Burning the Reichstag (13 page)

On February 17th Göring issued his infamous “Shooting Decree” to all Prussian police officers. The decree said that officers must use their firearms against “enemies of the state.” Any officer who failed to do so
when he should have would face disciplinary consequences. On February 22nd he went a step further with a decree allowing members of the “National Associations”—this meant the SA, the SS, and the Stahlhelm, the groups responsible for a large share of the violence—to be enrolled as auxiliary police. The text of the decree claimed that increasing “outrages” from left radicals, especially Communists, were an unbearable and constant threat to public security.
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It was part of the strange climate in Germany that February that a partially free press could still criticize these measures. The leading Catholic newspaper
Germania
, for instance, noted that it was a “highly dangerous” and “reckless” undertaking to give police authority, including the use of weapons, to young men from an “extraordinarily fanatical political party movement.” The
Berliner Tageblatt
, noting the untruth of Nazi claims that past Prussian governments had pressed the Social Democratic Reich Banner into service as auxiliary police, concluded that this “dangerous experiment” was both unnecessary and worrying.
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The leading Nazis—apart from Hitler—used their campaign speeches to voice contempt for the very act of voting, challenging their opponents to remove them through civil war. Two Sundays before the election, Wilhelm Frick told an audience in Dresden that this election would be the last. Should Hitler's government somehow fail to win a majority, he said, no other political grouping would win one either, so the government would simply continue as it was. “We are not willing,” he said, “to leave the field voluntarily.” A few days later, in a speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin, Goebbels told the crowd that National Socialism had burned all its bridges and that there was no way back. He added ominously that the Communists “should not believe that everything will remain as it is today.”
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Although theoretically the Nazis and the German Nationals were running together for the confirmation of their coalition, in fact there was no let-up in their mutual attacks. There were clear signs that the Nazis did not plan to be burdened with their Nationalist partners any longer than absolutely necessary. On January 30th, as Hitler's coalition was sworn into office, Goebbels wrote that the Nationalist cabinet members were “blemishes” that “must be rubbed out.” On February 2nd Hans Frank told Nazi students that the Nazis had no intention of maintaining a coalition as contemplated by the Weimar Constitution (although, as we have seen, Hitler had promised that whatever happened in the election, the cabinet would remain as it was). The Nazis wanted sole power for themselves, said
Frank, to destroy “Asiatic subhumandom” (in other words, Communism). No “liberal sense of law” would keep the Nazis from doing what they needed to do.

American ambassador Frederic M. Sackett—William Dodd's predecessor—reported to the State Department in mid-February on the rising tensions between the Nazis and the Nationalists, and after a press conference for foreign correspondents that the Social Democratic editor Friedrich Stampfer gave on February 23rd, the
Manchester Guardian
's correspondent wrote “one had the curious sensation” that “the time was rapidly approaching when to a large section of the German people the Nationalists would appear as the champions of law and order. Nothing has fostered this feeling more then Herr Göring's famous police circular.”
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German National newspapers began to criticize, without naming names, those “dumb” enough to imagine that they alone were called upon to save the country. Reinhold Quaatz told a mid-February election rally that the fate of Germany would depend on whether the nationalism or the socialism won out in the National Socialist movement. Quaatz himself had suffered Nazi abuse for his partly Jewish background.
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If the Nationals' main worry was their unruly coalition partner, the Nazis were growing increasingly concerned that a Communist uprising was nowhere in sight. Communist resistance to Hitler's new government was doubly hobbled. Joseph Stalin's self-interest put good relations with Hitler ahead of the fortunes of his German followers, at a time when the leader of the Soviet Union was ex officio leader of all the world's Communist parties. Secondly, German Communists were blinded by their own ideology, which saw Hitler's regime as confirmation of the desperate state of capitalism, and so of the excellent prospects for a Communist revolution in the near future. They believed they could sit back and wait for their moment.

Rudolf Diels thought that all Göring's extravagant military preparations were pointless. He knew that the Communists could not possibly launch a successful uprising against the Nazi stormtroopers, especially now that Communists could not count on any help from the police—many of whom were now themselves stormtroopers. But Diels added, “I was never in doubt for a moment that a pretext for outlawing the Communist Party would be found.”
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Some historians of the Reichstag fire, notably Fritz Tobias and Hans Mommsen, argue that Hitler and other leading Nazis sincerely believed
in the specter of an imminent Communist revolt. It was the intensity of their fear and hatred, these writers suggest, that led Hitler and the others to interpret the Reichstag fire immediately as a Communist act; Hitler's rage that night was genuine. Hans Mommsen goes so far as to say that Hitler “lost his nerve” on the night of the fire.
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However, this puts too much credence in what Nazis said for propagandistic effect. There were many signs that Hitler and Goebbels understood German Communism was a paper tiger. Hitler, as we have seen, told his cabinet that the Communist threat needed to be
preserved
for the sake of election propaganda. In his diaries Goebbels had surprisingly little to say about the Communists, and what he did write was largely perfunctory. He saved his real invective for the Nationalists. Here as elsewhere his diary was remarkably consistent with his public posture: Even in public, where one would expect him to play up his hatred for the Communists and play down that for the Nationalists, Goebbels could complain of the “giant burden” of fighting a “two-front war” against “the conceit of the Right” and the “class-consciousness of the Left.” Joachim Fest notes that it required a lot of effort for the Nazi propaganda to render the Communists that revolutionary threat that the Communists themselves claimed to be. The violence staged by SA men disguised as Communists was supposed to help the illusion along. Certain stereotyped phrases about the (allegedly) shocking discoveries that the police made at the Karl Liebknecht House on February 24th occur so repeatedly in official documents after the Reichstag fire that it is difficult to believe they were more than pre-arranged talking points.
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Nazi leaders could not have become paranoid about the Communists from any information Diels's political police gave them. Documents from Britain's MI5 offer unexpected confirmation on this point. In March 1933 Guy Liddell, a senior MI5 officer who spoke fluent German, went to Berlin to strike up a relationship with his German counterparts. Liddell took a dislike to Diels, whom he described as a man with “an unpleasant personality” and “jet black hair, slit eyes and sallow complexion” giving him “a rather Chinese appearance.” But Diels was also “extremely polite” and gave orders “that I was to be given every possible facility.” Liddell saw documents that had been looted from Communist headquarters by SA men “who just threw [them] into lorries and then dumped them in disorder in some large rooms.” Liddell wrote that “all our evidence goes to show that, although the German Communist Party may have contemplated a
peaceful street demonstration,” Moscow had ordered “no overt act was to be committed which could in any way lead to the wholesale repression of the Party.”
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One leading Nazi spent much of February in deep frustration. The Third Reich did not seem to begin well for Joseph Goebbels. In early February he felt that he had been pushed aside in the eternal struggle for Hitler's favor. Hitler had promised him a propaganda ministry after the election, but in the meantime had put Bernhard Rust in place as Goebbels's “regent” in the Prussian Ministry of Education and Culture, with many of the duties of a future propaganda minister. To Goebbels this was a betrayal. “I've been left in the lurch,” he complained to his diary on February 6th. “Hitler is hardly helping me at all. I have lost my courage.” The strength of the German Nationals in the cabinet, those “reactionaries” whom Goebbels so hated, drew his biting sarcasm. “The reactionaries dictate. The Third Reich!” Or—for Goebbels the same thing as dictation by reactionaries—“the Görings rule.” And every day Goebbels complained that there was not enough money for the election campaign. In the middle of February he caught a fever and gave himself over to self-pity and to “fantasies.”
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When Goebbels worried about “reactionary” influence on the Nazi movement or about his own position in the hierarchy, as at the time of the Stennes revolt or Harzburg or Kristallnacht, he invariably turned both to the SA and to a dramatic propaganda stunt. In February of 1933 his hatred for the Nationalists and for Göring, as well as his self-pity and concern for his own position, were running at high levels.

Meanwhile, Chancellor Hitler had been campaigning frenetically. Hitler was his party's most potent election speaker, and since February 1st, when the election campaign officially began, he had spoken somewhere in Germany almost every day. On February 10th he addressed a rally in the huge Berlin Sports Palace. The next day he opened the International Automobile and Motorcycle Exhibition. On February 12th he was in Leipzig for ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Richard Wagner. Back in Berlin on February 14th he spoke before the assembled National Socialist press. On February 15th he was in Stuttgart, on the 16th back in Berlin, on the 17th in Dortmund, on the 18th in Munich, the 19th in Cologne, and on the 20th he returned to Berlin to speak to a group of industrialists. On the 21st he gave interviews to foreign journalists, and on February 22nd, along with attending a cabinet meeting, he issued an order warning his party against provocateurs. Then
he was back on the road: On the 24th to an election rally in Munich and on the 25th to Nuremberg.
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Hitler returned to Berlin, attending a cabinet meeting again on February 27th. In the late afternoon, the ministers discussed the passage of another decree. This one was introduced to the cabinet by Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner. Gürtner called it the “Decree Against Treason and Treasonous Activities,” and he insisted that it must be passed before the March 5th election. The decree set out crushing penalties—death or long penitentiary sentences—for the betrayal of military secrets, for treasonous actions committed for the purpose of rendering the military or the police unable to fulfill their duties, for advocating political strikes, or for publishing materials advocating any such actions. Hitler suggested increasing some of the penalties; Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick proposed renaming the draft the “Decree Against Betrayal of the People.” Prussian Finance Minister Johannes Popitz suggested “Decree Against Betrayal of the German People.” With this change the cabinet agreed to the decree. President Hindenburg signed it into law the following day.
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From Sunday, February 26th, through Tuesday, February 28th, despite the climax of the election campaign, Hitler's speaking calendar was blank. Then a final flurry of appearances would keep him busy from March 1st until the March 5th elections. His long weekend gave him the leisure for a quiet dinner at the home of propaganda director Goebbels on the evening of Monday, the 27th. Goebbels, too, was enjoying an unaccustomed break from his otherwise intense campaign schedule. For the Nazis, who were very conscious of dates and anniversaries, February 27th was a day of some significance: on that day in 1925, at a public meeting in that same Bürgerbräu Keller in Munich from which Hitler had launched his 1923
Putsch
, Hitler, just released from prison, had ceremonially refounded the Nazi Party. To an overflowing crowd he had explained that Germany had lost the First World War because for long years before the war “the most sacred matters of the whole people had been turned over to parliamentary graft.” He also explained the meaning of the Nazi flag and dedicated his party to the “struggle” against Marxism and Jews.
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AS THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY
went on, the blizzard of special decrees, banned party meetings, and escalating police and SA violence began to alter the mood of relief and surprise at the seeming moderation of Hitler's first days in office.

Even as he puzzled over the restraint of Hitler's first speech as chancellor, Erich Ebermayer noted an undertone. “Somewhat unclear and darkly threatening is his statement about a ‘decisive act' that is required to overcome the Communist subversion of Germany. What is that supposed to mean?” A few days later he recorded the dissolution of the Prussian parliament with an emergency decree and the final deposing of the Braun-Severing administration. “That has nothing more to do with law,” he wrote. “For the first time Hitler is showing the naked, brutal fist. He is a revolutionary and has never concealed the fact. Now we have the revolution!” Actually, he thought, that wasn't such a bad thing. The more radical the revolution, the shorter its duration.
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On February 23rd the Prussian Council of State—the upper house of the Prussian parliament—met to discuss “current constitutional conditions in Prussia.” The president of the Council was the veteran mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, a pillar of the Catholic Center Party (and later postwar West Germany's first chancellor). The Council members understood that they might not have much longer to do their work. Two of the speakers noted that theirs was the last functioning representative institution in Prussia.
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