Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (79 page)

Three days after this staged volte-face, Hitler flew to Munich and expressed his satisfaction that “Bavaria has joined the broad front of the awakening nation.” Following a triumphant drive through the streets of the Bavarian capital, he laid a gigantic wreath in front of the Feldherrnhalle to commemorate the casualties of the putsch of 9 November 1923. Its inscription read: “And in the end you did achieve victory!”
⁷⁸
On 16 March, the Held cabinet, as the representatives of the last state to be brought into line, officially resigned. That cleared the way for a government consisting almost exclusively of National Socialists. By late March, a Preliminary Law for Bringing the States into Line ordered that seats in all regional parliaments be allocated according to the results of the national election of 5 March. KPD mandates were annulled. One week later, on 7 April, the Reich government issued the Second Law for Bringing the States into Line with the Reich. It installed “Reich governors,” eradicating once and for all the sovereignty of the regional German states.
⁷⁹

This law gave Hitler the leverage to reorder the power structure in Prussia as well. He himself assumed the authority of Reich governor, rendering Papen’s position as Reich commissioner obsolete. On 10 April, Göring was named Prussian state president, and two weeks later Hitler assigned him the authority of the governorship. As the British ambassador, Horace Rumbold, accurately reported to Foreign Secretary John Simon, Papen’s loss of influence put Prussia completely under National Socialist control and meant that even friends of Hindenburg had to kowtow to Göring and his lackeys.
⁸⁰
Within a matter of weeks, the vice-chancellor, who as recently as 30 January had depicted himself as the ringmaster taming the Nazis, had been pushed to the political margins.

—

If Hitler’s coalition partners had hoped that SA terror activities would die down in the wake of the election, these hopes were disappointed. On the contrary, the violence only increased. “What I termed terror prior to 5 March was but a mild prelude,” remarked Victor Klemperer on 10 March.
⁸¹
In many cities and communities, SA men occupied town halls and exacted revenge on representatives of the Weimar “system.” SPD offices and newspapers were also occupied, their furnishings destroyed, and their employees abused and taken to cellars and holding cells, where they, together with already-detained Communists, were mercilessly tortured by Hitler’s henchmen. Rudolf Diels bluntly described what such a torture chamber was like in the spring of 1933:

The victims we found there were close to starvation. They had been confined for days in narrow closets in an attempt to force “confessions” from them. The “interrogations” began and ended with beatings. Around a dozen brutes had taken turns beating the victims with iron bars, plastic batons and whips. Knocked-out teeth and broken bones bore witness to the torture. When we entered the space, whole rows of living skeletons were lying on rotten straw, their wounds festering. To a man, their bodies were covered with blue, yellow and green bruises from inhuman beatings. Many of their eyes were swollen shut, and blood had congealed under their nostrils. There was no groaning or complaint. They simply waited for the end to come or for the next beating to commence…Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel never imagined anything so horrific.
⁸²

Rampant SA terror tactics created a climate of fear and intimidation. “We’re forced to acknowledge that all parts of the opposition are completely demoralised,” noted Harry Kessler on 8 March. “The open departure from the rule of law, and the general feeling that justice no longer exists, has a tyrannical effect.”
⁸³
In a letter of 14 March, Theodor Heuss wrote:

Numerous rumours have it that there are many brutal excesses away from the public eye, that people are being dragged from their homes and beaten in the Brownshirt barracks. As long as the Nazi government doesn’t punish some of their members who are out of control and make examples of them, I fear that the situation won’t calm down. Thus far, these people have always been able to count on support from above.
⁸⁴

In a statement on 10 March, Hitler cautioned his supporters against “compromising the great work of national renewal with individual actions,” and two days later in a radio address he called for the “strictest and most blind discipline.” The NSDAP’s victory, Hitler said, was “so immense that we cannot feel any petty desires for vengeance.”
⁸⁵
But such public lip service notwithstanding, Hitler was by no means willing to restrain the SA. That emerged with utter clarity in a long letter he sent to Papen on 11 March.

The vice-chancellor had provoked Hitler’s ire by complaining that SA men had harassed foreign diplomats. He had the feeling, Hitler wrote, that “a planned barrage was going on with the intent of stopping the national uprising and definitely of intimidating the movement that carried it.” SA men, Hitler claimed, had shown “unprecedented discipline,” and he was fearful that history would conclude that, “at a decisive moment, perhaps infected by the weakness and cowardice of the bourgeois world, we proceeded with velvet gloves instead of an iron fist.” No one, Hitler vowed, would keep him from fulfilling his mission: “the destruction and eradication of Marxism.” The next few sentences expressed only contempt for the conservative coalition partners who had handed him the levers of power only a few months before, leaving no doubt that Hitler was no longer willing to consider their interests. “If the conservative nationalists and other bourgeois have suddenly lost their nerve and think they have to write open letters to me, they should have done so before the election…” Hitler wrote, mockingly. “I most insistently request of you, my dear Herr Vice-Chancellor, to refrain from addressing such complaints to me in the future.”
⁸⁶

Still, the more uncontrolled violence “from below” there was, the more it became a problem for the Nazi leadership, since it endangered their claim that they were restoring “law and order” after the civil-war-like conditions before 1933. For that reason, Nazi leaders stepped up their efforts to institutionalise the terror tactics used against their enemies. At a press conference in Munich on 20 March, Heinrich Himmler announced the establishment of a concentration camp in a former munitions factory near the small city of Dachau. Initially, as a state facility, Dachau was guarded by Bavarian police, but on 11 April the SS assumed command. The Dachau camp became the first cell from which a national system of terror germinated. It was a kind of laboratory, under the direction of the SS, where experiments could be carried out with the forms of violence that would soon be used in the other concentration camps within the Reich. The German media reported extensively about Dachau, and the stories that were told about what went on there acted as a powerful deterrent to opposition to the Nazis. “Dear God, strike me numb / Lest to Dachau I do come” was an oft-repeated saying in the Third Reich.
⁸⁷

But the mood in the spring of 1933 was not just one of terror and fear. Most Germans were enthusiastic about what they saw as a national renewal. “There were celebrations, relief, spring and intoxication in the air,” Luise Solmitz wrote on the day of the election.
⁸⁸
Many people shared the sense of being present at the dawning of a new era and felt reminded of the euphoria of August 1914. As Sebastian Haffner observed: “I saw old women with shopping bags stop and stare with glittering eyes at the wormlike army of marching and loudly singing Brownshirts. ‘You can really
see
it, can’t you?’ they said. ‘How things are looking up everywhere.’ ”
⁸⁹
While many supporters of the political Left withdrew, demoralised, into private niches, those sections of the middle classes that had previously kept their distance hastened to embrace the National Socialists, with flags flying. “Now everyone is a Nazi,” Goebbels noted on 24 February. “Makes me sick.”
⁹⁰
On 30 January, the NSDAP had had 850,000 members; only three months later they had been joined by 2 million others. On 1 May 1933, the party leadership had to declare a temporary moratorium on new memberships because Nazi administrators could no longer deal with the flood of applications.
⁹¹
Erich Ebermayer, one of the few who had retained a measure of critical distance, described the “flip-flop of the middle classes’ as “the most shameful aspect of this entire time.”
⁹²

The majority of the new party members were bandwagon jumpers who joined in hopes of improving their career opportunities, not out of political conviction. The desire to be on the winning side was combined with the attempt to gain material advantage from the political changes, be it preferential treatment in the search for employment or actual positions in the public sector or the party administration. A joke quickly made the rounds that NSDAP stood for “Na, suchst du auch’n Pöstchen”—“So you too want a little job.”
⁹³
New members were at pains to prove that their “conversions” were genuine, for instance by ostentatiously displaying party emblems. Bella Fromm, the reporter for the
Vossische Zeitung
, observed: “Our colleagues who previously wore their party badge discreetly under their lapels now put them on show for everyone to see.”
⁹⁴
Another way of declaring political allegiance was to use the greeting “Heil Hitler,” and Sefton Delmer noted that the people most apt to use the new social address were those who had dismissed Hitler as a “clown” just a few weeks earlier.
⁹⁵
The Polish journalist Count Anton Sobanski, who visited Berlin in the spring of 1933, found the sight of people spontaneously performing the raised right-arm salute extremely alienating.
⁹⁶
On 13 July 1933, a decree by Frick made the “German greeting” mandatory for all civil servants.
⁹⁷

Others indicated their support for the new regime by flying the swastika flag. On 11 March, Hindenburg ordered that the swastika be flown alongside the black-red-and-white banner of Imperial Germany. “These flags combine the glorious past of the German Empire and the powerful rebirth of the German nation,” Hindenburg wrote.
⁹⁸
With that, the Weimar Republic was symbolically dead and buried, and those who refused to conform and openly rejected the new regime were increasingly ostracised. “It feels like there’s an airless layer surrounding the few of us who refuse to convert,” Ebermayer complained in his diary. “The best of my young friends are declaring their allegiance to National Socialism…You can’t talk to them at all. They simply
believe
. And there are no rational arguments against faith.”
⁹⁹
Sebastian Haffner, then a legal clerk, had similar experiences. As of March 1933, the atmosphere in the discussion group he regularly attended became increasingly poisonous. Several of the members joined the NSDAP. Open discussions were no longer possible and, in late May, the group disbanded.
¹⁰⁰

—

The inauguration of the newly elected Reichstag was scheduled for 21 March in Potsdam’s Garrison Church. Goebbels, as Germany’s first propaganda minister, had assumed responsibility for organising the ceremony,
¹⁰¹
and both the location and date were symbolic. March the 21st was not only the beginning of spring but also signified “national renewal,” since it was the date when Bismarck had called to order the first Reichstag after the founding of the German Empire in 1871. Moreover the church crypt in Potsdam contained the coffins of the “Soldier King” Friedrich Wilhelm I and his son Friedrich the Great, making it the perfect location for a propaganda spectacle intended to symbolise the connection between Prussian tradition and National Socialism.
¹⁰²
The state celebrations began in the morning with services in the main churches of both major denominations, although Hitler and Goebbels declined to attend. Instead, they laid wreaths at the graves of Horst Wessel and other “martyrs of the movement.”
¹⁰³

Around noon, Hitler and Hindenburg met in front of the Garrison Church. The president wore his Prussian field marshal’s uniform, while Hitler had swapped his party uniform for a formal black jacket, which made him visibly uncomfortable. One observer commented that he seemed like “a nervous
arriviste
being introduced by a powerful patron to an alien social circle.”
¹⁰⁴
In the imperial box, where the seat belonging to Kaiser Wilhelm II had been left empty, Hindenburg greeted Crown Prince Wilhelm by raising his field marshal’s baton. The gesture was intended to express Hindenburg’s connection to the Hohenzollern dynasty, conveniently ignoring the fact that relations between the field marshal and the royal family had been irreparably damaged when Hindenburg ostensibly abandoned the Kaiser to his fate in 1918.
¹⁰⁵
The president’s welcoming address was kept short, in the military tradition. With the election of 5 March, Hindenburg stated, the German people had backed the government he had appointed “with a clear majority” and provided the “constitutional basis for its work.” With that, Hindenburg threw his weight behind the fiction that Hitler’s consolidation of power was completely legal. SPD deputies did not attend the ceremony, and KPD representatives were either in detention or had gone underground. Hindenburg called on those members of the Reichstag who were in attendance to look beyond “selfishness and party quarrels” and support the “difficult work” of the government “for the blessing of a free, proud and internally unified Germany.”
¹⁰⁶