Torches in Winter, Violets in March
Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933, the so-called Day of National Rising. ‘I have nothing sensational to report about this day,’ René Juvet noted, ten years later, ‘because I spent it not in Berlin, but in southern Germany.’ While the Second World War was still being fought, Juvet recorded his memories of Hitler’s early days in power. He concealed all names behind pseudonyms, but said his text was otherwise a ‘factual account’. He was interested in the behaviour of the Germans—in their words and attitudes. His aim was to show the effects of the various phases of Nazi rule on his colleagues at the factory, to give some insight into the minds of these people he had been living among for twenty years. Although Juvet had been born in Frankfurt am Main and raised in Munich, he thought of himself as Swiss, not German, and wrote as an outsider, looking on.
The day passed without event at the factory in Augsburg. No new brown shirts, and only seasoned Nazi colleagues like Neder and Hofmann had enamel badges gleaming on their chests. ‘On the whole there was little enthusiasm among us; a lot of people were apprehensive, waiting to see what the future would bring. The workers were very dejected indeed.’
In much of Germany, the election of Hitler as chancellor did not at first make much difference to the prevailing wait-and-see attitude. People were sceptical; they had seen too many governments come and go, and the spectre of economic crisis loomed too large. But in Berlin, the change of government was more than a mere radio report or newspaper headline; it was a kind of son et lumière show. The new chancellor’s supporters made their way to the centre of town for the National Socialist movement’s first victory parade.
• • •
Ilse Cordes attended the torchlight parade in the Tiergarten with her son. For her, the day was to mark a change of fortune for Germany. Hermann-Friedrich was eleven and had already seen so much—the war veterans’ vengeful anger, the grief and the hatred, the hunger and the despair. From an early age, he had looked on as failure pushed his father to drink and his mother into depression. Two islands of hope had remained to Ilse Cordes, and to these she clung: her great fatherland and her little boy. The two were closely linked in her mind. She made sure that Hermann attended a nationalist secondary school and was pleased when he joined the Freischar Junger Nation, a nationalist youth group. She let him help out with the Nazis’ election campaign, in spite of the fights that broke out there. She put all her hopes in him.
Right-wing paramilitaries marched past in seemingly endless columns, their heels ringing on the cobbles, their torches shining bright in the frosty January night. Ilse and Hermann-Friedrich pushed their way through the eagerly watching crowd at the side of the road. A lot of people were shouting and singing along to the march songs. Ilse Cordes felt joy and relief rise inside her. Everyone was laughing and smiling and cheering, she said—as if a huge weight had been lifted from their shoulders; they were no longer burdened by despair or the uncertainty of unemployment.
From the Tiergarten, mother and son continued on to the Brandenburg Gate, where the torches cast dancing shadows in the archways. They felt the hope of a new beginning for Germany—and of an end to the rift dividing their homeland. It looked as if the Germans really had become one people at last, Ilse Cordes said.
• • •
It was the new chancellor’s express desire to overcome the fragmentation of the country. After years of internecine war, people were longing to live side by side in peace, and that is just what the Nazis promised with their idea of ‘national community’—though their gangs of thugs had been a driving force behind Germany’s street and pub warfare. It meant more than unity, though. It was also about equality, and the abolition of the old class structures. During the election campaign, it had caught the imagination of people all over the country.
‘No rallying cry ever fascinated me as much as that of national community,’ Melita Maschmann said. She first heard it from the Maschmanns’ seamstress, who had called round to alter a dress. On previous occasions Melita had glimpsed the seamstress’s embossed metal party badge under her coat collar, but now she was wearing it openly.
Her dark eyes twinkled as she spoke of Hitler’s victory. My mother wasn’t pleased. She thought it presumptuous of uneducated people to concern themselves with politics. But it was precisely because this woman belonged to the common people that she appealed to me.
Melita’s parents expected the same deference from their children as from these ‘common’ people—their maid, for example, or their chauffeur. Their conservative upper-middle-class authoritarianism drove a wedge between them and their daughter. When the seamstress sat at her sewing machine extolling national community, it stirred Melita’s youthful sense of justice, prompting feelings of which her parents would never approve.
That evening, Melita’s parents took her to the torchlight parade. The sombre solemnity of the red and black flags, the glow of torches on people’s faces, and the sentimental and rousing tunes threw her into a tumult of emotions. As the columns passed, she felt at first only the eeriness of the night. Then she saw boys and girls no older than her, solemnly marching in the parade, and she felt shame flush her cheeks. There she was, standing next to her parents like a little girl, while her contemporaries shouldered flags. Melita sensed that she was missing something.
What was I—allowed only to stand at the edge of the road and watch, a chill at my back from my parents’ icy reserve? Barely more than a chance witness, a child who was still given little girls’ books for Christmas. And yet I was dying to throw myself into the current, to drown in it, drift with it.
She wanted to be part of it all like the others, serious-faced and involved in serious things. The next moment, she saw someone break ranks and begin, without warning, to club an onlooker. The man must have said something he shouldn’t have. Melita saw him fall to the cobbles, bleeding; her parents didn’t pull her out of the way quickly enough to protect her from the sight. The image fixed itself in her mind, but beneath her horror was a tiny thrill of danger. ‘It was a matter of life and death—not clothes or food or schoolwork, but life and death.’ Although frightened by what she’d seen, it made her determined not to stand on the sidelines anymore. She’d just turned fifteen, and she’d had enough of being too young. ‘I wanted to break out of my narrow child’s life and get involved in something big and important. It was a desire I shared with countless of my contemporaries.’
She liked the idea of a national community, in which everyone would live together like brothers and sisters—but if she wanted to get involved, it would mean going against her parents.
• • •
Stéphane Roussel, the foreign correspondent from Le Matin, had also fought her way through the crowd of spectators. She hadn’t believed that Hitler would ever be chancellor, but now his troops were marching in proud ranks, ten abreast, their boots pounding in time to the battle songs. She could barely make out the uniformed men beyond the crowd who had gathered to watch them—only the light from their torches, and the flags they carried floating along in the air as if by magic. For a moment she had the impression that the Germans’ self-loathing had subsided.
People shout and laugh and sing and chant the party slogans. A lot of couples have brought their children. The men put them on their shoulders or hold them at arms’ length, as if to bring them as close to Hitler as possible.
Roussel had trouble weaving her way out of the crowd. In the back rows, a little way off from the action, she saw behaviour of a kind that wasn’t recorded in any of the photographs taken that evening. Not everyone was rallying behind the new government. Roussel saw people avert their eyes as the brown-shirted troops passed. People in a hurry to get back inside their flats. People having trouble concealing their anger, helplessness, distress or fear. A young girl with tears pouring down her face.
On the way home, Stéphane Roussel noticed a thin covering of new snow on the roads. Now that the crowd was no longer there to keep her warm, she felt the cold creep over her.
• • •
The spectacle was repeated all over Germany, thrilling fans and alarming sceptics. In many towns, local party units organised their own triumphant marches. In some places there were counter rallies and clashes between police and the Brownshirts. The politically undecided made do with watching and waiting, indifferent or tensely impatient.
Raimund Pretzel had no firm political views, though if asked he tended to lean to the right. For him, 30 January 1933 was neither cause for celebration nor a national disaster, but simply another change of government. Like many educated middle-class people, he abhorred the National Socialists and refused to take them seriously. He didn’t go to the torchlight procession that evening, but discussed the news with his father in the drawing room. They saw little reason for concern, agreeing that Hitler was a mere puppet on an oversized stage. He couldn’t possibly last long. ‘There are few things as comic as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theatre,’ Pretzel would later write.
At the same time, he thought he smelt a warning whiff, a premonition of what was to come—‘but I did not have an intellectual framework that would allow me to interpret it’. The next day he went as usual to the Court of Appeal in Berlin, where he worked as an articled clerk, poring over the clauses of the Civil Code, page by page. It reassured him that the judiciary continued to grind away—that his life kept chugging along on the same old tracks. Even the sensationalism of the press left Pretzel strangely unmoved.
All this was still something one only read about in the papers. You did not see or hear anything that was any different from what had gone before. There were brown SA uniforms on the streets, demonstrations, shouts of ‘Heil’, but otherwise it was business as usual.
It was true that the government vilified Jews as Untermenschen, but when Pretzel glanced up in the quiet of the courtrooms, there was the scrupulous Appeals Court judge—a member of Berlin’s Jewish community—still passing sentences that were carried out on behalf of the state. The newspapers could write about breach of constitution, and the Brownshirts could carry on like maniacs, but everyday life went on regardless. Pretzel decided not to take any notice.
He was not alone. After Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, something strange began to happen. Although Germany’s new leaders had made no secret of how they intended to deal with opponents or what radical methods they would favour, most people played down the risks. The desire for security and stability was so great that the Germans preferred to turn a blind eye to certain aspects of this new reality, as long as they weren’t personally affected. They didn’t probe too deeply. They didn’t stop to ask what the changes meant, what was going to happen next. Life went on.
• • •
No sooner had Hitler taken his place at the head of the cabinet than he announced the dissolution of the Reichstag and called for new regional elections. Only forty-eight hours in office and already he was campaigning again. This constant drive was typical of him; he was always on the move.
British journalist Sefton Delmer had seen Hitler campaign on earlier occasions. He found it difficult to resist the energy of this extraordinary politician, who, when interviewed, would pitch into his answers with great fervour, letting each one swell to a speech, as thought after thought came bubbling out of him. Before long, Hitler would be shouting at his interviewer as if he were addressing a crowd.
Delmer accompanied him on a campaign tour by plane, observing his transformation from shy private individual into public dynamo. On the aeroplane, Hitler was sunk in morose apathy, like a listless travelling salesman on his way to a tedious appointment. But almost as soon as the plane touched down, his energy came flooding back, and by the time he was on the stairs to the tarmac, he was holding himself in his ‘Hero-Führer posture’, upright, serious, shoulders back.
His eyes widened to show their whites and a ‘light’ came into them. A light intended to denote kindly understanding of his people’s needs, fearless confidence, the light in the eyes of a Messiah predestined to lead Germany to its place in the sun.
The crowd responded as if electrified. There were roars of welcome as Hitler made his way down the steps, past dignitaries—shaking hands as he went—and into the car that was waiting to rush him to a nearby assembly room. Sefton Delmer tore off after him, through rows of outstretched arms to the stage with the huge swastika banner. The spectators didn’t have a chance to draw breath before he launched into his speech. Afterwards, Hitler stood for a moment, soaking up the cheers, head held high. Then he was gone. Delmer had to dash after him again and speed to the airfield.
Hitler himself seemed to me to enjoy this racing around in cars and aircraft. It gave him a sense of dramatic urgency and fitted in perfectly with his great act as the twelfth-hour saviour of the German fatherland.
Nothing was more fundamental to Hitler’s nature than the principle of movement. In his political treatise Mein Kampf, he uses the word well over a hundred times, describing the National Socialist organisation itself as a ‘movement’ rather than a party—a movement dynamic enough to set the masses in motion, and drive them to ever greater speed.
In the first hundred days of Hitler’s government, the German population was confronted with a dizzying series of dramatic events largely orchestrated by Nazi propaganda experts. After the launch of an aggressive election campaign, the Brownshirts and the SS formed an auxiliary police force in Prussia to combat the Nazis’ political opponents. When the Reichstag was set on fire a few days later, state terror against communists and other opponents of the regime escalated. An emergency decree annulled almost all basic democratic rights. By mid-March, more than a hundred thousand people had been arrested. Despite its lack of a majority, the government set about dissolving all regional parliaments. The same day that newspapers announced the opening of a concentration camp in Dachau intended to house five thousand political prisoners, Hitler celebrated the inauguration of the new Reichstag in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, where, in the eighteenth century, Frederick the Great had his summer residence and, in the nineteenth century, Bismarck inaugurated the Second German Reich. Two days after that, Hitler’s Enabling Act was passed by a majority vote in the Reichstag, effectively dissolving the national parliament. In April and May there followed the first public boycott of Jewish businesses, a ban on employing Jewish and dissident clerks, and book burnings in Berlin and a number of university towns. On 1 May the Reich celebrated ‘National Labour Day’ in the name of national community, with parades, beer tents, singing and competitive sports. The next morning, the Nazi authorities broke up the unions.
This storm of events swept over a breathless population in the space of less than three months.
• • •
Reiner Hamm was thirteen when Hitler came to power. In his hometown of Giessen, the Brownshirts and the SS staged their own torchlight parade on the evening of 30 January, and when the Reichstag burnt in Berlin, they fanned out to hunt down communists. Local party activists did what they could to ensure that the major events in the capital resonated even in a provincial town like Giessen. ‘In 1933 we were all completely absorbed by the rapid changes at home. What was going on around us in Europe took second place,’ Reiner said. At the grammar school he attended, the pupils worshipped politicians like film stars. Reiner had pictures of his heroes hanging on the walls of his room—Frederick the Great, Bismarck and Hitler. The new chancellor provided a constant flow of news; there was always something to talk about at break or over dinner. He also fuelled the boys’ collecting mania with a glut of likenesses.
We were surrounded by Hitlers in every shape and size, from toy figurines, each with the trademark black moustache and a movable right arm, to the two-storey-high painting of the Führer that I saw in the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
In art class at school, Reiner drew a picture of a worker—to represent the German people—hammering a huge Ja out of a stone block. Yes to Hitler. Hamm had found the idol of his youth. Like millions of others, he dreamed of meeting the man himself.
• • •
At the conclusion of the election on 5 March 1933, the National Socialists were, with forty-four per cent of the vote, still in a nominal minority. Only three weeks later, it looked as if Hitler had the majority of Germans behind him. In the space of a breath, wary astonishment had given way to excited approval and even euphoria. It was the time of the ‘March fallen’ or ‘March violets’—the much-derided opportunists who rushed to join the party only after the March elections.
In the middle of the month, René Juvet had an appointment with his manager. Waldmeyer wasted no time on factory matters, but immediately launched into a political lecture. Democracy, he said, was a thing of the past; it was time for a change of attitude. Juvet had never been asked to deny his democratic convictions; now his boss was demanding it straight out. Lying low wasn’t enough; to satisfy Waldmeyer, Juvet would have to make a commitment. The threat was unequivocal. ‘The faster you act, the better it will be for your career,’ Waldmeyer told his employee.
Jettison any unnecessary ballast. There’ll be no more standing on the sidelines here. In future, anyone wanting to get anything done will do so on National Socialist terms. I for my part am convinced that Hitler is the man of destiny and I will stand by my conviction.
Juvet didn’t know what to say. The talk shook him more than anything he’d heard or seen since the change of government. He knew Waldmeyer as an educated, erudite Prussian with an eclectic circle of friends, a boss who was respected by his staff for his intelligence and sarcastic sense of humour. And suddenly here he was, urging Juvet to toe the party line. He even told him to avoid his Jewish friends, having decided to do as much himself. Juvet couldn’t bring himself to reply. He silently resolved to keep his views to himself and watch his step.
In the days that followed, Waldmeyer came to work sporting a shiny new party badge. He helped set up a Nazi cell at the factory, run by the former bookkeeper Neder, an early party member and now the head of purchasing. Half the office staff and a quarter of the workers readily signed up. Except for some foreign correspondence, business letters were now signed off with ‘Heil Hitler’. A few days in March had been enough to transform an ordinary factory into a model Nazi business run by party loyalists.
• • •
The dizzying excitement that had gripped Melita Maschmann at the torchlight parade in Berlin had left her thoughts in a whirl. Now she began to look for facts to shore up her new ‘faith’. She greedily lapped up any news that offered ‘proof’ of the leaders’ spirit of enterprise. She believed their promises to free millions from misery and unite the German people. She believed them when they said they’d do away with the Treaty of Versailles. She was on the threshold between childhood and youth and felt ready for great ideas.
But her upper-middle-class parents stood in her way. Though they rejected Weimar, they looked no more favourably on the National Socialists and their revolutionary carry-on. When Melita wanted to join the Hitler Youth, they wouldn’t let her, pointing her instead to a monarchist girls’ league. And so Melita made a lonely decision that was to separate her from her parents’ world.
As my parents wouldn’t allow me to become a member of the Hitler Youth, I joined secretly. That was the beginning of my private ‘time of struggle’. At last I was catching up with my comrades who had joined before 1933; I, too, was paying for my allegiance to the National Socialists with a personal sacrifice.
In early 1933, the Hitler Youth organisation had more than a hundred thousand members. Since Hitler’s inauguration, an advertising campaign had been underway to lure young people into its ranks with camps, sporting activities, parades, drama groups and frequent celebrations. Fed up with the tedium of dull Sunday outings with her family, Melita Maschmann initially looked forward to these social activities, but her time as a member of the Hitler Youth proved a disappointment. The social evenings held in a dingy basement were excruciatingly primitive and the coarse language of the other girls grated on Melita’s patrician ears. They were salesgirls, seamstresses, maids—all from the working-class backgrounds she had romanticised. Melita’s late entry into the Hitler Youth saw her branded her a March violet, making her an object of derision to the ‘old guard’, who expected her to admire and respect them.
Because I was a March violet and a schoolgirl, they treated me with scorn and made it quite clear to me that I didn’t belong. Some of them were distressingly uncouth and, I realised to my dismay, corresponded in every detail with the picture my mother often drew of hoi polloi.
The only way Melita could reconcile her fantasy of a classless national family with bitter reality was to pin all her hopes on the future. ‘That’s why I stayed in the Hitler Youth. I wanted to help realise the idea of a national community in which people would live together like one big family.’ After all, the future was only just beginning.
In the early spring of 1933, millions of Germans cast aside their reservations and joined the Nazi Party in droves. The party offices were overwhelmed with applications. Between January and April, membership numbers exploded, reaching 2.5 million. The old guard had nothing but contempt for the March violets, whom they regarded as unprincipled bandwagon jumpers.
But the people who flocked to join the ‘movement’ did so from a variety of motives. There may have been a certain amount of cool calculation, but, at the same time, it was spring; people were feeling upbeat and hopeful and keen for something new. The desire for unity was officially fulfilled on the ‘Day of Potsdam’, when the former president, Hindenburg, shook hands with the young chancellor. In every city in the Reich, symbolic acts marked the spread of Nazism: lime trees were planted, known as ‘Hitler lindens’, the Führer was welcomed as an honorary citizen to towns across Germany, and the Hitler cult passed into the realms of kitsch and sentimentality. This enthusiasm penetrated the tiniest hamlets and infected even the most reluctant. Those who kept their distance began to be noticed.
Soon fear had become an ingredient of the collective frenzy. No one had failed to notice the wave of terror against the ‘enemies of the national community’, and although it met with widespread approval, it created an atmosphere of unease that would prove persistent. This unease was partly provoked by the unacknowledged fear of marginalisation. The margins were dangerous. Everyone could see that.
Stéphane Roussel had a large circle of German acquaintances, and wherever she went in those weeks in March 1933, she encountered recent converts. ‘Many who had hesitated end up doing the same as everyone else,’ she noted. Some people got hold of brown shirts and party badges so quickly that it made Roussel wonder. Her good-natured concierge, Herr Hellmann, suddenly began to wear a uniform under his coat. A friend in advertising showed her his party badge and talked of a campaign he was working on for ‘the German patriot’s soap’. Some of the March violets seemed to feel the need to justify the step they had taken, and cast about for alibis.
On one occasion, Roussel heard a wealthy woman—a Prussian nobleman’s widow—talk openly about this fear of marginalisation. This woman had never made a secret of her abhorrence of Hitler—his oily way of speaking, his base origins—but she was beginning to realise that most of her friends had joined the party. Her invitations to social events were dwindling, and the excuses she received when she tried to hold a tea party herself were chilly. The widow was advised to join a Nazi women’s organisation, at least in an honorary capacity, and she began to feel afraid. A few weeks later, on a visit to Roussel, she said she’d heard it rumoured that Hitler was the illegitimate son of a Hohenzollern, and thus of noble blood after all. That story did the trick, Roussel noted: ‘The next time I see her, she’s wearing swastika earrings and has a magnificent diamond-studded swastika pinned to the lapel of her tailor-made suit.’
The euphoria which spread to every corner of the Reich that spring showed how great the Germans’ capacity for excitement was. They were prepared to follow Adolf Hitler anywhere. Yet at the same time, right from the start, they were driven by fear. The only way they could live with this contradiction was to ignore it, to invent their own version of reality.