Killing Hitler (8 page)

I considered that the situation in Germany could only be changed by the elimination of the current leadership.

—GEORG ELSER
¹

ON THE EVENING OF
27
FEBRUARY
1933,
LESS THAN A MONTH
after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, an intimate soiree was in progress at Joseph Goebbels’s Berlin apartment. With an election campaign in full swing and due to culminate in a week, Hitler had been engaged in a frantic electioneering tour, crisscrossing the country speaking to huge audiences and giving radio broadcasts. He had intended to strengthen the position of his new government by giving it the democratic mandate that most previous governments had so grievously lacked. The indications were that he would succeed in his task. The new state-sponsored terror apparatus had cowed his political enemies, while his propaganda machine had managed to persuade the undecided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

That evening, however, Hitler was enjoying a break from the hectic political schedule and was a guest with the Goebbels family.
At around 10:00, after a fine dinner of braised trout, the guests were relaxing and reminiscing when the telephone rang. Goebbels answered and was informed by a colleague that the Reichstag building was on fire. He was incredulous. “Is this meant to be a joke?” he demanded.
²
After phoning around for confirmation of the report, he passed the news on to Hitler. Together they gazed across the Berlin skyline at the spreading orange glow. Hitler was in no doubt as to the perpetrators. “It’s the communists,” he raged.
³

Within minutes, the two were hurtling to the scene in one of Hitler’s limousines. The Reichstag was already well ablaze. Fire crews and police were doing what they could, but the debating chamber—oak-paneled and generously upholstered—was already an inferno, and flames licked up at the night sky through the cracks in the great glass cupola. In the foyer, Goebbels and Hitler encountered Göring, who informed them that a suspect, a Dutch communist, had been arrested at the scene. Together, the group ascended to a viewing gallery overlooking the chamber. There Hitler stood staring silently at the blaze below. After a time, he turned to the assembled group, his face red with the heat and his own fury. As one witness recalled: “He shouted uncontrollably, as I had never seen him do before, as if he was going to burst: ‘There will be no mercy now. Anyone who stands in our way will be cut down.’”
⁴

That very evening, Hitler began to translate those words into deeds. Along with Goebbels, he hurried to the editorial offices of the Nazi newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter
(National Observer), where he spent much of the night composing articles and dictating proclamations for the morning edition. The following day, emergency legislation—the Decree for the Protection of People and State—was passed by the president. In it, many of the fundamental human rights previously enshrined in the German constitution were formally suspended, including the right of association, freedom of the press, and freedom of expression. Violations could be punishable by death. The first foundation stone of the Nazi dictatorship had been laid.

One of the first to feel the full force of the new legislation was
the suspect captured at the scene. Marinus van der Lubbe was a twenty-four-year-old former bricklayer from Leiden in Holland. Invalided in an industrial accident, he had become a militant communist and was in almost constant trouble with the authorities. After several attempts to reach the Soviet Union, he finally traveled to Berlin in 1933, as he claimed, to help foment proletarian revolution against Nazi rule. Though suggestions were made at the time that the Nazis had torched the Reichstag themselves to provide a pretext for suppressing their political opponents, little evidence has emerged to support this theory, and the most plausible conclusion is that van der Lubbe had indeed set the fire himself. Arrested and tortured into a confession, he claimed to have worked alone. He was tried, found guilty, and duly beheaded. The venerable institution that he was supposed to have torched was itself abolished a little over a month later.

Within weeks of his appointment, therefore, Hitler began the “coordination” of German political life. By a series of measures combining the quasi-constitutional with the downright illegal, he contrived to eliminate his political rivals. Within a month, playing on the fear of a communist uprising, the Nazis forced the so-called Enabling Act on the Reichstag, now meeting in a cramped Berlin opera house and easily cowed by Hitler’s storm troopers. The act’s clauses provided for the formal suspension of the constitution and for rule by decree. The communists were then outlawed and the socialists were terrorized into exile and dissolution. The formidable trade unions were forcibly absorbed into the Nazi-led Labor Front. The parties on the right were similarly “persuaded” to dissolve. Those who resisted were taken care of by the burgeoning network of concentration camps. By the spring, the Weimar constitution, which Hitler had solemnly sworn to uphold less than two months before, was already a dead letter. Within only a few months of the Reichstag fire, Hitler’s political dictatorship would be all but complete.

German society took somewhat longer to “coordinate.” Just as in the political sphere, rival social organizations were forcibly amalgamated, while opposition groups were outlawed. Social divisions, meanwhile, were smoothed by stressing the existence of a
Volksgemeinschaft
, a “national community” that would embrace all Germans and transcend class and creed. This was not an entirely spurious concept. Many Germans had tired of the rancor of politics and longed for a return to the sense of community and patriotism that they had witnessed during the First World War. Coercion, then, was not always necessary, but it was nevertheless ever-present.

The first degree of coercion under Nazism was the omnipresence of the party. Though much less influential than the Communist Party had become in the Soviet Union, the Nazi Party was still the driving force behind the transformation of German society. Pressure to join the party was relentless, and after 1933, opportunism, cowardice, and an instinct toward subservience conspired to sap the public’s fragile will to resist. Party membership brought with it privileged status, preferential treatment, and in some cases even legal immunity. It was the key to political and social advancement and could also aid progress in the professions. In 1935, for example, it was decreed that 10 percent of civil service vacancies should be filled by party members.
⁵
Already by that point, over 60 percent of senior state employees were card-carrying Nazis.

Whether one became a member or not, the party’s influence penetrated every aspect of life. At the lowest level was the
Block-wart
, or block warden, whose job was to keep the residents of each block under close surveillance. The block warden circulated the party collecting tin, ensured that the swastika was flown on red-letter days, and was authorized to snoop into all aspects of an individual’s affairs.
⁶
He was a lowly, often despised figure, but he was a part of a system that had the power to deprive a recalcitrant of his livelihood, his status, and even his life. Noncompliance could be fraught with danger.

Those who failed to comply faced the wrath of the SS and Gestapo. In theory, the Gestapo, or state police, defended the state, while the SS protected the party. Yet in truth, as the state and party merged, the Gestapo and the SS became ever more closely related; all Gestapo men, for example, were obliged to be members of the SS.
⁷
Their task was not only the purely defensive
one of rooting out dissent and checking opposition activity but also the preemptive one of inspiring conformity. The Gestapo and SS, with their network of agents and informers, operated as a state within a state. Their task was secretly to penetrate every aspect of German public and private life. Their power was vast. They could arrest a man and consign him to a concentration camp without recourse to the formal legal process. There was no appeal. As Hitler himself explained, apparently without any hint of irony: “[E]very means …is considered legal, even though it may conflict with existing statutes and precedents.”
⁸
Many Germans lived in fear of the knock at the door. The experience of one was typical of those who dared to resist:

One morning, the Gestapo knocked at our door…. They searched our apartment, confiscated our diaries and took us away…. They left me sitting in a cell for eight days before coming to question me. I heard footsteps above me and footsteps in the courtyard. Once I heard a woman’s voice, which I thought could be my mother’s. Perhaps they had picked her up too…. I wondered if they had already shot my father. Heaven only knew…. I was afraid. I was afraid of anything that might lead to my being taken to prison again, and that was exactly what they wanted…. [That] fear made me very timid and passive, just completely inactive.
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One of the most important targets for the Nazi Party and its agencies was to win over the working class. It was one of the largest and most influential social groups, and working-class support was essential for the Third Reich to function as it did. Accordingly, a masterly seduction was planned. Widespread acceptance of the new regime was initially ensured by the fact that Hitler’s government provided work. After the long years of the Depression, that commodity was too valuable for many to allow political or ideological objections to intercede. Thus pacified, the workers reacted with a combination of rage and resignation when their political and trade union organizations were subsequently
abolished. Yet the new regime did much to court the working class and ensure their continued support. May Day, for example, was transformed into a national paid holiday, when the German worker (or “plant follower,” as he was officially known) was feted. As the economy boomed and labor became increasingly scarce, the employers had to battle to keep staff. Some introduced initiatives such as subsidies for house purchases, and elsewhere holiday entitlement was doubled. Wages, meanwhile, were subjected to a statewide freeze.

Even the field of welfare provision was taken over by the party. The Nazi People’s Welfare organization, known by its German initials NSV, was established as an umbrella for a huge number of independent charities, which were then forcibly absorbed. It practiced an especially involuntary form of voluntary donation. Not only did it circulate the ubiquitous collecting tins and make deductions from workers’ wages, it would also admonish those who failed to contribute, even threatening “protective custody” for persistent nondonors, to “pre-empt popular outrage.”
¹⁰
The NSV was little more than a vehicle for licensed extortion. But its collection campaigns did have the ulterior motive of inculcating in donors a heightened sense of community. The distribution of its funds, through programs such as the annual Winter Aid drive, was also ruthlessly exploited, predictably, for propaganda purposes.

Leisure time, too, was regulated and exploited. The German worker could avail himself of cut-price opera tickets, buy a subsidized wireless, or even go on a package holiday. In 1938, one German worker in three enjoyed a vacation
¹¹
hosted by the Nazi organization Strength Through Joy, often at purpose-built complexes, such as the enormous Prora resort on the island of Rügen in the Baltic, which was to house twenty thousand holiday makers and employ over two thousand staff.
¹²
Other destinations included Lake Constance, the Black Forest, or the Harz Mountains. The fortunate few could even enjoy a cruise to Madeira or the Norwegian fjords aboard a purpose-built liner such as the
Wilhelm Gustloff.
Whatever destination the worker chose, he could rest assured that all the necessary measures were in hand to
continue his effective indoctrination. The
Wilhelm Gustloff
, for example, had 156 loudspeakers for the relaying of propaganda.
¹³

Nazi influence reached even the most apparently apolitical of groups. All commercial, industrial, and professional bodies were “coordinated” in the summer of 1933.
¹⁴
The following year, the majority of youth organizations, from the Scouts to sports societies to chess clubs, were incorporated into the Hitler Youth. One recruit, the young Helmut Schmidt, for example, later chancellor of West Germany, automatically became a Hitler Youth member when his rowing club was absorbed.
¹⁵
Hitler Youth membership increased 3,500 percent as a result of this expansion, to over three million.
¹⁶
Few German boys could resist its heady mixture of uniforms, war games, and small-arms drill. The girls of the associated German Girls’ League, meanwhile, were instructed in physical culture, eurythmy, and domestic science. They were all obliged to swear loyalty to the “Supreme Father”—Adolf Hitler.
¹⁷

The force that prepared and underpinned the “coordination” of German life in the Third Reich was propaganda. Described as the “genius” of the regime, propaganda in many ways made up for the ideological shortcomings of Nazism.
¹⁸
With its pyrotechnics, fanfares, and screeching editorials, it could be relied upon to induce compliance, even when the eclectic mishmash of ideas behind Hitler might have failed to inspire. Its power became legendary. As Hitler once asserted: “By the clever and continuous use of propaganda, a people can even be made to mistake heaven for hell, and vice versa.”
¹⁹