THE REICHSTAG BUILDING IN BERLIN, HOME OF THE GERMAN Parliament, was on fire. A tremendous explosion had ripped into the great plenary hall of the building, and pillars of flame now shot through the roof as thick smoke billowed from open windows.
It was February 27, 1933, and a few blocks away, Adolf Hitler, Germany’s new chancellor and the head of the Nazi Party, was attending a small dinner party at the home of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, a close friend and Nazi supporter. A telephone call interrupted the meal.
Goebbels picked up the phone and heard the news. He and Hitler, without good-byes, immediately left the party, climbed into a car, and sped toward the Reichstag. A block away, they could see the building’s ornate dome illuminated by the inferno.
The speed of the flames left no doubt in their minds: the fire had been deliberately set, and the likely culprits were Communists.
Already at the scene were Hermann Goering, another prominent Nazi, and Rudolf Diels, the head of the Gestapo, the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Goering was screaming at Diels: “This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up.”
The efficient Diels sent out the orders. Within an hour, prominent Communist politicians and journalists answered the knocks on their doors and were taken into custody.
Among the first arrested was Marinus van der Lubbe, a twenty-four-year-old Dutch Communist, seized and put in handcuffs as he stood outside the burning building. When authorities said he had confessed to setting the blaze, it gave solid credence to the Nazi claim that Communists were a grave threat to Germany. Months later, Lubbe was convicted and guillotined. By then it was evident that the torching of the Reichstag had initiated a bloody civil war and was fueling the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, Austria, Hitler was the son of Alois Hitler Schicklgruber, an Austrian customs agent and loyal defender of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He was a harsh disciplinarian and administered almost daily thrashings to his son.
In contrast, Klara Hitler, Hitler’s mother and Alois’s third wife, was a pious and kindly woman. Twenty years younger than Alois, she doted on Adolf and his younger sister, Paula, as well as the two children from her husband’s second marriage, Alois and Angela.
Adolf, ever in fear of his father’s outbursts, loathed him. But he deeply loved his mother; he carried her picture with him until his death. In 1898, the family moved to a village near Linz which Hitler would forever after claim as his home town.
He despised school and his teachers, except for one: Dr. Leonard Pötsch, a history teacher who sparked Hitler’s imagination with stories of German heroism and the man credited with nurturing Hitler’s hatred of Jews. By his mid-teens, Hitler was constantly clashing with his father over his career ambitions. Hitler wanted to become an artist. His father insisted he become a civil servant.
Their struggle ended on January 3, 1903, when Hitler’s father died. Later that year, Hitler dropped out of school and for the next three years spent most of his time taking piano lessons, drawing, reading, and immersing himself in opera, enraptured by the emotionally charged music of Richard Wagner.
Hitler was greatly moved by Wagner’s opera Rienzi. After Hitler saw it, his friend August Kubizek later recalled, “Words burst from him like a backed-up flood breaking through crumbling dams. In grandiose, compelling images, he sketched his future and that of his people.” Hitler later told him, “It began at that hour.”
In time, Hitler would extol Wagner as “the greatest prophetic figure the German people has had.” Wagner’s music and writings inflamed Hitler’s imagination and fanned his hatred of Jews. Wagner wrote, “This hatred is as necessary to my nature as gall is to blood.” The histrionics of Wagner’s operas stirred Hitler to envision huge public extravaganzas. And he drew elements of his theories about Germans constituting an Aryan “master race” from Wagner’s dramatic retelling of Nordic myths.
Hitler traveled to Vienna, where he wandered the streets for two weeks, attended opulent theatrical productions, and decided to seriously pursue his desire to paint. He applied for admission to the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts but he was rejected — twice. As he would later write, “I was so convinced that I would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue.” Hitler received a more devastating blow with the news that his mother, long suffering from breast cancer, had died on December 21, 1907.
Over the next six years, Hitler eked out a living in Vienna, earning paltry sums turning out postcard-sized water-color paintings. He lived in a flophouse for a time. His principal diversions were studying architecture and reading. He became known as a vigorous debater of politics and was a regular reader of the Deutsches Volksblatt, an anti-Semitic newspaper. He greatly admired Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, and became an especially strong critic of Social Democrats, the “Reds,” and Jesuits.
In May 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, where he continued to sell paintings, work as a house painter, and voraciously read books on Marxism, a philosophy and economic practice he called a “world plague.” When World War I broke out in the summer of 1914 (the United States would not enter the conflict until 1917), Hitler enlisted. “I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time,” he later wrote.
He fought with the Bavarian Infantry and was promoted to corporal, serving as a dispatch runner, a particularly dangerous assignment. Hitler was wounded in the leg by a shell fragment in October 1916 and returned to battle after he recuperated. Two years later, shortly before the war’s end, he was temporarily blinded by mustard gas. He was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, and the Iron Cross, First Class.
For this young man, Germany’s defeat in World War I was nothing less than a humiliating national tragedy. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), he lamented: “And so it had all been in vain … Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland? … In those nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed.”
He blamed a vast array of people — including German Communists, Socialists, and Jews — for the country’s disgrace. He excoriated the Allies as unjust in promulgating the punitive terms of the 1919 Versailles Treaty. He was particularly outraged that the treaty stipulated that Germany alone bore responsibility for World War I and thus was solely responsible for reparations for civilian losses.
The treaty also demanded that the country be demilitarized, capping its army at one hundred thousand men and limiting the navy to fifteen thousand personnel. Germany also was required to cede its overseas colonies and a number of territories in Europe. Manufacture or possession of certain munitions and weaponry was barred. The treaty also forbade Germany from creating a union with Austria.
These demands greatly rankled Hitler and many other Germans. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson worried that in time the harsh treatment of Germany might precipitate another European conflict far worse than the Great War of 1914 – 1918, because advances in weaponry assured many more deaths.
Speaking in Omaha, Nebraska, in September 1918, Wilson had warned, “I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation, there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the methods by which to prevent it.”
A few days later, Wilson told a crowd in San Diego, California, “I do not hesitate to say that the war we have just been through, though it was shot through with terror of every kind, is not to be compared with the war we would have to face the next time. What the Germans used were toys as compared with what would be used in the next war.”
By the early 1920s, the lack of political, economic, and social stability created a void for Hitler to seek power. He began casting a mesmerizing patriotic vision for the restoration of the German people — what he believed was their rightful place as the superior Aryan master race within the world order.
He was not the only German with such ideas. In 1918 in Munich, Anton Drexler formed a branch of the Free Committee for German Workers’ Peace, and, a year later, he created the German Workers’ Party, a group opposed to Communists and Social Democrats. He urged Germans to unite in a national community of one people — with no Jews allowed. Adolf Hitler was its fifty-fifth member.
The group soon changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and by July 1921 Hitler was its undisputed leader. The Nazi Party was born, with Hitler viewing himself as a “drummer” and “rallier” of a national movement.
The party’s militia, whose members were often referred to as storm troopers or brown shirts, was founded that year. Initially, the members of this paramilitary organization were bouncers who protected Nazi meetings at beer halls. As enforcers, they often initiated and fought in brawls in those drinking halls and in the streets of Munich where steins flew, shots were fired, and punches thrown. The organization became a loyal and ferocious force that embraced violence to accomplish the Nazi Party’s goals.
On November 8, 1923, Hitler tried to seize power in the German state of Bavaria in what became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. At 8:30 p.m., Hitler and his storm troopers entered the Bürgerbräukeller, which was crammed with three thousand people. Hitler climbed on a chair, fired a pistol shot into the ceiling, and announced that he was forming a provisional government and that “a national revolution had begun.”
It was short-lived. The next day when Hitler and two thousand supporters attempted to march to the Bavarian War Ministry, government soldiers and police confronted them. Hitler was in the first row when a shot rang out. In the ensuing thirty-second gun battle, fourteen of Hitler’s supporters and four policemen were killed. The gunfire narrowly missed Hitler, but his shoulder was dislocated in the melee.
Arrested and convicted of treason in April 1924, Hitler was sent to Landsberg Prison, located in Landsberg am Lech, to serve a five-year prison term. And the Nazi Party was banned.
Hitler settled into prison life and, by the account of the governor of the prison, was obedient, quiet, and got along with fellow prisoners. He spent most of his waking hours writing Mein Kampf.
Just eight months later, in December 1924, Hitler’s sentence was reduced and he walked out of prison. Despite the ban on the party, Hitler quickly reorganized it and created the SS as his own personal guard unit.
The Nazis competed in various national elections but gathered little popular support. As late as 1928, their candidates received only 3 percent of the national vote. At the time, Germans were fairly content with the status quo, particularly since the economy was prospering. But the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929 in the United States devastated the world’s financial system. Hitler and the Nazis capitalized on this by blaming their political opponents for the scarcity of goods and the loss of jobs.
Germans were drawn more intently to Hitler’s patriotic speeches and became captivated by his rhetorical skill, as he targeted Jewish financiers as the leading culprits in the collapse. By the tens of thousands, they began attending Nazi political rallies and marches. Their hearts pounded listening to beating drums as Nazi flags adorned with swastikas were hoisted high and they responded with the Nazi salute.
Hitler portrayed himself as one of them: an ordinary man who had suffered hardship and who loved boys and girls and dogs, and who found strength and renewal in his walks along Bavarian mountain trails. German citizens began to see Hitler as a potential savior, a man who could pull the nation out of its economic morass and restore the country to its rightful place as a leader of the world.
As Hitler’s popularity surged, so did the ranks of the Nazi Party. In the 1930 elections, Nazi candidates won 18.3 percent of the vote. In 1932, Hitler ran for the German presidency and forced a run-off election with incumbent Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler was trounced — receiving 36.8 percent of the vote to von Hindenburg’s 53 percent. The Nazi Party won 230 of the 608 seats in the legislature.
It was a hollow victory for von Hindenburg. In January 1933, unable to repair Germany’s serious economic troubles and threatened by the rising influence of the Nazi Party, von Hindenburg acceded to Hitler’s demand that Hitler become Germany’s Chancellor.
Some people were deeply troubled by this decision, including von Hindenburg’s one-time military colleague Erich Ludendorff, who warned the president in a telegram that he had just “handed over our sacred German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I prophesy to you this evil man will plunge our Reich into the abyss and will inflict immeasurable woe on our nation.”
Hitler’s appointment was celebrated with a massive torchlight parade that lasted deep into the night of January 30, 1933, and, some claimed, was attended by one million marchers. Emboldened, Hitler almost immediately called for dissolution of the current government and for new legislative elections with an eye toward suppressing all political critics, whether Communists, Socialists, or members of other parties. He orchestrated approval of the Reichstag Fire Decree, a draconian measure that essentially stripped Germans of their civil rights. The law placed restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and on the privacy of postal, telegraphic, and telephonic communications. Warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations, as well as restrictions on who could own property, were legalized.
Under the decree, armed individuals who engaged in serious disturbances of the peace could be executed. Storm troopers were given arrest power and began scouring Germany in trucks, rousting and arresting Communists, Social Democrats, and Liberals. Many were tortured. Politicians who sought to speak out against Hitler frequently had their meetings shut down.
On March 3, 1933, Hitler’s friend and ally Hermann Goering — he had been wounded in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 while marching with Hitler — let loose a tirade of threats against Hitler’s opponents in Frankfort: “Fellow Germans, my measures will not be crippled by any judicial thinking … I don’t have to worry about justice; my mission is only to destroy and exterminate — nothing more!” He promised to lead the brown shirts against Communists and anyone who would oppose the Nazis.
International observers were clearly alarmed by the ferocity of the Nazis’ tactics. Residents fleeing Germany spoke of being warned that their lives were in peril if they stayed.
In the elections that Hitler demanded, the Nazi Party received only 43.9 percent of the vote but managed to acquire a majority in the new legislature by forming a coalition with the Nationalists, who had garnered 8 percent of the vote.
Chancellor Hitler pressed von Hindenburg to endorse the Enabling Act, which would effectively give the cabinet, which Hitler controlled, the authority to enact laws that did not have to conform to the nation’s constitution. If it passed, the cabinet would not need the approval of the Reichstag for four years.
On March 23, 1933, Hitler addressed the Reichstag and urged passage of the act. He claimed that strong leadership from the cabinet was needed if Germany was to be protected from its enemies. He promised that the government would “make use of those powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures.”
Though raised a Roman Catholic, Hitler had long before stopped practicing and some think that what religious beliefs he had were based more in paganism than Christianity. Yet he went out of his way to praise Christianity and won over some members of the Center Party, particularly after he suggested he would protect the civil and religious rights of Roman Catholics.
As Hitler spoke to the legislature, SS troops demonstrated outside, chanting loudly, “Full powers or else!”
The Enabling Act passed, 441 to 84. Intoxicated by their victory, Nazi legislators rose to their feet and lustily sang the party’s anthem. The same day, the Völkischer Beobachter, a Nazi Party newspaper, published a chilling announcement: “On Wednesday the first concentration camp for 5,000 people will be set up near Dachau.”
Heinrich Himmler, the future chief of the SS and then head of the Munich police force, had ordered the camp’s creation. The first prisoners were to be Communists and Social Democrats.
On August 2, 1934, von Hindenburg died at age eighty-seven. Almost simultaneously, the cabinet consolidated the positions of chancellor and president and the title of president was erased. Hitler was fuehrer and reich chancellor. All members of the German military were obliged to take an oath swearing unconditional obedience to Hitler and to be prepared to risk their lives for him.
His rise to power had been swift and stunning. As the New York Times later declared: “Hitler was nothing, and from nothing he became everything to most Germans … Sixty-five million Germans yielded to the blandishments and magnetism of this slender man of medium height, with little black mustache and shock of dark hair, whose fervor and demagogy swept everything before him with outstretched arms as the savior and regenerator of the Fatherland.”
Immediately, Hitler turned his full attention to the building of a Third Reich, a reich he fervently believed was destined to last for one thousand years.