Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (45 page)

It was common in left-wing circles to think that, if the Nazis ever got a share of power, they would soon be undone by their own incompetence. A remarkable exception was the dramatist Ernst Toller, who had served five years in prison for participation in the Munich Soviet Republic. “Reich Chancellor Hitler is waiting just outside the gates of Berlin,” Toller wrote in
Die
Weltbühne
on 7 October 1930, warning against the dangerous illusion that the Nazis would bankrupt themselves if allowed to rule for a brief period. One should not underestimate Hitler’s “will to power and determination to keep it,” Toller cautioned. The dramatist was in no doubt that as chancellor Hitler would eradicate all democratic progress with a stroke of his pen: “Overnight, all republican civil servants, judges and police officers will be fired in favour of a reliable, fascist cadre…Hundreds of thousands of Hitlerites are waiting for jobs!” Toller also predicted that a Hitler regime would brutally terrorise socialists, communists, pacifists and the few surviving democrats, and that once he felt strong enough, the Nazi leader would even go after the trade unions. “For once there is truth to the phrase: it’s one minute to midnight,” Toller wrote.
⁶⁸

—

A few days after the election, Hitler was given the opportunity to spell out in public how he planned to come to power and what he would do after he did. On 23 September, a Reich court in Leipzig began hearing a case concerning three young Reichswehr officers from the southern German city of Ulm who had violated an order from the Defence Ministry by establishing contact with and promoting the NSDAP. On the third day of the trial, the National Socialist lawyer for the defence called Hitler as a witness. Many people had collected outside the court building, and a number of foreign reporters had also come to see the man who had suddenly become the great hope of millions of people. “The atmosphere positively crackled with excitement,” Hanfstaengl observed, when Hitler appeared before the court and the judge began to question him.
⁶⁹
The judge warned him not to give an “hour-long propaganda speech”—a reference to the 1924 trial at which the Munich judge had allowed Hitler to use the courtroom as a pulpit. After calmly beginning his testimony, however, Hitler began to get excited, earning himself a reprimand. “You’re not here to make political speeches,” the judge told him again. “Calm down and keep your statements objective.”

When asked about the NSDAP’s attitude towards state monopoly on legitimate force, Hitler answered that the Reichswehr was “the most important instrument in the restoration of the German state and the German people.” Any attempt to corrode it, he added, was insanity. If his party came to power, he told the judge, he would ensure the military, which the Treaty of Versailles had restricted to 100,000 men, would once again become a “great German people’s army.” Hitler also reiterated his promise from countless campaign speeches that he would “under no circumstances use illegal means” to achieve his ends. Whenever, as in the case of Otto Strasser, one of his subordinates had violated his instructions, he had “immediately intervened.” The NSDAP did not need to resort to violence, Hitler boasted, because after the next election, it would be Germany’s strongest party. “In this constitutional way,” Hitler said, “we will try to achieve decisive majorities in all legislative bodies so that, if we’re successful, we can remould the state in a form that corresponds to our ideas…If our movement is victorious in its entirely legal battle, there will be a German national court, there will be retribution for November 1918, and heads will roll.”
⁷⁰

Hitler could hardly have stated any more clearly that he was only prepared to renounce violence until he came to power. His adherence to the Weimar constitution was a tactical ploy to gain the NSDAP political room for manoeuvre and legal protection, which it used to undermine stability and ultimately to bring down German democracy. Goebbels belied the NSDAP’s seeming support for law and order when he remarked to one of the officers on trial in Leipzig, Richard Scheringer, that Hitler’s testimony had been a “clever move.” “What do the authorities think they can do to us now?” Goebbels asked. “They were waiting to make their move. But now we’re strictly legal. Legal no matter what.”
⁷¹

In the summer of 1930, at the request of the Prussian interior minister, Carl Severing of the SPD, the political division of the Berlin police put together a memorandum on the character of the Hitler movement. It considered a wealth of material, concluding that “the NSDAP was an organisation hostile to the state that strives to undermine the constitutionally enshrined republican form of state.” Statements seemingly to the contrary by Hitler only served “to cloak [the movement] in legality so as to avoid problems with the authorities.”
⁷²
Nonetheless, in a cabinet meeting on 19 December 1930, the Reich ministers unanimously agreed that there was nothing they could do about the NSDAP. Heinrich Brüning himself warned against using “the same mistaken methods that were applied before the war against the Social Democrats.”
⁷³
The Prussian memorandum disappeared in a filing cabinet in the Reich Chancellery.

The military leadership, which had played a decisive role in the transition to rule by presidential decree in March 1930 and which was a key element in the new political constellation, began to revise its stance towards the NSDAP. Impressed by Hitler’s vow in Leipzig to keep things legal, Reich Defence Minister Wilhelm Groener and his closest political adviser, General Kurt von Schleicher, argued that Hitler’s party should no longer be considered a revolutionary movement bent on overthrowing the state but a serious political force that would have to be involved in Germany’s future. The military hoped to co-opt the Nazis’ enthusiasm for the armed forces for their own ends and recruit party members for the national defence. Military leaders also thought that involving the NSDAP would exert a moderating, domesticating influence on the movement.
⁷⁴
For his part Hitler had not forgotten the lesson he had learned from the Beer Hall Putsch: that the path to power depended upon the support or at least the neutrality of the military. The way he presented himself in Leipzig was calculated to bring about a rapprochement with military leaders. In mid-January 1931, he met with the chief of the general staff, General Kurt von Hammerstein. The purpose of the meeting is clear from a short entry in Goebbels’s diary: “We have to get the army on our side.”
⁷⁵

But when the new Reichstag first met on 13 October 1930, it was immediately apparent how hollow Hitler’s promise of legality was. Despite a prohibition on uniforms at parliamentary sessions in Prussia, the 107 NSDAP deputies appeared in their brown shirts and swastika armbands. Nazis also staged a provocative demonstration in Berlin’s city centre. Horrified, Count Kessler wrote: “All afternoon and evening, there were large masses of Nazis who demonstrated and smashed the windows of the [Jewish-owned] department stores Wertheim, Grünfeld, etc., in Leipziger Strasse. In the evening on Potsdamer Platz, crowds chanted ‘Germany awake,’ ‘Death to Judah’ and ‘Heil, heil.’ ” They had to be dispersed by police on horseback and in trucks.
⁷⁶
The fact that this “attack on shop windows” was directed almost exclusively against Jewish businesses suggests that it was a coordinated act, not a spontaneous outburst of public sentiment.
⁷⁷
In interviews with the foreign press, Hitler distanced himself from the unrest, calling it the work of “rowdies, shoplifters, plunderers and Communist provocateurs” and claiming that his movement had nothing to do with it.
⁷⁸
Hitler’s denials were transparent lies. In his response to a speech in the Reichstag by Gregor Strasser, the Bavarian SPD deputy Wilhelm Hoegner said the events of 13 October had belied the Nazis’ promises to stay within the bounds of legality: “We do not believe that yesterday’s wolves have transformed themselves overnight into pious lambs watched over by peaceful shepherds.”
⁷⁹

Although as the second most powerful faction the NSDAP was represented in the Reichstag presidium and on all parliamentary committees, their attitude from the very beginning of the legislative period was one of obstructionism. The party’s only aim was to bring the Reichstag to a standstill by subverting negotiations, filing frivolous motions and submitting nonsensical queries.
⁸⁰
At the same time Goebbels pressed ahead with extra-parliamentary actions. In early December, he organised the disruption of the world premiere of the film
All Quiet on the Western Front
, based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 anti-war novel, in the Mozartsaal cinema on Berlin’s Nollendorfplatz. “After 10 minutes, the cinema already resembled a madhouse,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “The police were powerless, and the embittered crowd turned on the Jews…‘Jews out!’ they cried. ‘Hitler is at the gates.’ The police sympathised with us…The screening was cancelled, as was a second one. We’ve won.” On 12 December, after further protests against the film, authorities banned it from being shown. It was the first act of capitulation in the face of Nazi terror. “The National Socialist street is dictating behaviour to the government,” Goebbels crowed.
⁸¹

The Reichstag changed its procedural rules in an attempt to break the National Socialists’ policy of obstruction, so on 10 February 1931 the NSDAP faction, along with forty-one delegates from the DNVP and four from the rural protest party, the Landvolk, began boycotting parliamentary sessions. NSDAP faction leader and Reichstag vice-president Franz Stöhr declared that his party would only rejoin the “Young [Plan] Parliament” if it saw a possibility “to flout a particularly pernicious measure by the majority Reichstag, which is hostile to the people.”
⁸²
On 26 March, the Reichstag went into recess; it would not reconvene until October.

—

By early 1931, the growing radicalism of political conflicts created conditions that were akin to a civil war.
⁸³
In most cases, it was the SA who started the violence. Packs of SA men tried to create an atmosphere of intimidation and convince their political enemies of their omnipresence by marching through working-class districts or suddenly appearing en masse in smaller “red” towns. Such acts of provocation, which often precipitated brawls, were like invasions of hostile territory. As a rule, public action taken by the German communists and socialists were aimed at defending themselves against the SA’s increasingly aggressive behaviour in working-class areas, which the police frequently refused to prevent and thus tacitly supported.
⁸⁴
Hitler’s oft-repeated contentions that the street fights were “without exception the work of Communists and Social Democratic activists” and that the SA was “mostly outnumbered and only defending itself” were a crass reversal of the facts.
⁸⁵

Nonetheless, SA violence was a double-edged sword for the party leadership. Rowdyism constantly threatened to get out of hand and give the lie to Hitler’s assurances that the party was acting within the bounds of the law. In the midst of the 1930 campaign, this conflict had broken out openly, reflecting an unresolved yet fundamental structural problem running through the entire history of the SA. It was unclear whether the SA was an ancillary apparatus that only existed to help the NSDAP come to power, or whether it was, in parallel to the party, a “self-defence organisation” of equal status which would be given a key military role in the new “Third Reich.” Dissatisfied by a chronic lack of funding and the fact that the organisation had not been consulted about the list of candidates for the Reichstag election, the Berlin chapter of the SA, under its commander, Walter Stennes, refused to provide security for party events. The conflict escalated to the point that in late August 1930, while Goebbels was away campaigning in Breslau, SA men stormed the Gau directorship’s headquarters and caused significant damage.
⁸⁶
Hitler hurried to Berlin to nip the rebellion in the bud. In a Nazi clubhouse in Chausseestrasse, he tried to regain the trust of some 2,000 SA men. The police report noted that his “hoarse voice became an almost hysterical scream.” Hitler’s speech ended with a melodramatic oath of solidarity: “We will use this hour to swear that nothing will drive us apart, if God grants us His assistance against all the devils! May Almighty God bless our struggle.”
⁸⁷

“Stennes seems to want to keep calm,” Goebbels noted on 3 September.
⁸⁸
Yet although the revolt was over for the time being, the underlying conflict continued to percolate. Hitler had relieved the SA leader, Pfeffer von Salomon, of his duties and nominally taken over command himself. Otto Wagener, previously Pfeffer’s chief of staff, was in charge of the day-to-day running of the organisation. Wagener had previously been the managing director of a small industrial company and had only joined the party at the Nuremberg rally in 1929. Then, at the end of November 1930, at a meeting of SA leaders in Munich, Hitler astonished everyone by announcing that Ernst Röhm, who had just returned from Bolivia, would be taking over as SA leader. Röhm, of course, had been rudely pushed aside in 1925 due to disagreements with Hitler about the role of the SA, so this was most likely a concession by Hitler to the still-dissatisfied SA leaders, most of them former military officers and Freikorps fighters, who saw Röhm as one of their own. In early January 1931, Röhm assumed the post of SA chief of staff.