Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (81 page)

The parliamentary session reconvened shortly after 6 p.m., with SPD Chairman Otto Wels taking the floor. After the persecution Social Democrats had suffered in recent days, he declared, no one could expect him to support the Enabling Act: “You can take away our liberty and our lives, but not our honour.” It was a courageous speech considering the murderous atmosphere in the makeshift parliamentary hall. It was the last time for twelve years that anyone would make a public declaration of support for democratic principles and the rule of law in front of the Reichstag. “No enabling law gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible,” Wels said and went on to pay tribute to those who were being pressured and persecuted. “Your determination and loyalty deserve admiration. Your courage in your convictions and unbroken confidence are signs of a brighter future to come.” At this point the parliamentary protocol recorded repeated “laughter from the National Socialists.”
¹³¹

Hardly had Wels finished speaking than Hitler hurried to the podium to attack him: “You’ve shown up late, but you’ve shown up. The nice theories you’ve just put forth here, Herr Deputy, have been communicated a bit too late to world history.” Hitler’s reply seemed to have been extemporaneous, and it has been often cited as evidence of his gift with words. But the truth is that the editor-in-chief of
Vorwärts
, Friedrich Stampfer, had earlier distributed the text of Wels’s speech as a press release, which gave Hitler time to prepare his answer to it.
¹³²
“You’ve never seen anyone cut down like that,” Goebbels crowed. “Hitler was on a roll. It was a massive success.”
¹³³
In fact, the Reich chancellor’s speech revealed his true, brutal, power-hungry face, which he had kept concealed behind the mask of the respectable statesman in Potsdam. “Gentlemen, you are whiny and unfit for the current age, if you already speak of persecution,” Hitler snarled at the Social Democrats. He even went so far as to admit that his overtures to secure support for the Enabling Act were a calculated manoeuvre: “Only because we have Germany and its misery and the necessities of national life clearly in view do we appeal at this hour to the German Reichstag to approve what we could have seized for ourselves anyway.” In conclusion, Hitler once again directly addressed the Social Democrats: “I think that you will not vote for this law because your innermost mentality is incapable of comprehending the intention that animates us…I can only say: I do not want you to vote for it! Germany should be free, but not through any action of yours!” The protocol recorded: “Long, frenetic cries of ‘Heil’ from the National Socialists and the rows of spectators. Applause from the conservative nationalists.”
¹³⁴

Hitler could not have expressed any more clearly that his emphasis on “legality” had been mere lip service and that his government was going to do away with all norms of separation of powers and the rule of law. Nonetheless, that did not prevent the spokesmen of the Centre Party, the Bavarian People’s Party, the German State Party, the German People’s Party and Christian People’s Service from voting for the Enabling Act on behalf of their factions—“in the expectation of an orderly development,” as Reinhold Maier from the State Party put it.
¹³⁵
In the final roll call 441 deputies voted yes, while 94 representatives of the decimated SPD faction voted no. With that, the “blackest day” in German parliamentary history was over.
¹³⁶
On 24 March in cabinet, Hugenberg expressed his gratitude for the “excellent success” to Hitler. He particularly praised Hitler’s reply to Wels’s speech, which had “generally been received as giving the SPD a complete dressing-down.”
¹³⁷
As far as the definitive removal of parliamentary democracy and persecution of its last defenders, the Social Democrats, were concerned, there was complete agreement between National Socialists and conservative nationalists.

The Enabling Act concluded the first phase of the Nazi consolidation of power, and the next step was pre-programmed. In shutting down parliament as a state legislative organ, the political parties sacrificed their
raison d’être
. But Hitler’s government had not just made itself independent of the Reichstag, which henceforth would merely rubber-stamp and celebrate the regime’s decisions. It had also got rid of the president’s authority to issue emergency decrees.
¹³⁸
This marked the definitive end of the idea of “taming Hitler,” which depended on the ability to call upon the powers of the president’s office. Hitler was no longer constrained in any way by his conservative coalition partners, even though he kept them in his cabinet for the time being to maintain appearances. “So now we are the masters,” declared Goebbels, who sat with Hitler in the Chancellery on the evening of 23 March to listen to a rebroadcast of the Führer’s reply to Wels on the radio.
¹³⁹
Although the Enabling Act, which took effect the following day, was limited to four years, it was extended three times and remained the basis of National Socialist rule until the demise of the regime.

—

A mere week later, on 1 April, the Hitler government launched its next offensive, calling for the first boycott of Jewish businesses, lawyers and doctors. Since Hitler had taken power on 30 January, anti-Semitic agitation had risen noticeably. Physical attacks on Jews and Jewish businesses had become part of everyday life in many cities and areas. Usually they were organised by local SA and party activists.
¹⁴⁰
The day after the 5 March election, gangs of SA thugs went after Jewish pedestrians on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. “In several parts of Berlin a large number of people, most of whom appeared to be Jews, were openly attacked in the streets and knocked down,” the Berlin correspondent of the
Manchester Guardian
wrote. “Some of them were seriously injured. The police could do no more than pick up the injured and take them off to hospital.”
¹⁴¹
Reports like this in foreign newspapers caused outrage. On 26 March, some 250,000 people in New York and more than a million across the United States protested against the Hitler regime’s anti-Jewish discrimination and persecution.
¹⁴²

Both Nazi propaganda and reports by German diplomats described international criticism as a Jewish “atrocity propaganda” against which the Third Reich had to defend itself.
¹⁴³
The Nazi-organised national boycott of Jewish businesses, doctors and lawyers was intended to punish German Jews for foreign criticism and to channel the “wild” activities of the SA towards a common end. Goebbels and Hitler likely decided to stage the boycott when they had met on the Obersalzberg on 26 March. “I am writing a call for an anti-Jewish boycott,” Goebbels noted after the meeting. “That will put an end to the agitation abroad.”
¹⁴⁴
A “Central Committee for Defence against Jewish Atrocity and Boycott Agitation” planned and organised the initiative. It was chaired by the Nuremberg Gauleiter, Julius Streicher, the publisher of the viciously anti-Semitic newspaper
Der Stürmer
. The NSDAP leadership’s appeal was published on 28 March in the
Völkischer Beobachter.
It called on all Nazi Party groups to form immediate action committees so that the boycott could commence “abruptly” on 1 April and be carried out everywhere “down to the smallest village.” The boycott slogan was: “No good German still buys from a Jew and lets himself be talked into purchases by a Jew or his backers.”
¹⁴⁵

On 29 March, Hitler informed his cabinet about the planned initiative, leaving no doubt that he had ordered the boycott and stood behind it personally. “He was convinced that a boycott of 2–3 days would convince Jews that their atrocious anti-German agitation was hurting themselves the most,” read a protocol of the cabinet meeting.
¹⁴⁶
Two days later, some of his ministers voiced concerns. Finance Minister von Krosigk feared “massive losses in sales tax revenues,” while Transport Minister Eltz-Rübenach was concerned the initiative would hurt the German economy, citing the fact that all foreign passages aboard the ships MS
Europa
and MS
Bremen
had been cancelled. Hitler appeared to be flexible, saying that he would be willing to postpone the boycott until 4 April if the governments of Britain and the United States issued immediate statements condemning foreign criticism of Nazi Germany. Otherwise, Hitler threatened, the boycott would go ahead as planned for Saturday 1 April, although there would be a two-day pause between then and 4 April.
¹⁴⁷
In fact, both foreign governments agreed to the statement demanded on the evening of 31 March, but that was deemed too late. The mobilised party grass roots were itching for action, and Hitler would have lost face, even had he wanted to call off the boycott. “I don’t know whether my name will be held in honour in Germany in 200 or 300 years,” Hitler told the Italian ambassador, Vittorio Cerruti, on the eve of the boycott. “But I’m absolutely certain that in 500 or 600 years the name Hitler will be universally glorified as the name of the man who once and for all eradicated the global pestilence that is Jewry.”
¹⁴⁸

On the morning of 1 April, SA men took up positions with placards in front of Jewish businesses, doctors’ offices and legal firms all over Germany and tried to get people to participate in the boycott. “The Jewish businesses—and there were a lot of them in the streets in the east—were open, and SA men planted themselves, their feet spread wide apart, before their front doors,” recalled Sebastian Haffner, who witnessed the boycott in Berlin.
¹⁴⁹
Reports differed about how the public reacted. “A murmur of disapproval, suppressed but still audible,” went through the country,” wrote Haffner in retrospect.
¹⁵⁰
The British ambassador also concluded that the boycott had not been popular but that neither had public opinion swung around in Jews’ favour.
¹⁵¹
There were plenty of contemporary stories about customers who deliberately visited Jewish businesses, doctors and lawyers on 1 April. But these people were no doubt a courageous minority. The majority seem to have followed the wishes of the regime. They withheld their patronage, stood by and looked on.
¹⁵²

Many German Jews were deeply shocked by the first government-organised national anti-Semitic initiative. “I always felt German,” Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary. “And I always thought the twentieth century and central Europe were different than the fourteenth century and Romania. A mistake.”
¹⁵³
Klemperer was not alone among patriotic German Jews in feeling that in one fell swoop all guarantees against a return to medieval barbarism had been swept away. The boycott was also greeted with shame and horror by Gentile Germans critical of the regime. Count Kessler, who had resided in Paris since deciding not to return to Germany, remarked on 1 April: “This contemptible boycott of Jews in the Reich. This criminal act of insanity has destroyed all the trust and respect Germany had regained in the past fourteen years.”
¹⁵⁴

Although the boycott was not resumed on 4 April, local SA and party groups staged repeated actions against Jewish businesses in the weeks and months that followed,
¹⁵⁵
and the Hitler government began using less conspicuous methods of forcing Jews from German society. On 7 April, the regime issued the Law Concerning the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service, which not only allowed the government to dismiss state employees considered politically unreliable, but also mandated that civil servants from “non-Aryan backgrounds” be sent into early retirement. Jewish state employees who had fought at the front in the First World War, or whose fathers or sons had fallen, were exempt from the law.
¹⁵⁶
In a letter to Hitler, Hindenburg had urged him to adopt these exceptions. “If they were good enough to fight and shed their blood for Germany,” Hindenburg wrote, “they should be considered worthy enough to serve their fatherland in their jobs.”
¹⁵⁷
This did not mean that Hindenburg was generally unhappy about the discriminatory measures. In late April, when Sweden’s Prince Carl, the head of the Swedish Red Cross, tried to intervene on behalf of German Jews, the Reich president rejected those attempts by saying that a peaceful and orderly national revolution was taking place—a development all the more remarkable because “the now-victorious National Socialist movement has been the victim of serious injustice from Jewish and Jewish–Marxist quarters.”
¹⁵⁸
Hindenburg’s intervention on behalf of Jewish war veterans was thus not a rejection of the regime’s anti-Semitic policies but rather an expression of his loyalty towards those who had fought in the First World War.

It is telling how Hitler reacted to Hindenburg’s letter. On the one hand, he justified his policies by arguing that the German people had to defend themselves against “Jews swamping certain professions,” and that Jews had remained “an alien element that had never merged with the German people.” On the other, he lavished praise upon the Reich president for intervening on behalf of Jewish veterans “in such generous human fashion,” and he promised to “be true to this noble sentiment as broadly as possible.” The next sentence he wrote epitomised Hitler as a master of dissimulation: “I understand your internal rationale, and by the way, I myself often suffer under the difficult fate of being forced to make decisions that as a human being I would prefer one thousandfold to avoid.”
¹⁵⁹
Hitler still could not afford to alienate Hindenburg, so he slipped into a role that he knew would please the Reich president: that of the polite, modest, adaptable politician who was selflessly doing his burdensome duty and who was forced to act harshly towards Jews and “Marxists” in the interest of the German people and not because that was what he himself wanted.