Hitler (86 page)

Significantly, his manner soon reverted to the Schwabing
condottiere
style of the twenties. Constantly trailing behind him a motley caravan of demiartists, strong-arm men, and adjutants, he would always be traveling between the chancellery, the Brown House, Obersalzberg, Bayreuth, parade grounds, and meeting halls. As the years went on, his need to be in motion increased. On the morning of July 26, for example, he delivered an address in Munich to a delegation of 470 Italian Young Fascists; at 2
P.M.
he attended the funeral of Admiral von Schroeder in Berlin; and by 5
P.M.
he was at a concert in Bayreuth. On July 29, still in Bayreuth, he was the guest of honor at a reception given by Winifred Wagner, and the following day laid a wreath on the composer's grave. In the afternoon he spoke at the German Gymnastic Festival in Stuttgart, then went to Berlin, then to a meeting with high party officials at Obersalzberg. On August 12 he took part in a Richard Wagner Festival in Neuschwanstein, where in the course of his speech he referred to himself as completing the plans of King Ludwig II. From there he returned to Obersalzberg for a week. On August 18 he left for Nuremberg to see to preparations for the party rally, and a day later went to Bad Godesberg for a discussion with SA and SS leaders. It would appear that, now, having achieved success, he was once more prey to the fluctuating desires and interests of his earlier years. Often, he would let himself drift irresolutely for a long while, then he would suddenly display an explosive energy—especially in questions concerning power. In the political realm he manifested a peculiar and surely rare combination of indolence and genius. Soon he was shirking the many burdensome routine duties of his office and brazenly going to the opera or the movies instead. During those early months as Chancellor he once more read through all of Karl May's nearly seventy volumes of adventure stories—of which he later said that they had opened his eyes to the world. It was this unusual style of undisguised laziness that prompted Oswald Spengler to remark sarcastically that the Third Reich was “the organization of the jobless by the job-shirkers.”
³⁶
Rosenberg, for example, was highly indignant that Hitler preferred an ice revue to a demonstration Rosenberg had organized. In years past, Gottfried Feder had wanted to assign an army officer to Hitler to help him handle a proper day's agenda. But Goebbels explained his master's working methods in characteristically high-flown terms. “What we... are constantly endeavoring to bring to bear has become for him a system in world-wide dimensions. His creativity is that of the genuine artist, no matter in what field he may be working.”

If we look at the matter in retrospect, Hitler accomplished an amazing amount in the first year of his chancellorship. He had eliminated the Weimar Republic, taken the decisive steps toward building a government dependent upon him personally as leader, had centralized the nation, politically regimented it, and had brought it to the point of becoming the weapon he considered it to be, as indeed he considered everything to be a weapon. He had initiated an economic turnaround, had thrown off the fetters of the League of Nations, and had won the respect of the outside world. Within a short time, a pluralistic free society with its many centers of power and influence had been burned down to “pure, uniform, obedient ashes.” As he himself put it, he had “got rid of a world of opinions and institutions and installed another in its place.” Only disorganized groups without political weight were left of the shattered opposition.

Granted, what Goebbels called the “process of resmelting the nation” had not taken place without the use of violence. But we should not overestimate the part played by brute force in the course of the seizure of power. Hitler spoke of the “least bloody revolution in world history.” This soon became one of the rhetorical slogans of the regime. And it certainly contained a kernel of truth. And yet—consider a decree such as Gôring's of June 22, 1933, “For Combating Griping and Defeatism.” The mere expression of discontent was viewed as a “continuation of Marxist agitation,” and hence a punishable offence. Such a decree made plain what methods were used to heat the smelting crucible.

Similarly, when we contemplate the “miracle” of the folk community, we cannot overlook its illusory character. It was an impressive façade, but for the most part it only covered over and did not eliminate social conflicts. One episode from the first few days of the regime throws light on the way the national “reconciliation” was compounded of coercion and deception. The episode is as grotesque as it is illuminating: on Hitler's order the notorious leader of “Killer Storm Troop 33,” Hans (“Firebug”) Maikowski, was honored with a state funeral. He had been assassinated on the night of January 30, 1933, returning from the historic torchlight parade. A policeman named Zauritz who had been killed that same night was likewise granted a state funeral. In the name of the “folk community” and over the protests of the church officials, the policeman, who had been a Catholic and a leftist, was without more ado placed on a bier in the Lutheran cathedral alongside the storm trooper, who had been a gangster and a freethinker. To complete the missing element in this forcible reconciliation, the former Crown Prince was sent to lay wreaths on these coffins.

Nevertheless, the second phase of the seizure of power had proceeded more swiftly and more smoothly than anticipated. The necessary measures to organize government and party into a leader state were taken in the course of that legalistic game, which simultaneously prepared the next steps even as it was sanctioning the present one. In the provinces Reichs-tatthalter—federal governors—acted as party bosses, deposing ministers, appointing officials, participating in cabinet meetings, and exercising virtually unlimited authority as soon as the autonomy of the states was abrogated by law and the Reichsrat, the upper house, abolished. The federal government also stripped the states of their judiciary independence. A new organizational scheme for the party divided the country into thirty-two gaus, the gaus into sections, local groups, cells and blocks.

A statute of December 1, 1933, proclaimed the unity of party and state, but in fact Hitler was bent on separating the two. He had his reasons for leaving the national headquarters of the NSDAP in Munich. It was evident that he meant to keep the party from directly affecting government affairs. Hence his appointment of feeble, submissive Rudolf Hess, who lacked any power base of his own, to the post of FUhrer's deputy. Certainly no political primacy of the National Socialist Party existed. Unity was present only in the person of Hitler, who continued to foster a multiplicity of divided authorities and who allowed the party only in a few special cases to assume governmental functions and carry through its totalitarian claims.

Almost all the powerful institutions in Germany were overwhelmed. Hindenburg no longer counted. He was, as his friend and Neudeck neighbor von Oldenburg-Januschau pungently remarked, “the President we no longer have.” Significantly, the leadership of the party, in taking that mass oath of February 25, swore allegiance to Hitler, not to the President, as should have been the case under the statute promulgating the unity of party and state. The old man still figured in a good many schemes as the supposed embodiment of justice and tradition; but in the meantime he had not only capitulated to Hitler, but allowed Hitler to corrupt him. His willingness to support the Nazi conquest of all power in the state with his moral authority certainly contrasted remarkably with the dour reserve with which he had left the Weimar Republic to its fate. On the anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg the new rulers made him a gift of the Domain of Langenau, which bordered on Neudeck Estate, and the woodlands of Preussenwald, free and clear. He reciprocated with a gesture almost unprecedented in German military history, conferring upon retired Captain Hermann Göring “in recognition of his preeminent services in war and peace” the honorary rank of an infantry general.

The army remained the single institution that had escaped “co-ordination.” The SA was clearly seething with impatience to carry out that final
Gleichschaltung.
“The gray rock must be drowned by the brown tide,” Ernst Röhm was in the habit of remarking. Röhm and Hitler were now increasingly at odds, with Röhm suspecting that Hitler might abandon the revolution for reasons of tactics and opportunism. From Hitler's point of view, the army and the SA constituted the only remaining still independent power factors whose self-assurance had not been shattered. The manner in which he used each to smash the other, thus solving the existential problem of every revolutionary leader is still another example of his tactical genius. He arranged for the revolution to devour first and foremost its most loyal children, and represented his perfidious act as a great service to history.

As always in the decisive situations of his life, he continued to hesitate, to answer those who pressed him to act with “We must let the situation ripen.” But from the spring of 1934 on, forces entered into play that, operating along different paths, accelerated matters. On June 30, 1934, many different interests and impulses coincided, and all met before the rifle barrels of the execution squads.

Après la révolution il se pose toujours la question des révolutionnaires.

Mussolini to Oswald Mosley

 

No one watches more closely over his revolution than the Führer.

Rudolf Hess, June 25, 1934

 

The tactics of legal revolution developed by Hitler made possible a relatively bloodless seizure of power, and avoided that deep rent in the body politic with which every nation emerges from a revolutionary period. But those same tactics had the drawback that the old leaders could infiltrate the revolution by adaptation and thus could contantly threaten the existence of the new regime, at least theoretically. Overrun and for the time being carried along, the former ruling class was by no means eliminated, by no means paralyzed. At the same time, the militant advance guard of the SA, who had fought for the movement and cleared the obstacles from the path to power, found themselves cheated of the wages of their wrath. Scornfully, and with some bitterness, the brown pretorians watched the way “reaction”—the capitalists, generals, Junkers, conservative politicians and others in the “cowardly bunch of philistines”—clambered onto the reviewing stands at the victory celebrations for the national revolution and sedulously moved their black tailcoats in among the brown uniforms. If everyone enrolled in the party, where would the revolutionaries find their enemies?

An old-fashioned, straightforward roughneck like Röhm could not help being furious at the way things were going. And he let his displeasure be known quite early, in repeated public statements. By May, 1933, he had thought it appropriate to issue an order warning the storm troopers against all the false friends and false celebrations, and reminding them of unfulfilled goals: “We have celebrated enough. I wish that from now on the SA and SS visibly withdraw from the endless succession of celebrations.... Your task is to complete the National Socialist Revolution and to bring about the National Socialist Reich. That still remains to be done.” Hitler, craftier than the clumsy Röhm, regarded the revolution as a pseudolegal process of undermining the established order. It operated by demagoguery, attrition, and deception; force was merely an auxiliary instrument handy for purposes of intimidation. Röhm, on the other hand, could not conceive of a revolution without an insurrectionary phase, a storming of the citadels of the former powers, culminating in the classical “night of the long knives.” Nothing of the kind had taken place, and Röhm was deeply disappointed.

After a short period of tactical uncertainty he tried to keep his storm troops out of the great national smelting process. He emphasized the need for a martial posture and hailed the special mentality of the SA: “It alone will win and preserve the victory of pure, unadulterated nationalism and socialism.” He warned his subleaders against taking posts and positions of honor in the new government. While his rivals Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ley, and countless followers of the third rank extended their influence by acquiring bastions of political power, Röhm tried to go the opposite way. By consistently building up his forces, which soon increased to between 3.5 million and 4 million men, he was preparing the way for the SA government, which one day would be superimposed right on top of the existing order, crushing it.

Under these circumstances the old antagonisms between the SA and the Political Organization inevitably flared once again. There was the natural resentment of militant revolutionaries against the thick-necked, middle-class egotists of the Political Organization, who were apt to win out in the petty skirmishes for sinecures and jobs. The rancor increased after Hitler demanded, with growing insistence, the end of revolutionary activities. As early as June, 1933, the government had begun breaking up the many unauthorized camps for protective custody set up by the SA. Soon afterward, the SA's auxiliary police squads were disbanded. In vain, Röhm's followers pointed to the sacrifices they had made, the battles they had endured; they felt that they had been passed over. They were the forgotten revolutionaries of the unconsummated revolution. More and more often word went out that the seizure of power was over, and the tasks of the SA had been fulfilled. Röhm sharply retorted to such pronouncements in June, 1933. Those who were now calling for abatement of revolutionary fervor, he declared, were betraying the revolution; the workers, peasants, and soldiers who were marching under the banners of his storm troops would finish their job without consideration for the “co-ordinated philistines and gripers.” He added, “Whether they like it or not, we shall continue our struggle. Along with them, if they at last grasp what is at stake! Without them, if they don't want to grasp it. And against them, if so it must be.”