolution was a good deal “more than a propagandistic trick.” It was basic to Hitler’s whole program for entrenching himself. Hitler himself later declared that Germany at that time thirsted for order, so that he was obliged to shun any open use of force. In one of his despairing moods during the last days of January, when he was reviewing all the mistakes and omissions of the past, he roundly condemned the Germans’ craving for law and order. Their mania for legalism and profound dislike of chaos had made the revolution of 1918 an indecisive affair, but it had also caused his own failure in the Munich putsch of 1923. He blamed himself along with all other Germans for the halfway measures, the compromises, and the eschewing of a bloody surprise operation: “Had we gone ahead as we should have, thousands would have been eliminated at that time. . . . Only afterwards does one regret having been so good.”

At the moment, to be sure, the strategy of encasing a revolution within a legal framework was proving highly successful. Before February was over, three decrees decided the whole future course of events—and yet their legitimacy seemed guaranteed by the bourgeois associates at Hitler’s side, by Hindenburg’s signature, and by the accompanying fog of nationalistic slogans. As early as February 4 the decree “For the protection of the German people” was issued. It permitted the government on the vaguest grounds to forbid political meetings and ban the newspapers and publications of the rival parties. Almost at once the government moved against deviant political views of all kinds. A congress of leftist intellectuals and artists was banned shortly after it opened, purportedly because of atheistic statements made by some of the delegates. Two days later another emergency measure, a kind of second coup d’état, ordered dissolution of the Prussian Landtag; an attempt to dissolve the Prussian legislature by parliamentary means had just failed. Another two days later Hitler, addressing German journalists, justified the emergency decree of February 4 by pointing to certain newspaper criticisms of Richard Wagner; his purpose was “to preserve the present-day press from similar errors.” Along with this he threatened harsh measures against all those “who consciously want to harm Germany.” Meanwhile, the general public was being fed carefully calculated bulletins to bring out the human side of the new Chancellor. On February 5 the Reich press agency of the National Socialist Party announced that Adolf Hitler, “who personally is also deeply attached to Munich,” was keeping his apartment in that city and had resolved not to accept his Chancellor’s salary.

With every day that passed the Nazis were penetrating deeper into the administrative apparatus. Hitler’s script for legal revolution had assigned a special role to Göring, whose fatness lent a jovial note to outright brutality. According to the new arrangements, von Papen held governmental authority in Prussia; but the real power was in Göring’s hands. While the Vice-Chancellor continued to hope that his “educational work in the cabinet” would succeed, Göring was installing a number of so-called honorary commissioners in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Such men as SS Oberfuhrer Kurt Daluege at once took hold in this ministry, which constituted the largest administrative apparatus in Germany. By a massive series of personnel shifts, dismissals, and appointments “the System bigwigs are being thrown out one after the other,” as a contemporary report put it. “From high-ranking official down to doorkeeper, this ruthless purge is going on.”

Göring kept his eye particularly on the police chiefs; within a short time he replaced most of them by high-ranking SA leaders. On February 17 he issued a decree ordering the police to “establish the finest concord with the nationalist associations (SA, SS, and Stahlhelm),” but in dealing with the Left the police were “to make free use of their weapons whenever necessary.” In a later speech he explicitly confirmed these instructions: “Every bullet that is now fired from the barrel of a police pistol is my bullet. If that is called murder, then I have committed murder, for I have ordered it all; I take the responsibility for it.”

Out of an inconspicuous minor department in Berlin police headquarters, which had been detailed to keep watch on anti-Constitutional activities, Göring began building the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), soon to become notorious as the Gestapo. Within four years, its budget had increased forty times. It had 4,000 men in Berlin alone. In order to “relieve the burden on the ordinary police in special cases,”’ on February 22 Göring set up an auxiliary police force approximately 50,000 strong, consisting chiefly of SA and SS men. This amounted to dropping the fiction of police neutrality and openly admitting the link between the party toughs and the forces of law and order. Henceforth, Nazi excesses became governmental action. “My measures,” Göring boasted, “will not be sicklied o’er by any legal scruples. My measures will not be sicklied o’er by any bureaucracy. It’s not my business to do justice; it’s my business to annihilate and exterminate, that’s all!”

This challenge was directed chiefly against the Communists. Not only were they the main enemy; they also would hold the balance in the next Reichstag. Three days after the formation of the cabinet, Göring had already banned all Communist meetings in Prussia in response to the Communist Party’s call for a general strike and demonstrations. Nevertheless, the muffled civil war continued; in the first few days of February there were clashes costing fifteen lives and ten times that number of wounded. On February 24 the police made a large-scale raid on the Communist Party headquarters, Karl Liebknccht House on Bülow Platz in Berlin. It had long since been abandoned by the Communist Party leadership, but the very next day the press and radio reported sensational finds of “tons of treasonous materials.” Subsequently these documents—which were never published—provided Nazi electioneering with atrocity stories of a projected Communist revolution: “The populace is to be terrified and cowed by preliminary measures involving murderous attacks etc. upon leaders of the nation and government, assaults upon vital factories and public buildings, poisoning of entire groups of especially feared persons, the taking of hostages, the kidnapping of wives and children of prominent men,” the police report stated. Nevertheless, the Communist Party was not banned, for that might have driven its voters into the arms of the Social Democratic Party.

The Nazis intensified their propaganda to make this campaign the noisiest and wildest of all the electoral battles of recent years. Hitler himself, who again made the greatest impact, had opened the campaign with a major speech in the Berlin Sportpalast. In it he verbosely repeated the old cry of fourteen years of shame and misery, the old denunciations of the November criminals and the parties of the “system,” and the old formulas for salvation. He ended on a pseudoreligious note. He had, he cried, the “rock-hard conviction that sooner or later the hour will come in which the millions who hate us today will stand behind us and together with us will hail what we have jointly created, toilsomely struggled for, bitterly paid for: the new German Reich of greatness and honor and power and glory and justice. Amen!”

Once again all technical media were utilized—this time with the prestige and support of the government. The country was inundated with appeals, slogans, parades, displays of banners. Once again Hitler was flying over Germany. Goebbels had hit on a new propaganda tool—radio. “Our opponents did not know what to do with its possibilities,” the propaganda chief wrote. “We must learn all the better how to handle it.” As Hitler visited city after city, the local radio station was to report on his appearance. “We will have our broadcasts held in the midst of the people and so give the listener a vivid picture of what goes on at our meetings. For each of the FUhrer’s speeches I myself will give an introduction in which I mean to try to convey to the listener the magic and the atmosphere of our mass demonstrations.”

A considerable portion of the expenses for the election campaign was obtained at an affair in the palace of the Reichstag President, to which Göring invited a number of leading businessmen on February 20. Among the participants were Hjalmar Schacht, Krupp von Bohlen, Albert Vogler of Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel), Georg von Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, the banker Kurt von Schroder, and other representatives of heavy industry, mining, and banking. In his speech to these notables Hitler once again emphasized the difference between the authoritarian ideology of employers and the democratic Constitution, which he derided as the political expression of weakness and decadence. He hailed the tightly organized ideological state as the sole possible means for combating the Communist menace, and lauded the supreme right of the great individual. He had refused to be merely tolerated by the Center, he continued. Hugenberg and the German Nationalists were only holding him back. To vanquish the enemy once and for all, he must have full control of the state. In language that abandoned even the sham of legality, he called upon his listeners for financial assistance: “We now are facing the last election. Whatever its outcome, there is no going backward. . . . One way or another, if the election does not decide, the decision will have to be taken in another way.” Göring followed up the appeal with a few remarks. The contribution, he said, “would surely come all the more easily to industry if it knew that the election on March 5 would surely be the last for ten years, or even for a hundred years.” Thereupon Schacht turned to the company, saying, “And now, gentlemen, to the cashier!” He proposed the creation of an “election fund” and promptly collected from the leading industrial firms at least 3 million marks, possibly more.¹

In his campaign speeches, too, Hitler abandoned a good deal of his restraint. “The period of international babble, the promise of reconciliation among nations, is over and done with; its place will be taken by the German People’s Community,” he declared in Kassel. In Stuttgart he promised to “burn out the symptoms of rottenness and eliminate the poison.” He was determined, he said, “under no circumstances to let Germany fall back into the past regime.” He carefully avoided defining his program in detail (“We do not want to lie and we do not want to deceive. . . and give cheap promises”); his only specific statement was his pledge “never, never. . . to depart from the task of exterminating Marxism and everything connected with it” in Germany. The “first point” in his program would be to notify the adversary: “Away with all illusions!” Four years hence he would give the German people another chance to vote for him, but he would give no such opportunity to the parties of disintegration. Then let the German people judge, he exclaimed, falling into that messianic tone to which he was so prone at that period. He would admit no other judge, but “for my part the people may crucify me if they think that I have not done my duty.”²

 

One of the stratagems of legal revolution was not to openly crush the adversary, but instead to provoke him to acts of violence so that he himself provided the pretext for legal measures of repression. Goebbels described these tactics in a diary note dated January 31: “For the present we intend to refrain from direct countermeasures [against the Communists], First the Bolshevist attempt at revolution must flare up. Then we will strike at the proper moment.” This was Hitler’s old dream: to be called in at the climax of a Communist uprising, and annihilate the great foe in a single dramatic clash. Then he would be hailed by the nation as the restorer of order and granted legitimacy and respect. As early as the first cabinet meeting of January 30, therefore, he had dismissed Hugenberg’s proposal that the Communist Party be banned outright, its seats in the Reichstag withdrawn, thus assuring a parliamentary majority by doing away with the need for new elections.

He was worried, however, that the Communists might be in no position for a full-scale, vigorous act of rebellion. At various times he had expressed doubts of their revolutionary impetus—which, incidentally, Goebbels had also done early in 1932 when he said he could no longer see them as a danger. As a matter of fact, Nazi propaganda had to work hard to create the necessary bogey man. The revelations about the tons of seditious material found in Communist Party headquarters served this purpose along with a flock of rumors, obviously inspired by the Nazis themselves from the middle of February on, concerning a plan to assassinate Hitler. Rosa Luxemburg’s vain question of 1918, “Where is the German proletariat?” remained unanswered this time as well. To be sure, a few street battles occurred during the early weeks of February, but these were all local clashes. There was no sign of a centrally directed attempt at a major uprising of the sort that could stimulate full-blown anxiety complexes. Partly, the reason for this was the Depression and the depleted energies of the working class. But the principal reason was the grotesque error of the Communist leadership in its estimate of the historical situation. In spite of persecution and torture, the flight of many comrades and the mass defections of their followers, the Communists clung to their doctrine that the real enemy was Social Democracy, that there was nothing to choose between Fascism and parliamentary democracy, and that Hitler was merely a puppet whose installation in power was only bringing the victory of Communism closer. In this stage of history, the Communist leaders preached, patience was the supreme revolutionary virtue.

These tactical errors evidently expressed an underlying shift in the realities of power. One of the strange aspects of the seizure of power was the disappearance of the enemy at the moment of confrontation. For a long time the Communists had provided Nazism with psychological nourishment. The Red menace had been the crucial inspiration, had sparked the growth of National Socialism into a mass movement. Now a Communist following numbering millions, forming a powerful and effective threat, terrifying the bourgeoisie, had evaporated without even token resistance, without dramatic action, without so much as sounding the trumpet blast for “the final conflict.” If we accept the principle that we cannot speak of Fascism without mentioning both capitalism and Communism, the historical links to both were snapped at this time. Henceforth Fascism was neither an instrument nor a negation nor a mirror image of anything. During those days of the seizure of power it came into its own. And from then on, right to the end, Communism would not again emerge as a counterforce provoking a Fascist reaction.

The dramatic Reichstag fire of February 28, 1933, must be seen against this background, as well as the years of discussion that followed over the authorship of this deed. The Communists always passionately denied any connection with the fire, and in fact they had no motive whatsoever for it. For this very reason it was possible to paint a convincing picture of Nazi responsibility, since the fire fitted so neatly into the pattern of Hitler’s strategy. For a long time the argument that the Nazis themselves were the incendiaries went almost unchallenged, although details remained unclarified.

In the early sixties Fritz Tobias published a study of the Reichstag fire which analyzed the many crude partisan fictions and myths that had grown up around the subject. Tobias came to the conclusion that the Nazis did not set fire to the Reichstag, that the act was in fact committed by the half-naked Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe who was caught in the burning building, dripping with sweat and triumphantly babbling, “Protest! Protest!” Tobias mustered a good deal of convincing evidence for his thesis. But considerable doubts remain, and the controversy has continued.³ We need not go into it ourselves, since the question of what individual set the fire is a criminological one, with only small bearing on our understanding of the political currents. By instantly taking advantage of the fire to further their plans for dictatorship, the Nazis made the deed their own and manifested their complicity in a sense that is independent of “whodunit” questions. In Nuremberg Göring admitted that the wave of arrests and persecutions would have been carried out in any case, that the Reichstag fire only accelerated those steps.⁴

The first measures were taken at once, right on the spot. Hitler had been spending the evening of February 27 in Goebbels’s apartment on Reichskanzlerplatz. A telephone call from Hanfstaengl informed Goebbels that the Reichstag was in flames. Goebbels at first assumed that this report was a “wild fantasy” and forbore to tell Hitler. But, shortly afterward, the news was confirmed, and he then passed it on. Hitler’s spontaneous exclamation, “Now I have them,” indicated how he meant to use the event tactically and propagandistically. Immediately afterward, the two raced “at sixty miles an hour” down Charlottenburger Chaussee to the Reichstag. Clambering over fire hoses, they finally reached the grand lobby. Here they met Göring, who had arrived first and was “going great guns.” He had already issued the obvious statements about an organized political action by the Communists, statements that immediately prejudiced political, journalistic, and criminological opinion. One of Gôring’s associates of that period, Rudolf Diels, who later became first chief of the Gestapo, has provided a description of the scene:

 

When I entered, Göring strode forward to meet me. His voice rang with all the fateful emotions of that dramatic hour: “This is the beginning of the Communist uprising. Now they are going to strike. Not a minute must be lost!”

Göring was unable to continue. Hitler turned to the assemblage. Now I saw that his face was flaming red from excitement and from the heat which had accumulated under the dome. As if he were going to burst, he screamed in an utterly uncontrolled manner such as I had never before witnessed in him: “Now there can be no mercy; whoever gets in our way will be cut down. The German people will not put up with leniency. Every Communist functionary will be shot wherever we find him. The Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. Everyone in alliance with the Communists is to be arrested. We are not going to spare the Social Democrats and members of the Reichsbanner either!

 

Meanwhile, Göring ordered the entire police force on maximum emergency footing. That night some 4,000 functionaries were arrested; most of them were members of the Communist Party, but included in the bag were some writers, doctors, and lawyers whom the Nazis disliked, among them Carl von Ossietzky, Ludwig Renn, Erich Mühsam, and Egon Erwin Kisch. Several Social Democratic Party headquarters and newspaper offices were occupied. “If resistance is offered,” Goebbels threatened, “then clear the streets for the SA.” And although most of those arrested had to be fetched out of their beds, and the Reichstag faction leader of the Communist Party, Ernst Torgler, voluntarily surrendered to the police in order to demonstrate the untenability of the charges, the first official account—dated that very February 27!—stated:

 

The burning of the Reichstag was intended to be the signal for a bloody uprising and civil war. Large-scale pillaging in Berlin was planned for as early as four o’clock in the morning on Tuesday. It has been determined that starting today throughout Germany acts of terrorism were to begin against prominent individuals, against private property, against the lives and safety of the peaceful population, and general civil war was to be unleashed. . . .

Warrants have been issued for the arrest of two leading Communist Reichstag deputies on grounds of urgent suspicion. The other deputies and functionaries of the Communist Party are being taken into protective custody. Communist newspapers, magazines, leaflets and posters are banned for four months throughout Prussia. For two weeks all newspapers, magazines, leaflets and posters of the Social Democratic Party are banned. . . .

 

Next morning Hitler, accompanied by Papen, called on the President. After giving a highly colored account of the events, he placed a prepared emergency decree before Hindenburg for signature. It utilized the pretext of the fire in truly comprehensive fashion, annulling all important fundamental rights of citizens, considerably extending the list of crimes subject to the death penalty, and providing the Reich government with numerous levers against the states. “People behaved as if stunned,” a contemporary noted. The Communist threat was taken very seriously by the ordinary man. Apartment houses organized guards against the feared pillaging. Peasants set up watches at springs and wells for fear of their being poisoned. These fears, further fanned by the whole propaganda apparatus of government and party, made it possible for the moment for Hitler to do almost anything. And with great presence of mind he made the most of the opportunity. Yet it remains incomprehensible that Papen and his conservative fellow “tamers” approved a decree that snatched all power from their hands and enabled the National Socialist revolution to burst through all the dikes.

The decisive factor was that the conservatives made no effort to preserve the rights of habeas corpus. This “fearful gap” meant that henceforth there was no limit to outrages by the state. The police could arbitrarily “arrest and extend the period of detention indefinitely. They could leave relatives without any news concerning the reasons for the arrest and the fate of the person arrested. They could prevent a lawyer or other persons from visiting him or examining the files on the case. . . . They could crush their prisoner with work, give him the vilest food and shelter, force him to repeat hated slogans or sing songs. They could torture him. . . . No court would ever find the case in its files. No court had the right to interfere, even if a judge unofficially obtained knowledge of the circumstances.”⁵

The emergency decree “for the protection of the people and the state,” supplemented by another decree “against betrayal of the German people and treasonous machinations” issued that same day, proved to be the decisive legal basis for Nazi rule and undoubtedly the most important law ever laid down in the Third Reich. The decree replaced a constitutional government by a permanent state of emergency. It has been trenchantly pointed out that this decree, not the Enabling Act passed a few weeks later, provided the legal basis for the regime. The decree remained in force until 1945; it provided the sham of a legal basis for persecution, totalitarian terrorism, and the repression of the German resistance right up to July 20, 1944. At the same time, one of its side effects was that the Nazis’ authority stood or fell on the thesis that the Communists had set the Reichstag fire. The subsequent trial, which could prove only the guilt of van der Lubbe, had to be regarded as a grave defeat for the Nazis. In these aspects, not in the criminological details, the crucial historical importance of the Reichstag fire lies. When Sefton Delmer, the correspondent of the London Daily Express, asked Hitler whether there was any truth to the rumors of an impending massacre of the domestic opposition, Hitler could reply sarcastically: “My dear Delmer, I need no St. Bartholomew’s Night. By the decrees issued legally we have appointed tribunals which will try enemies of the State legally, and deal with them legally in a way which will put an end to these conspiracies.” The number of persons arrested in Prussia alone within two weeks after the decree of February 28 has been estimated at more than 10,000. Beside himself with delight at the way things were going, Goebbels commented, “Once again it is a joy to live!”⁶

 

Goebbels had proclaimed March 5, the date of the election, “the day of the awakening nation.” All mass demonstrations were now directed toward it. The wild momentum of the Nazis’ propaganda activities all but drove their German Nationalist partners from the scene. The other parties were hounded and hectored, while the police looked on in silence. By election day the casualties among the opponents of the Nazis amounted to fifty-one dead and several hundred injured. The Nazis, for their part, had lost eighteen dead. The Völkische Beobachter quite rightly compared the NSDAP’s agitation and propaganda to “hard hammer blows.”

The eve of the election was celebrated with a grandiose spectacle in Königsberg. Hitler ended his speech with an injunction to the German people: “Now hold your heads high and proud, once again! Now you are no longer enslaved and unfree; now you are free again. . . by God’s gracious aid.” Whereupon the strains of a hymn rang out, the final stanza sung amid the clangor of bells from Königsberg cathedral. All radio stations had been instructed to broadcast the event live, and, according to a party directive, every station “that has the technical means will transmit the Chancellor’s voice to the street.” After the broadcast SA columns started marching throughout the country, while on the mountains and along the frontier so-called freedom fires were kindled. “It will be an enormous victory,” the organizers exulted.

Their disappointment was all the greater when the results were announced on the evening of March 5. With nearly 89 per cent of the electorate voting, the Nazi party won 288 seats. Their Nationalist coalition partners won 52. The Center retained their 73 seats, the Social Democratic Party held its own with 120, and even the Communists had lost only 19 of their 100 seats. The Nazis achieved real successes only in the South German states of Württemberg and Bavaria, where their representation had hitherto been less than their average for the country. But they missed the majority they had hoped for by nearly 40, winning 43.9 per cent of the votes. In a formal sense at least, therefore, Hitler was still dependent on the support of Papen and Hugenberg, whose share of the vote assured him a scanty majority of 51.9 per cent. In Göring’s apartment, where he heard the returns, he had muttered that as long as Hindenburg lived they would not be able to get rid of “that gang,” by which he meant his German Nationalist partners in the coalition. Goebbels, however, exclaimed: “What do figures matter now? We’re the masters in the Reich and in Prussia.” An editorial by Goebbels in Der Angriff advised the Reichstag, with astonishing cheek, “to make. . . no difficulties for the administration and let things take their course.”

It was part of the whole approach to the seizure of power, and part of Nazi psychology in general, to think only in terms of triumph, to counter all appearances by celebrating even the severest setbacks as victories. In spite of their disappointment the Nazis therefore pretended that the election results were an overwhelming success and made this assumed success the basis for a historic mission—“to execute the verdict that the people have passed upon Marxism.” Immediately after the election the Center protested the raising of the swastika flag on public buildings. Göring haughtily replied that “the preponderant part of the German population” had declared its adherence to the swastika flag on March 5. He added: “I am responsible for seeing that the will of the majority of the German people is observed, but not the wishes of a group which apparently has failed to understand the signs of the times.”

In the cabinet session of March 7 Hitler brashly claimed that the election had been a “revolution.” During the next four days he seized control in the states in the equivalent of a coup d’état. The SA everywhere played its customary part of embodying the wrath of a people outraged beyond the point of self-control. Storm troopers marched through the streets, besieged government offices, demanded the deposition of mayors, police commissioners, and finally the state governments themselves. In Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, the Free Cities, and in Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, and Saxony the same procedures forced the governments to resign and thus left the road clear for a “nationalist” cabinet.

Sometimes the careful language of legality cracked, and the real voice of the new masters was heard. “The government will strike down with all brutality anyone who opposes it,” Wilhelm Murr, gauleiter of Württemberg, declared after his manipulated election as the new governor of the state. “We do not say: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. No, if anyone strikes an eye from us, we will chop off his head, and if anyone knocks out one of our teeth, we will smash in his jaw.” In Bavaria Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, assisted by Ernst Röhm and Heinrich Himmler, forced Premier Held to resign on March 9 and promptly had the government building occupied. In Munich a few days earlier the state government, in an effort to fend off Gleichschaltung (forcible co-ordination), had considered restoring the monarchy under Crown Prince Rupprecht. The Bavarians warned that they would arrest any Reich commissioner who attempted to cross the line of the Main River. But now it turned out that the Reich commissioner had long been inside the country and that his popularity was far greater than that of any ministers of the state government. On March 9 state governmental authority was transferred to General von Epp, the same von Epp who had smashed soviet rule in Bavaria in 1919. Three days later, Hitler came to Munich. That morning he had announced over the radio that the black-red-goid colors of the Weimar Republic were abolished; henceforth the black-white-red flag and the swastika flag would together constitute the colors of the nation. Simultaneously, “to celebrate the victory” of the Nationalist forces, he had ordered a three-day display of flags. Now he declared “the first part of the struggle” ended, and added: “The co-ordination of the political will of the states with the will of the nation has been completed.”

The fact was that co-ordination—Gleichschaltung—was the peculiar form in which the Nazi revolution was carried to completion. In the preceding years Hitler had repeatedly decried old-fashioned and sentimental revolutionaries who saw in revolution “a spectacle for the masses.” “We aren’t wild-eyed revolutionaries who are counting on the lumpenproletariat.” The revolution Hitler had in mind was not a matter of rioting but of directed confusion, not anarchy but the triumph of orderly violence. He therefore noted with distinct displeasure the acts of terrorism that erupted immediately after the election, committed by SA men additionally inflamed by the noisy slogans of victory. Such acts disturbed him not because they were violent, but because they were undirected. In the Chemnitz district of Saxony five Communists were murdered within two days, and the editor of a Social Democratic newspaper was shot down. In Gleiwitz a hand grenade was thrown through the window of a Center deputy. In Düsseldorf armed storm troopers forced their way into a meeting being held by the mayor and lashed one of the participants with a whip. In Dresden the SA broke up a concert by the conductor Fritz Busch. In Kiel they killed a Social Democratic lawyer. They harassed Jewish businesses, released party members from prison, occupied banks, forced the dismissal of politically unpalatable officials. The number of deaths within the first few months has been reckoned at between 500 and 600; the number of those swept off to the abject concentration camps—the establishment of which was announced by Frick as early as March 8—has been estimated at about 100,000.

As always in Nazi behavior, the motive forces are a tangle of political elements, personal spite, and cold calculation. This is apparent from the names of some of the victims. Alongside the anarchist poet Erich Mühsam, we find, in the list of the murdered, the theatrical agent Rotter and his wife; the former Nazi deputy Schäfer, who had given the Boxheim Papers to the authorities; the professional clairvoyant Hanussen; Major Hunglinger of the Bavarian police, who had opposed Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller on November 9, 1923; the former SS leader Erhard Heiden; and, finally, one Ali Höhler, who happened to be the killer of Horst Wessel.

Yet Hitler assumed a sharp and injured tone when reproved by his bourgeois partners for the mounting “rule of the streets.” He told Papen that in fact he admired “the incredible discipline” of his SA and SS men. “Some day the judgment of history will not spare us a reproach because in a historic hour, ourselves perhaps already sicklied o’er by the weakness and cowardice of our bourgeois world, we proceeded with kid gloves instead of with an iron fist.” He would not let anyone deter him from his mission of exterminating Marxism, he said, and therefore “most insistently” requested Papen “henceforth no longer to bring up these complaints.”

Nevertheless, on March 10 he told the SA and SS “to see to it that the nationalist revolution of 1933 will never be compared with the revolution of knapsack Spartacists in 1918.”⁷

The SA men took such restraints in bad part. They had always assumed that coming to power would entitle them to the open use of force without having to account to anyone. Their brutalities, in fact, were meant in part to “give the revolution its true tone.” For years they had been promised that after victory Germany would belong to them. Was this pledge to turn into a mere figure of speech? To their minds, very specific things went with it; they were counting on being made officers and administrative chiefs, on receiving sinecures and pensions. But Hitler’s plan merely envisaged—at least in its first phase—sufficient pressure to bring about a complete change of personnel in key positions. As for the great mass of smaller bureaucrats, Hitler counted on their being tricked or frightened into co-operation. But the storm troopers had to be mollified as well. “The hour for smashing the Communists is coming!” he promised them as early as the beginning of February.

The disappointments of the SA constituted the hopes of the bourgeoisie. That class had looked to the brown pretorians to restore order, not to make things worse by excesses, killings, and the establishment of sinister concentration camps. They were therefore pleased to see that the SA was being set to such harmless activities as going around with collection boxes or marching in a body to church services. The deceptive notion of a moderate Hitler, the guardian of law and order, forever trying to subdue his radical followers—this notion so necessary for his good repute came into being in this early period.

In addition Nazi propaganda had coined a “second magic phrase” that immensely assisted the process of legal revolution. This phrase was the “National Rising.” It could serve as camouflage for the most brazen behavior on the part of the Nazis and as a cloak for a good many acts of violence. Moreover, it offered a slogan full of reverberations to a country still suffering from national inferiority feelings. By such creative use of language the Nazis were able to accomplish their aims and paralyze a broad sector of the public, from their conservative colleagues in the cabinet to the ordinary bourgeois citizen. They encountered no resistance. On the contrary, their seizure of power was actually hailed as a “nonpartisan” breakthrough.

Such was the pattern of thought and feeling that was imposed upon the nation and from which there was henceforth no escape. At its center, subject to innumerable and sometimes grotesque variations, stood the propaganda creation known as the Volkskanzler, the populist Chancellor remote from partisan disputes and petty selfish interests, concerned only with the law and the good of the nation. Goebbels personally now assumed the task of constructing and cultivating this image. On March 13 Hindenburg had signed the measure installing Goebbels in the post planned for him from the start but so far postponed out of consideration for the other partners in the coalition, the post of Reich Minister for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda. In establishing the Propaganda Ministry Hitler was riding roughshod over his previous pledge- that the composition of the cabinet would be unalterable.

The new minister snatched sizable administrative areas from his colleagues. But at the same time he adopted a manner of courteous urbanity that contrasted favorably with the victory-drunk, “slap-in-the-face” tone taken by most of the Nazi leaders. In his first speech to the press, in which he outlined his program, he stated that “in instituting the new Ministry the government is carrying out its plan of no longer neglecting the people. This government is a people’s government. . . . The new Ministry will enlighten the people concerning the plans of the administration, with the aim of establishing political coordination [Gleichschaltung] between the people and the government.”

Hitler had had to justify the establishment of the new ministry to the rest of the cabinet; he did so on the most innocent grounds, though with a good measure of irony. He made a great point, for example, of the need to prepare the people for what was going to be done about the oil and fats problem. And in fact his explanation was accepted without demur. It testifies to Hitler’s tact and magnetism that within a few weeks the conservatives had entirely forgotten their intention of “taming” him. Papen showed himself abjectly accommodating; Blomberg had succumbed all too readily when Hitler laid on the charm; Hugenberg muttered a bit under his breath, but that was all. The others scarcely counted. The task for which Goebbels was actually appointed, and into which he flung himself without delay, consisted in preparing the new government’s first public function, which was intended to pave the way psychologically for the planned Enabling Act. Of course, Hitler could have put across this law—which was meant as a “death blow” to the parliamentary system—by invoking the Reichstag fire decree and on the basis of that arresting enough deputies of the Left parties until he had attained the requisite two-thirds majority. As a matter of fact, Frick presented this possibility to the cabinet, citing figures, and it was discussed.⁸ But Hitler could also choose a formally correct course and attempt to win the consent of the Center parties. It is characteristic of his tactical style that Hitler used both approaches.

While the deputies of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party were intimidated, and many of them arrested, Hitler courted the bourgeois parties in the most ostentatious fashion—though not without reminding them, too, of the powers given him by the Reichstag fire emergency decree of February 28. His pronounced nationalistic pose of that period, his evocations of Christian morality, his bows to tradition, and in general the civil, statesmanlike, controlled manner he adopted were a part of the sham. His courtship of the bourgeoisie reached its apogee on the day of Potsdam.

That day was also the first test for the new Propaganda Minister, and he passed it brilliantly. Just as he had declared election day, March 5, the “Day of the Awakening Nation,” he now declared March 21, when the first Reichstag session of the Third Reich was to be held, the “Day of the National Rising.” A solemn state function in the Potsdam Garrison Church, above the tomb of Frederick the Great, was to mark the opening of the Reichstag. Potsdam, the soberly graceful residence of the Prussian kings, was linked in many ways to the sense of national pride, and so was the date. March 21 was not only the first day of spring but also the day on which Bismarck in 1871 had opened the first German Reichstag, thus celebrating a turning point in history.

Goebbels had directed every phase of the ceremony, and Hitler approved every detail of the script. The scenes that later seemed so overwhelming or so moving—the precise order of the marching columns, the child with a bunch of flowers by the roadside, the guns firing salutes, the sight of white-bearded veterans of the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1871, the troops presenting arms, the organ music—all this compelling mixture of tight precision and loose sentimentality was the product of cool planning and a remarkable instinct for theater. Goebbels had gone to have a look at the site beforehand and had noted: “With such great state ceremonies, the smallest touches matter.”

 

Significantly, the festive day began with services in the Protestant Nikolaikirche. Shortly after ten o’clock the first columns of automobiles arrived from Berlin and made their way slowly through streets jammed with people. In the cars sat Hindenburg, Göring, Papen, Frick, Reichstag deputies, SA leaders, generals: the old and the new Germany. Along the façades of the buildings hung garlands and bright tapestries; everywhere flags were festooned, the black-white-red alternating with the swastika flags, in a striking symbol of the new order. Hindenburg in his old field marshal’s uniform—he now more and more preferred it to the civilian black tailcoat—entered the church. After the service he was driven around the city. The Center deputies attended the Catholic services at the church of St. Peter and Paul. Hitler and Goebbels stayed away “because of the hostile attitude of the Catholic episcopate.” But then, among the others absent from this “people’s festival of national unity” were the Communists and Social Democrats, some of whom—as Frick had boldly announced on March 14—were detained “by urgent and more useful work. . . in the concentration camps.”

Shortly before twelve o’clock Hindenburg and Hitler met on the steps of the Garrison Church and exchanged that handshake which was subsequently reproduced a millionfold on postcards and posters. It symbolized the longing of the nation for reconciliation. Without “the old gentleman’s blessing,” Hitler had said, he would not have wanted to take power. Now the blessing had been bestowed. The choir and gallery of the church were filled with generals of the imperial army and the present Reichswehr, with diplomats and dignitaries. Members of the government had taken their seats in the nave. Behind them, brown-shirted, were the Nazi deputies, flanked by the representatives of the Center parties. The Kaiser’s seat had been left empty, but behind it the Crown Prince sat in full-dress uniform. As Hindenburg moved slowly to his seat in the nave, he paused for a moment before the Kaiser’s box and raised his marshal’s baton in salute. Respectfully, in a black cutaway coat, wearing the parvenu’s air of embarrassment, Hitler followed the sorrowful-looking old man. Behind them a sea of uniforms. Then the organ sounded the choral that the entire victorious army of Frederick the Great had sung after the Battle of Leuthen, which regained Silesia for the Prussians; Nun danket alle Gott.

Hindenburg’s address was brief. He pointed to the confidence that he and the people had come to feel in the new regime, so that a “constitutional basis for its work exists.” He appealed to the deputies to support the government in its difficult task, and invoked the “old spirit of this shrine” as a bulwark against “selfishness and party strife. . . and a blessing upon a free, proud Germany united within herself.” Hitler’s speech was pitched on the same note of moderate, deeply felt solemnity. He looked back upon the greatness and downfall of the nation and then declared his faith in the “eternal foundations” of its life, the traditions of its history and culture. After a stirring tribute to Hindenburg, whose “greathearted decision” had made possible this union “between the symbols of old greatness and youthful strength,” he asked Providence for “that courage and that perseverance which we feel around us in this room sacred to every German, as men struggling for our nation’s freedom and greatness at the feet of the bier of the country’s greatest king.”

Goebbels noted:

 

At the end everyone is profoundly moved. I am sitting close to Hindenburg and see tears filling his eyes. All rise from their seats and jubilantly pay homage to the gray-haired Field Marshal who is extending his hand to the young Chancellor. A historic moment. The shield of German honor is once again washed clean. The standards with our eagles rise high. Hindenburg places laurel wreaths on the tombs of the great Prussian kings. Outside, the cannon thunder. Now the trumpets sound; the President of the Reich stands upon a podium, Field Marshal’s baton in hand, and salutes the Reichswehr, the SA, SS and Stahlhelm, which march past him. He stands and salutes. . . .

 

These scenes had an extraordinary effect upon all the participants, upon the deputies, the soldiers, the diplomats, the foreign observers, and the public. That day at Potsdam truly proved to be a turning point in history.

Some time before that Papen had boasted that within a few months he would have Hitler squeezed into such a corner “that he’ll squeak.” Things were clearly not turning out that way. Nevertheless, the “Potsdam emotional farce” seemed to demonstrate that the wild-eyed Nazi leader had after all fallen into the snares of nationalist conservatism. The picture was of a young, credulous and deferential Hitler bowing to the tradition embodied in the personality of Hindenburg and concentrated in the former capital of the Prussian kings. Only a minority of those present were not entirely duped. And many who had voted against Hitler as recently as March 5 now obviously began to waver in their judgments. To this day it is troubling to realize that many government officials, army officers, lawyers and judges, many members of the nationalistic bourgeoisie who had distrusted Hitler on rational grounds, abandoned their stand the moment the regime let them taste the joys of nationalistic feeling. “Like a tidal wave,” a newspaper of the bourgeois Right wrote, “nationalist enthusiasm swept over Germany yesterday and, let us hope, poured over the dikes that a good many of the parties had erected against it, and broke open doors which until now had been defiantly closed to it.”⁹ Long torchlight parades through the streets of Berlin and a gala performance of Die Meistersinger concluded the festival program.

Two days later the regime, and Hitler himself, showed itself in a different aspect. About two o’clock in the afternoon on March 23 the Reichstag met in the Kroll Opera House, its temporary quarters, for the session that had already had its ceremonial prelude in Potsdam. The very setting was unequivocably dominated by the colors and symbols of the National Socialist Party. Units of the SS had taken responsibility for cordoning off the building—this was the first time the SS was assuming an important public function. Inside the opera house stood long lines of brown-shirted SA men. At the back of the stage, where the cabinet and the presiding officers of the Reichstag were seated, hung a huge swastika flag. And Göring opened the session with a speech that rudely ignored the existence of other parties in the Reichstag. Turning to his “comrades,” he delivered a totally uncalled-for memorial address on Dietrich Eckart.

Then Hitler, likewise in a brown shirt, after having sported for the past few weeks predominantly civilian clothing, stepped forward on the platform to deliver his first parliamentary speech. Faithful to his unvarying rhetorical pattern, he once again began with a gloomy panorama of the period after November, 1918, of the distress and perils into which the Reich had fallen. Then he sketched in largely general terms the program of the government. He continued:

 

In order for the government to be in a position to carry out the tasks I have outlined, it has had the two parties, the National Socialists and the German Nationalists, submit the Enabling Act. . . . It would be against the meaning of the National Rising and would hamper the intended purpose if the government were to negotiate with and petition for the Reichstag’s approval of its measures from case to case. The government, in making this request, is not impelled by any intention of abolishing the Reichstag as such. On the contrary, it reserves for the future the right to inform it of its measures from time to time. . . . The government intends to make use of this Act only to the extent required to carry out vitally necessary measures. The existence of neither the Reichstag nor the Reichsrat is threatened. The position and the rights of the President are not affected. . . . The existence of the states will not be eliminated. . . .

 

In spite of all these soothing assurances, each of the five articles of the Enabling Act smashed “an essential part of the German Constitution to smithereens.” By Article 1 legislation passed from the Reichstag to the administration; Article 2 gave the government power to make constitutional changes; Article 3 transferred the right to draft laws from the President to the Chancellor; Article 4 extended the application of the Enabling Act to treaties with foreign states; Article 5 limited the validity of the Act to four years and also to the existence of the present administration. With another characteristic change of tone, Hitler concluded his speech with a challenge to battle:

Since the government itself has a clear majority behind it, the number of cases in which there will be any need to resort to such an Act is in itself limited. But the Government of the National Rising insists all the more upon the passing of this bill. This government prefers a clear decision in every case. It offers the parties of the Reichstag the chance for peaceful development in Germany and the reconciliation which will spring from that in the future. But it is resolute and equally prepared to meet any announcement of refusal, and will take that as a statement of opposition. You, the Deputies, must decide for yourselves whether it is to be peace or war.¹⁰

 

As if rehearsing for their future role, the deputies, with all too few honorable exceptions, greeted Hitler’s speech with an ovation. Then all assembled rose to their feet and sang “Deutschland über Alles.” In an atmosphere that resembled a state of siege, thanks to the SA and SS guards drawn up everywhere, the parliamentary factions withdrew for a three-hour recess for consultations. Outside the building Hitler’s uniformed men began bellowing: “We want the Enabling Act—or there’ll be hell to pay.”

Everything depended upon the conduct of the Center Party. Its consent would assure the government the majority it needed to amend the Constitution. In negotiations with Dr. Kaas, the leader of the party, Hitler had given a number of assurances. Above all, he promised a concordat and, “as a return favor for an assenting vote by the Center Party,” had indicated that he would write a letter “concerning revocation of those parts of the Reichstag fire decree which prejudiced the civil and political liberties of citizens”; the letter would also stipulate that the decree was to be applied only in specific circumstances. What was more, Hugenberg and Brüning had held a conference on the evening of March 21 and agreed to make consent of the Center dependent on a clause guaranteeing civil and political liberties. The German Nationalist faction, it was decided, would introduce the motion formulated by Brüning.

During the recess, however, Brüning was informed that members of the German Nationalist faction had raised objections to the projected motion and would not sponsor it. Once more indecisive, the Center faction considered what it should do. The majority pleaded for assent; Brüning passionately opposed any such thing. It would be better, he cried, to go down gloriously than to expire wretchedly. But finally it was agreed that they would cast a bloc vote for the opinion of the majority. It could scarcely have been otherwise, given the party’s traditional opportunism, the impression made by the day at Potsdam, and the resigned recognition that the party was in no position to prevent passage of the act. After all, in conjunction with the promised letter, would not the Enabling Act bind Hitler to legality more effectively than he was bound at present?

By the time the recess ended, however, Hitler’s letter had not arrived. At Brüning’s urging, Monsignor Kaas went to see Hitler, and returned with the explanation that the letter was already signed and had been turned over to the Minister of the Interior for transmission to the Reichstag; it would arrive while the measure was being voted on. Kaas added that “if he had ever believed Hitler at all, he would have to do it this time, given the conviction in his tone.”

Meanwhile the Social Democratic Party chairman, Otto Weis, had stepped upon the platform in deep silence, during which the distant, menacing chanting of the SA and SS could be heard. In explaining his faction’s refusal to vote in favor of the bill, he made a last public profession of faith in democracy. Answering Hitler’s earlier statement on foreign policy, he said that the Social Democrats, too, had always been for German equality with other nations and against any attempt to impugn Germany’s honor. But to be defenseless, he declared, did not mean to be without honor (a play on the words wehrlos and ehrlos). That was just as true in domestic as in foreign politics. The elections had given the government parties the majority and therefore granted them the opportunity to govern constitutionally. Since this opportunity existed, it also constituted an obligation. Criticism was salutary; to persecute it would accomplish nothing. He concluded his speech with an appeal to the people’s sense of justice and a greeting to his friends and victims of persecution.

This moderate and dignified rejoinder threw Hitler into a fury. Violently thrusting aside Papen, who tried to restrain him, he mounted the platform for the second time. Pointing directly at the Social Democratic leader, he began: “You come late, but still you come!^* The pretty theories you have just proclaimed here, Mr. Deputy, are being communicated to world history just a bit too late.” In growing agitation, he declared that Social Democracy had no right to claim any common goals in foreign policy, that the Social Democrats had no feeling for national honor, no sense of justice. Then, repeatedly interrupted by stormy applause, he continued with even greater fervor:

 

You talk about persecutions. I think there are only a few of us here who did not have to suffer persecutions from your side in prison. . . . You seem to have forgotten completely that for years our shirts were ripped off our backs because you did not like the color. . . . We have outgrown your persecutions!

You say furthermore that criticism is salutary. Certainly, those who love Germany may criticize us; but those who worship an International cannot criticize us. Here, too, insight comes to you very late indeed, Mr. Deputy. You should have recognized the salutariness of criticism during the time we were in the opposition. . . . In those days our press was forbidden and forbidden and again forbidden, our meetings were forbidden, and we were forbidden to speak and I was forbidden to speak, for years on end. And now you say: criticism is salutary!

 

At this point the Social Democrats began to shout loudly in protest. The Reichstag President’s bell rang, and Göring called out into the ebbing din: “Stop talking nonsense now and listen to this!” Hitler continued:

You say: “Now they want to shunt aside the Reichstag in order to continue the revolution.” Gentlemen, if that had been our purpose we would not have needed. . . to have this bill presented. By God, we would have had the courage to deal with you differently!

You also say that not even we can abolish Social Democracy because it was the first to open these seats here to the common people, to the working men and women, and not just to barons and counts. In all that, Mr. Deputy, you have come too late. Why didn’t you, while there was still time, make your principles known to your friend Grzesinski,^* or your other friends Braun* and Severing,* who for years kept saying that I was after all only a housepainter! For years you asserted that on your posters. [Interjection by Göring: “Now the Chancellor is settling accounts!”] And finally you even threatened to drive me out of Germany with a dog whip.

From now on we National Socialists will make it possible for the German worker to attain what he is able to demand and insist on. We National Socialists will be his intercessors. You, gentlemen, are no longer needed!. . . And don’t confound us with the bourgeois world. You think that your star may rise again. Gentlemen, the star of Germany will rise and yours will sink. . . . In the life of nations, what is rotten, old and feeble passes and does not come again.

 

With the revealing remark that he was appealing only “on account of justice” and for psychological reasons “to the German Reichstag to grant us what in any case we could have taken,” Hitler fired his parting shot. Turning to the Social Democrats, he cried:

 

My feeling is that you are not voting for this bill because by the very nature of your mentality you cannot comprehend the intentions that animate us in asking for it. . . and I can only tell you: I do not want you to vote for it! Germany shall be free, but not through you!

 

The minutes noted after these sentences: “Prolonged, stormy shouts of Heil, furious applause among the National Socialists and in the galleries. Hand-clapping among the German Nationalists. Stormy applause and shouts of Heil starting up repeatedly.”

Hitler’s reply has generally been considered an outstanding example of his gift for impromptu speaking. Thus it is worth knowing that the preceding speech by Otto Weis had been released to the newspapers beforehand, and evidently Hitler was already acquainted with it. Goebbels saw the enemy’s “fur flying” and rejoiced: “Never has anyone been so thrown to the ground and given such a brushing off as was done here.” In its bravura crudity and zest for crushing an opponent, the speech recalled that early performance of September, 1919, when a professorial speaker at a discussion first opened the sluices of Hitlerian oratory, to the astonished admiration of sober Anton Drexler. Now it was Hugenberg who at the cabinet meeting on the following day thanked Hitler “in the name of the other cabinet members. . . for so brilliantly putting the Marxist leader Weis in his place.”

When the storm of applause after Hitler’s speech had subsided, the representatives of the other parties took the floor. One after another they gave their reasons for consenting. Kaas, however, spoke with some embarrassment, and only after Frick, in response to another inquiry, had “solemnly assured him that the messenger had already delivered Hitler’s letter to his office in the Kroll Opera House.” The requisite three readings of the bill took only a few minutes. The result of the vote was 441 to 94; only the Social Democrats stuck to their nays. That was far more than the required two-thirds majority; it would have been sufficient even if the 81 Communist and the 26 Social Democratic deputies who had been detained by arrest, flight, or sickness had likewise voted no. As soon as Göring announced the result, the Nazis rushed to the fore. Arms raised in the Hitler salute, they gathered in front of the government bench and began singing the Horst Wessel song. That same evening the bill passed the already “co-ordinated” Reichsrat by unanimous vote. The promised letter from Hitler never reached any member of the Center.

With the passage of the “Law for the Removal of the Distress of People and Reich,” as the Enabling Act was officially called, the Reichstag was eliminated from any active role in German politics, and the administration had won unlimited freedom of action. The infamy lay not in the fact that the parties of the Center capitulated to a stronger opponent and bowed to a more unscrupulous will but that they actually collaborated to bring about their own exclusion from government. To be sure, the bourgeois parties were not altogether wrong when they pointed out that the so-called Reichstag fire decree of February 28 had decisively opened the way to dictatorship and that the Enabling Act was actually only a formality, the seizure of power having taken place already. But even so, the vote offered them a chance to bear witness to their objections by a memorable gesture. Instead, they chose to set the seal of legality upon the revolutionary actions of those weeks. If the decree of February 28 represented the actual downfall of the Weimar Republic, the Enabling Act meant its moral collapse. The act sealed the process of abdication by the political parties, a process that had started in 1930 when the Great Coalition was shattered.

 

The Enabling Act concluded the first phase of the seizure of power. It made Hitler independent of the alliance with his conservative partners. That in itself thwarted any chance for an organized power struggle against the new regime. The Völkische Beobachter was completely right when it commented: “A historic day. The parliamentary system has capitulated to the new Germany. For four years Hitler will be able to do everything he considers necessary: negatively, the extermination of all the corrupting forces of Marxism; positively, the establishment of a new people’s community. The great undertaking is begun. The day of the Third Reich has come!”

Actually, Hitler had needed less than three months to outmaneuver his partners and checkmate almost all the opposing forces. To realize the swiftness of the process we must keep in mind that Mussolini in Italy took seven years to accumulate approximately as much power. Hitler’s purposefulness and his feeling for the statesmanlike style had made their impression on Hindenburg from the start and soon prompted the President to drop his former reservations. The affirmative vote in the Reichstag now reinforced him in his change of attitude. The cold, self-centered old man ignored the persecutions which, after all, affected a good many of his own former voters. Hindenburg felt that at last he was once more in the right camp. If Hitler was doing away with that “wretched undisciplined party nonsense,” wasn’t that to his credit?

Only two days after the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor, Ludendorff had written to the aged field marshal reproaching him for having “delivered the country to one of the greatest demagogues of all time.” The man who had marched with Hitler in 1923 added: “I solemnly prophesy to you that this damnable man will plunge our Reich into the abyss and bring inconceivable misery down upon our nation. Coming generations will curse you in your grave because of this action.”¹¹ But Hindenburg appeared to be well pleased with his decision. He had “taken the leap over the hurdle and would now have peace for a considerable time.” As part of his program for withdrawing personally from the business of government, he had State Secretary Meissner explain, during the cabinet conference on the Enabling Act, that presidential collaboration on the laws issued as a result of this Enabling Act would be “not requisite.” He was glad to be relieved of the responsibility that had long been oppressive to him.

Papen’s insistence on attending all meetings between the President and the Chancellor was soon dropped. Hindenburg himself asked Papen “not to insult” Hitler, as he put it. And when Prime Minister Held of Bavaria came to the presidential palace to protest against the terrorism and violations of the Constitution committed by the Nazis, the doddering old man told him to speak to Hitler himself. In the cabinet, too, Goebbels noted, “the authority of the Führer has now been wholly established. Votes are no longer taken. The Führer decides. All this is going much faster than we dared to hope.”

For the time being the slogans and open challenges of the Nazis were almost all directed against the Marxists, but the thrust was aimed equally at their German Nationalist partner in the government. In their own shortsighted zeal against the Left, Papen, Hugenberg, and their following entirely overlooked the fact that elimination of the Left would leave Hitler in command of the means to liquidate them also. Instead, Carl Goerdeler, the conservative mayor of Leipzig, cheerfully asserted that they would soon be sending Hitler back to his hobby of architecture and resume the conduct of the state themselves. Hitler himself, his old resentments again aroused, called his bourgeois coalition partners “ghosts” and declared: “The reactionaries think they have put me on a leash. They are going to set traps for me, as many as they can. But we will not wait until they act. . . . We are ruthless. I have no bourgeois scruples! They think I am uncultured, a barbarian. Yes, we are barbarians! We want to be. That is an honorable epithet. We are the ones who will rejuvenate the world. This old world is done for. . . .”¹²

But leverage against both the Left and Right was not all of the profit Hitler derived from the Enabling Act. By virtue of the act, the entire apparatus of the government bureaucracy was at Hitler’s disposal. This included the judiciary, which was indispensable to his far-reaching plans. The act offered a basis that satisfied both the consciences and the craving for security of the bureaucrats. Most government officials were pleased to note the legal nature of this revolution, which in spite of the many isolated outrages contrasted so favorably with the chaos of 1918. This legality, even more than the antidemocratic traditions of the civil service made them ready to co-operate. Moreover, a special decree had been issued, which made no acquiescent civil servants liable to punishment. What is more, resistance would have equaled illegal action.

There are those who to this day maintain that there was no definite break, that the parliamentary republic glided by degrees into totalitarian dictatorship. But examination of all the facts reveals that within the process of the legal revolution the revolutionary elements far outweighed the legal ones. The public was duped by the brilliant trick of having the change of scene take place on the uncurtained stage, so to speak. But the real drama consisted in a revolutionary seizure of power confirmed by the Enabling Act. As the act itself provided, it was formally extended in 1937, 1941, and once again in 1943. But it remained an emergency measure promulgated in a state of emergency. Nor did the language of the regime attempt to hide its revolutionary intentions. Even in his speech on the Enabling Act Hitler constantly spoke of “national revolution” when he might have used the safer euphemism of “national rising.” And two weeks later Göring in a speech explicitly repudiated this formula, replacing it by the concept “national socialist revolution.”

There remained only a rounding off of power positions already achieved. Within a few weeks the centralist Gleichschaltung of the states had been completed, and in tandem with that action the complete shattering of all political groups and associations. The collapse of the Communists took place almost silently, in an atmosphere of muffled terrorism. Some members of the Communist Party retreated into the underground; others opportunistically deserted to the National Socialists. The Nazis then turned upon the unions, which had already exposed their dismay and weakness during the early March days. They seemed to think they could buy off the impending doom by a series of placating gestures. Although the harassment and arrests of leading union members were steadily increasing throughout the Reich and the SA was staging a series of raids on local union offices, on March 20 the labor federation’s executive committee addressed a kind of declaration of loyalty to Hitler. It spoke of the purely social tasks of the unions, “no matter what the nature of the political regime.” When Hitler took over an old demand of the labor movement and declared May 1 a national holiday, the union leadership called upon the rank and file to participate in the demonstrations. Everywhere, thereupon, the unionized blue-collar and white-collar workers marched under alien banners in huge holiday parades. They listened bitterly to the speeches of Nazi functionaries but were nevertheless forced to applaud, and found themselves suddenly lined up in the very ranks they had so recently faced with fierce enmity. This confusing experience contributed more than anything else to shattering the will to resist of a movement numbering millions of workers. And while the labor-union paper, following the line of the union leadership, hailed May 1 as a “day of victory,” on May 2 the SA and SS occupied union headquarters throughout Germany. They also took over the businesses and the banks belonging to the labor federation, arrested the leading officials, and shipped a good many of them off to concentration camps. The unions went ingloriously down to destruction.

The end of the Social Democratic Party took place in an equally undramatic fashion. Isolated appeals to resistance on the part of some leaders evoked at best contrary appeals from others, revealing the impotence of a mass party that had petrified in its traditional forms. Ever since January 30 the Social Democratic Party had constantly upheld the Constitution, which had already been undermined by the Nazis, and the Social Democrats kept on pledging that their party would never take the first step away from the solid ground of the law. Literal-minded Marxists that they were, they insisted on seeing Nazism as “the last card of reaction,” which by the laws of historical determinism could never win. The party leadership therefore justified its immobility on the grounds of a tactical slogan: “Readiness is all!” This passivity had a profoundly demoralizing effect upon many of the lower branches of the organization, which were urging action.

On May 10, without a sign of resistance, all party headquarters, newspapers, and all the property of the Social Democratic Party and the Reichsbanner were confiscated on orders from Göring. After violent disagreements within the leadership, the advocates of appeasement won out: they thought they could force the government to moderation by conciliatory tactics. Following the same logic, the Social Democratic Reichstag faction decided that they would approve Hitler’s major statement on foreign policy of May 17, though they would frame their consent in a special, independent statement. But this position was much too subtle for Hitler, who was already determined to annihilate them. Blackmailed by Frick’s threat to kill the Social Democrats imprisoned in concentration camps, the party hurried to vote unconditionally for the government statement. With a mocking glance to the left, Göring could declare at the end of the Reichstag session: “The world has seen that the German people are united where their fate is at stake.” The Social Democratic Party had been so crushed and humiliated that no one expected so much as a gesture of resistance when, on June 22, it was at last banned and its seats in the Reichstag invalidated.

All other political groupings were now likewise “co-ordinated”—sucked into the whirlpool of Gleichschaltung. Almost every day the newspapers reported liquidations or voluntary dissolutions. The Stahlhelm and the German Nationalist militias led the procession (June 21). There followed all remaining employee and employer organizations (June 22). Then came the German National People’s Party, which as a fellow fighter in the national rising had vainly insisted on its right to continue in existence; its members could not see why they now had to run with the hares after they had for so long hunted with the hounds. Then came the dissolution of the State Party (June 28), of the German National Front (June 28), of the Center Association (July 1), of the Young German Order (July 3), of the Bavarian People’s Party (July 4), of the German People’s Party (July 4), and finally of the Center itself—which was tactically paralyzed by the ongoing negotiations on a concordat and then forced to capitulate (July 5).

Co-ordination of the various industrial, commercial, artisan, and agricultural associations ran parallel to the breakup of the political and paramilitary groups. But in no case was there any act of resistance. Scarcely an incident of more than local importance occurred. On June 27 Hugenberg was forced to resign, and not one of his conservative friends lifted a finger. He had just attended the World Economic Conference in London, where he had tried once more to outbid the Nazis in demagoguery by making excessive demands for a colonial empire and German economic expansion into the Ukraine. But he had succeeded only in providing Hitler with an easy opportunity to stand up for common sense and peace among nations against the Pan-German mischief-maker.

Hugenberg had held cabinet posts in the Reich and in Prussia, which now fell vacant. Two days later Hitler assigned economics to Kurt Schmitt, general manager of the Allianz Insurance Company, and food and agriculture to Walter Darre. At the same time, he ordered the permanent participation of Rudolf Hess, the “Führer’s deputy,” in cabinet meetings. In April Franz Seldte, the leader of the Veterans’ Organization, joined the National Socialist Party; this meant that the proportions of Nazis to German Nationalists in the cabinet had been nearly reversed (eight to five). Since the German Nationalist ministers no longer had the backing of a party, they were essentially demoted to mere technicians without political pull. The regime fastened its grip on what had already been achieved by issuing, on July 14, a whole catalogue of decrees. The chief of these declared the National Socialist Party the sole legal party.

This rapid, unopposed extinction of all political forces from Left to Right remains the most striking feature of the Nazi take-over. If anything could have demonstrated the sapped vitality of the Weimar Republic, it was the ease with which the institutions that had sustained it let themselves be overwhelmed. Even Hitler was astonished. “One would never have thought so miserable a collapse possible,” he declared in Dortmund at the beginning of July. Actions that only a short time before would have unleashed riots close to civil war were now met with a shrugging fatalism. The great capitulation of these months cannot be understood in political terms alone. We must consider its intellectual and psychological causes also. For over and above the illegality and violence of those weeks, the capitulation provides a certain historical justification for Hitler. Brüning, as he marched with the deputies to the Garrison Church on the day of Potsdam, felt as if he “were being led to the execution ground”—and that feeling was more prophetic than he himself imagined. One of the keen observers of the period noted that as the unanswered blows “into the face of truth, of freedom” went on, as the elimination of the other parties and of the parliamentary system progressed, there was a growing feeling “that all the things being abolished no longer concerned people very much.”

In fact all these inglorious downfalls meant that the nation was inwardly bidding good-bye to the Weimar Republic. From now on the political order of the past was no longer a concept in whose name some hope, let alone opposition, might have gathered. The feeling of a great change, which had affected people vaguely, as a kind of euphoric expectation, when Hitler entered the government, now overcame wider and wider sectors of the population. Hitler had moved rapidly from the status of demagogue to that of a respected statesman. The craving to join the ranks of the victors was spreading like an epidemic, and the shrunken minority of those who resisted the urge were being visibly pushed into isolation. Faced with a defeat apparently imposed “by history itself,” they concealed their bitterness and their lonely disgust. The past was dead. The future, it seemed, belonged to the regime, which had more and more followers, which was being hailed everywhere and suddenly had sound reasons on its side. “The only ones who give the impression of resolute refusal to accept it all, although they say nothing, are the servant girls,” Robert Musil ironically noted in March, 1933. But he, too, admitted that he lacked any alternative for which to fight; he was unable, he wrote, to imagine the new order being replaced by a return of the old or of a still older state of affairs. “What this feeling probably signifies is that National Socialism has a mission and that its hour has come, that it is no puff of smoke, but a stage of history.” Kurt Tucholsky on the Left implied much the same thing when he wrote, with that brash resignation peculiar to him: “You don’t go railing against the ocean.”

Such moods of fatalism, of cultural resignation, speeded the success of Nazism. Only a few were able to resist the swelling current of the triumphant cause. Not that the terrorism and the injustices went unnoticed. But in the old European dichotomy d’être en mauvais ménage avec la conscience ou avec les affaires du siècle, more and more people swung over to those who seemed to have history and business as well on their side. Now that it had conquered power, the regime set about conquering people.