During that first year of the Nazi regime Hitler, who had started carefully, with only a solitary Nazi in the cabinet (this was the colorless Frick, at the Reichs Ministry of the Interior), had been consolidating his grip on the country with resounding success. By the time Himmler and Heydrich were ready to come from Munich to Berlin the stage was set for totalitarian action in the grand manner.
The first enemy had been the Communist Party, with its six million voters, many of whom by the time the year was out had joined the Nazis. In his diary on January 31st, the day after Hitler became Chancellor, Goebbels had written:
“In a conference with the Fuehrer we arranged meassures for combating the Red terror. For the present we shall abstain from direct action. First the Bolshevik attempt at a revolution must burst into flame. At the given moment we shall strike.”
And so it was—except that what burst into flame was the Reichstag, and it was not fired by the Communists.
On February 24th the Berlin Police raided the Karl Liebknecht House, the Communist headquarters. A communiqué was issued immediately afterwards which said that complete plans for the Bolshevik revolution had been discovered. These documents were never published.
On February 27th the Reichstag burst into flames and Hitler struck. Of all the incidents of the Nazi revolution this is the most familiar and the least rewarding of study. There is no need to recapitulate the details, and it is fairly certain that the Gestapo as such, under Diels, was not directly involved. The fire was supervised by Goering and Goebbels working through the S.A. It is established that Karl Ernst, the Chief of the Berlin S.A., taking a small group of his followers, got into the empty Reichstag on the evening of the 27th by means of an underground passage which ran from the Palace of the President of the Reichstag (i.e., Goering) to the Reichstag building itself. There they sprayed a special preparation used in the past by Berlin hooligans (it bursts into flames after some exposure to the air) over carpets, curtains, and upholstery.
When this task was finished, and as they left the building by the way they had come, the wretched young Dutch Communist, degenerate and half insane, who had been chosen by the S.A. as their tool because of his known propensity for setting fire to things, got into the building through a window and started his own incendiarism in an amateurish way. To this day nobody knows what methods the S.A. used to persuade van der Lubbe to play his part at the given moment. But play it he did. It would have been better for Hitler and Goering if he had failed. The Reichstag would have gone up in flames just the same. The Communists could have been accused and liquidated without the farcical and damaging superfluity of the trial which turned Dimitrov and Torgler into martyrs.
It was the sort of clumsiness that was later to distinguish the work of Heydrich—notably in the assassination of Dr. Dollfuss in the Ballhausplatz in Vienna. But it was not the work of Heydrich, who was in Munich. Nor was it the work of Diels, though he had a great deal to do with the arrests that followed. It was the work of the higher Nazi leadership, using their trusted S.A. And, indeed, the exclusion of the Gestapo from this action is a fine example of the sort of madness that existed in those days.
Diels must have known all about it afterwards. In his book he protests too much, and his argument against the proper view that Goering and Goebbels were responsible is almost inconceivably lame. It is possible in his protestations to discover a certain pique at his exclusion from the deliberations preceding this great drama: for one thing Diels can never resist, and that is magnifying his own importance, even if, by doing so, he has to show himself a bigger rascal than he cares to seem to be. Gisevius, of course, has his story—prolix and circumstantial down to the last detail—too circumstantial to be true. But in one particular he carries conviction—on broad lines if not in detail. And that is in his description of the liquidation by Diels and the Gestapo of certain S.A. participants in the Reichstag plot who had afterwards talked too much. That is what the Gestapo were for.
And it was the Gestapo which profited most from the fire itself. Next day, on February 28th, came the decree for “The Protection of the People and the State,” which Hitler induced President Hindenburg to sign. Described as “a defensive measure against Communist acts of violence,” it made an end of personal liberty as it had been guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution:
“Thus restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the Press; on the rights of assembly and association; violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; warrants for house searches; orders for confiscation as well as restrictions on property, are permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”
The Police, in a word, were now given a free hand. But still Hitler was not dictator, and the Nazi Party was still a minority Party in a coalition government. The Reichstag Fire and the President’s decree opened the last week of the election campaign which, on March 5th, was to give Hitler his majority. But in spite of the terrorism; the torchlight processions of marching brownshirts; the frenzied speeches (it was on March 3rd that Goering made his speech at Frankfurt in which he declared, “Here I don’t have to worry about Justice; my mission is only to destroy and to exterminate; nothing more”); individual acts of terror against Communists, Left Wing journalists, Trade Unionists, and opposition leaders of every kind; the shameless inactivity of the Police, who stood by and watched the S.A. beat their enemies to death and break into offices and shops—in spite of all this the Nazis won less than half the votes, while the Communists still got nearly five million to the Nazis’ seventeen million. But it was enough for Hitler, and the subsequent proscription of the Communist Party gave him an absolute majority in the Reichstag.
And so the new phase began. The Communists were proscribed. And by a judicious mixture of blatant force and flattery of the aged President and the Nationalists, Hitler managed to pass by constitutional means (a majority of two-thirds), on March 21st, 1933, a law which in effect did away with the Constitution. This was the basic Enabling Act (Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich) which gave the Government power for four years to enact laws without the co-operation of the Reichstag, to deviate from the Constitution. It gave the Chancellor personally the power to draft such laws, to come into effect the day after publication.
The Revolution had now started in earnest. It was called the Gleichschaltung, the process of bringing the totality of German society under direct Nazi control. First Hitler had to do for the various Laender what Goering had done for Prussia. On March 9th, aided by Himmler and Heydrich, Ritter von Epp, on instructions from Berlin, carried out a Putsch against the Bavarian Government—and Himmler became Chief of Bavarian Police. A few days later Frick, at the Reichs Ministry of the Interior, appointed Reich Police Commissioners in Baden, Wuertem-burg, and Saxony, who promptly turned out the existing governments. On March 31st Hitler, through Frick, decreed the dissolution of the Diets of all other Laender, and a week later appointed a Reichstatthaiter to every State with the power to appoint and remove governments, promulgate State laws, appoint and dismiss State officials.
Then it was the turn of the Trade Unions. Through March and April the S.A. ran wild and looted the Trade Union branch offices. On the second day of May the offices were formally occupied by the S.A. and the S.S., officials were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and the Unions were merged into the New Labor Front under Robert Ley.
Finally came the dissolution of the opposition parties. On May 10th Goering occupied the buildings and newspaper offices of the great Social Democratic Party and ordered the confiscation of its funds. On June 19th what remained of the Party was put under a ban. On May 26th the assets and property of the Communist Party were confiscated. On June 14th all parties were officially banned and the National Socialist German Workers Party was declared “the only political Party in Germany.” It became an offense to seek to maintain existing parties or to start new ones—an offense punishable with up to three years’ penal servitude or imprisonment, “provided the action is not subject to a greater penalty under other regulations.”
In all this tumult the new Gestapo played only a small part. The youth of Germany, alive and ardent after years of frustration and apathy, stood behind the man who at last seemed able to do something active and bold to rehabilitate their shabby lives, and marched to the rhythm of “Sieg Heil,” intoxicated by a new sense of power which found its natural expression in revolutionary violence. The liberals, the sober thinkers, the balanced sceptics had failed, and Germany was still sunk in resentful chaos. The liberals now tried to block the new drive led by the magician Hitler which held the first real promise for many weary years. They had to go. They had nothing to offer but the infinite negative. If they would not go of their own accord they had to be trampled underfoot. And so they were. And so also were the Communists, who, instructed by the tortuous crassness of Stalin in Moscow, had made it clear that they would do nothing to support the liberals and the socialists in face of the new menace—because they believed that their own way to power led through the swift rise and fall of Hitler.
The conspiratorial leadership of the Nazi Party and the thugs who took to violence for the sake of violence were reinforced and upheld by the genuine revolutionary enthusiasm which Hitler had evoked and by the distrust of the Communists aroused by their own dreary methods. They caught up in their wake millions who should have known better, and few stopped to ask whether an advance towards the promised land led by Goering and Goebbels and organized by Himmler and Heydrich could in cold blood be regarded as desirable. The fathomless German cynicism which separates absolutely political action from private morals was never more manifest than during the spring and summer of 1933. It prepared the way for all that was to come.
By autumn the new police were controlling the levers of a State organization which had been completely transformed. While Rudolf Diels, at the head of the infant Gestapo in Berlin, was conducting the fight for his own career in a welter of intrigue and violence, while the Gestapo itself was being used partly as a weapon in this fight, partly as a private weapon by Goering, partly to establish a dark, secret terror over Prussia—which ran parallel with, but much deeper than, the spectacular terror of the S.A.—Himmler and Heydrich waited and planned in Munich.
With Daluege in Berlin they already had a hold on Prussia through their S.S. cohorts, now very much a power in the land, and infiltrating every Government office. And when in October, 1933, the last restraints to the Nazi revolution were finally broken down and Hitler became in effect dictator of the Reich, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to centralize the various police forces in their political aspects on the Himmler machine.
In the next three months this was done, and the German people fearfully watched the rise of a new star in their midst—until, in early 1934, Heinrich Himmler had become, step by step, Chief of Political Police throughout the whole of Germany, except in Prussia. Himmler’s Political Police was modeled on Goering’s Gestapo—but with a difference: it was monolithic. It did not have to fight the S.S.—because it was the S.S. It could devote itself with single-mindedness to the task of smashing the S.A. and winning for itself the physical power upon which Hitler was to rest. It could devote itself to this task with all the more freedom since in the first year of the revolution the general political opposition had been broken—largely by the S.A.
But first Himmler had to conquer Prussia. He could not hope to smash Goering: the most he could do was to use him. Goering, too, wanted to smash the S.A. Thus there existed in the making an excellent arrangement for all. And in April, 1934, Himmler took over the running of the Prussian Gestapo and came with Heydrich to Berlin—Himmler in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, Heydrich with his S.D. in the Wilhelmstrasse, the two buildings separated from each other by a pleasant garden.