Hitler's Charisma (13 page)

As for President Hindenburg, he would see the beginnings of a “new monarchy” installed before he died—just not the kind of monarchy he had been expecting.

PART TWO
 
JOURNEY TO WAR

Adolf Hitler looked out from the window of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin on the evening of 30 January 1933 as row upon row of Nazi stormtroopers paraded past him in celebration. But despite witnessing this image of strength, he knew he was not yet secure in power as chancellor. Less than half the population of Germany had voted for him and his Nazi party. There were only three Nazis in the Cabinet and he had to rule, as had the recent failed chancellors, with the consent of President Hindenburg via the constitutional device of Article 48.

Hitler had been explicit in the election campaign that he wanted to sweep democracy out of Germany. But a truly charismatic leader needs the support of the masses—even in a one party state. Without that support Hitler could perhaps cling on to power as a straightforward dictator, but he would never become what he aspired to be—a statesman who ruled by acclamation.

As a consequence he had to try and transcend the support for the party he led. The more he was associated with the actions of individual Nazis or connected himself with the detailed implementation of policies, the more he risked the German public perceiving him as a politician like all
the others. So what Hitler attempted, during the first eighteen months of his chancellorship, was not just to force through measures which released him from the burden of Article 48 and the Weimar constitution, but to demonstrate in dramatic ways that he was not just the leader of the Nazi party but the ruler of all Germany. In pursuit of this aim he would order the murder of many of his old party comrades.

At the start of his chancellorship, Hitler acted predictably enough. He had always supported the use of violence against his opponents, and he moved to suppress opposition from the first moment he came to power. In this respect the actions of Hermann Göring were of most help to him. Göring, as Prussian Minister of the Interior, had direct control of the police force in the greater part of Germany. And he soon made his wishes clear in a directive of 17 February 1933: “Police officers who fire their revolvers in the execution of their duty will be protected by me without regard to the consequences of using their weapons.”
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He then summed up his attitude to human rights in a speech at Dortmund a few days later: “A bullet fired from the barrel of a police pistol is my bullet. If you say that is murder then I am a murderer … I know two sorts of law because I know two sorts of men: those who are with us and those who are against us.”
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Göring was a devoted creature of Hitler’s. Ernst Röhm and the stormtroopers, however, were a less straightforward proposition. Many of them saw in the elevation of Hitler to the chancellorship a chance to take rewards for themselves and practise unlimited revenge on their ideological enemies. Rudi Bamber’s father, for example, was one of their victims in those early days of Nazi rule. Nazi stormtroopers took him, along with a group of other Jews, to a sports stadium in Nuremberg and made them cut the grass with their teeth. “It’s very traumatic,” says Rudi Bamber, “to feel that whatever you have done is of no consequence and you’re just a Jew and that’s all there is to it.”
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But though there were a number of attacks on Jews in the immediate aftermath of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, it was the political enemies of the Nazis who were particularly targeted. “Right at the beginning,” says Maria Mauth, then a schoolgirl in northern Germany, “the first Communists and Social Democrats were carted off. I even saw it myself—the lorries—but it did not make us think. They were only Communists after all … they were enemies of the people.”
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Initially these “enemies of the people” were imprisoned in makeshift
jails where they were often cruelly mistreated. They were held without charge, without due legal process, and at the whim of their captors. But Hitler, whilst he approved of violently suppressing any opposition, did not necessarily approve of all the SA’s actions. He was concerned, as he said in a speech on 10 March 1933, that the “molesting of individuals, the obstruction of business life, must cease on principle.”
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Two days later, on 12 March, he called on his “party comrades” to “exercise the strictest and blindest discipline from now on. There must be no more isolated operations …”
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Significantly, just over a week later on 21 March 1933, the first “official” concentration camp opened at Dachau, outside Munich. Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Even though Himmler nominally reported to Röhm, it was obvious that he had grander ambitions. Himmler was not a buccaneering thug like his direct boss, but an altogether colder character who would terrorise the Nazis’ enemies systematically and to order. Dachau, administered by a reliable secret policeman like Himmler, fitted into Hitler’s vision of the new Germany in a way that Röhm’s stormtroopers did not.

Not that those caught up in the horror of Nazi oppression would have seen much difference in the way Himmler’s SS, as opposed to Röhm’s SA, treated them. Under Himmler’s control, conditions inside Dachau were still appalling. The socialist politician Josef Felder was imprisoned in the notorious “bunker”—a collection of isolation cells away from the main prison huts. Here he was tied up with chains and taunted with threats of his imminent execution. He was also starved—given only water to drink and the occasional piece of stale bread to eat.

Nonetheless, many of those who had welcomed Hitler’s promise to restore “order” to Germany were not unhappy to see concentration camps established—and consequently they put an inaccurate gloss on events. “In Dachau he [i.e., Hitler] collected all the people—really the professional criminals,” says Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, then a young air force officer. “And they were there in Dachau, in that working camp, and people didn’t object too much at this.”
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Others rationalised the suffering as a necessary consequence of a “revolution.” “At the moment we thought it [the establishment of camps like Dachau] was necessary,” says Reinhard Spitzy. “We knew this was a revolution. But look here, I studied the French Revolution. How many people have been killed by guillotine—40,000 have been
killed by guillotine in France … That means that in all revolutions—and we thought we had a revolution—blood is running … That the Nazi revolution killed some people, I think that’s normal, there was never a revolution in the world without killing.”
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Hitler was careful to demonise the Communists as the biggest and most immediate threat to the new “national community” which the Nazi revolution wished to establish. And in this respect he was helped by a Dutch Communist called Marinus van der Lubbe, who set fire to the German parliament—the Reichstag—on 27 February 1933. The destruction of this iconic building increased the fear amongst the German population of a possible Communist revolution and thus served to justify the Nazis’ oppression of their political opponents. The convenient timing of van der Lubbe’s actions—a week before elections called by Hitler—has led a number of historians to believe that the Nazis conspired to create the fire themselves and that van der Lubbe did not act alone, but there is no conclusive evidence for this conspiracy theory. Certainly the unsystematic actions of the Nazis after the fire do not suggest that they knew about it beforehand.

However, the Reichstag fire did lead—the very next day—to the hurried adoption of one of the most restrictive legislative measures the Nazi state ever imposed: the decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State. Article 1 of the decree suspended basic human rights—such as the right to a free press and peaceful assembly—whilst Article 2 allowed the Reich Government, via the Nazi Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, to take over the police powers of the individual German states in order to “restore security.”

Five days later, on 5 March 1933, the Germans voted in the last general election to be held for more than a dozen years. Despite a massive propaganda effort, despite fear of a Communist uprising, despite Hitler’s “appeal to the nation,” despite all of this and more, the Nazis did not manage to gain the support of a majority of the German electorate. Fifty-six per cent of the German people voted for other political parties.

The fact that most Germans still did not want the Nazis represented a huge challenge for Adolf Hitler. He had already privately announced that the election would not make him change the composition of his Cabinet, nor would it remove him from power. Instead, he pushed forward with an attempt to pass an Enabling Law in the new Reichstag. This would allow him to issue decrees without referral to President Hindenburg under Article
48—but he needed a two-thirds vote in the Reichstag in order to pass the necessary legislation.

In particular, the Nazis needed the support of the Catholic Centre Party, and in his speech to the new Reichstag representatives on 23 March 1933—with the meeting held in the Kroll Opera House as a result of the Reichstag fire—Hitler was deliberately conciliatory to them, saying that his government “regards Christianity as the unshakeable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation.”
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Hitler believed no such thing, but he recognised that for purely political reasons he had to make this assertion. He had acted in a similar way before. After his release from Landsberg prison he had demonstrated his understanding of the power of Christianity in German politics when he had expelled the Gauleiter of Thuringia, Artur Dinter, from the Nazi party. Against Hitler’s wishes, Dinter had wanted to promote his own Aryan religion
Geistchristentum
—a heretical version of Christianity that excluded the Old Testament from the Bible and violently attacked the Jews. But, at the time, Hitler needed the support of the Minister President of Bavaria, a member of a Catholic party—so Dinter had to go.
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In 1933, just as it had years before, Hitler’s ploy of telling the German Catholics what they wanted to hear worked. Members of the Catholic Centre party—who were also all too well aware of the fate awaiting those who opposed the Nazis—decided to support the Enabling Law.

Hitler’s first, carefully prepared, statement to parliament on 23 March was in marked contrast to his hurriedly constructed response later in the same debate when the Enabling Act was attacked by Otto Wels of the Social Democrats. In his first speech Hitler attempted to portray himself as a statesman and as the leader of the whole of Germany: “We want to restore the unity of spirit and will to the German nation. We want to preserve the everlasting foundations of our life …”
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In the second he returned to his beer hall origins and ridiculed Wels, pouring contempt upon both him and the party he led. “You are sissies [
wehleidig
—literally “snivelling”], gentlemen,” said Hitler, “and not worthy of this age, if you start talking about persecution at this stage of the game.” He also announced that the Nazis were “restraining” themselves from “turning against those who tortured and humiliated us for 14 years.”
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After telling the Social Democrats that he didn’t even want them to vote for the Enabling Law and that “Germany will be liberated but not by you!” Hitler sat down to a rapturous reception from the Nazi members of parliament.

It was a telling moment. In his speech attacking the Social Democrats, Hitler had shown all of the rhetorical attributes that had made him undisputed dictatorial leader of the Nazi party. But he had also demonstrated many of the qualities that frightened large numbers of ordinary German voters—intolerance, aggression and wild partisanship.

Still, the Nazis won the vote. With the support of the Centre party the Enabling Law received 444 votes against the 94 votes cast by the Social Democrats. It was the moment all pretence of democracy left Germany. As a consequence, within four months, every political party in the country other than the Nazis was either banned or broke up voluntarily.

However, even with this milestone reached, Hitler still could not act exactly as he wanted. One of the most serious restraints on him was that the two policies that were central to his world view—the desire to remove all the Jews from Germany and the longing to acquire a Nazi empire in Eastern Europe—had not been trumpeted during the various election campaigns of the previous three years. There was little evidence that a majority of Germans supported either of them. This left Hitler in an unusual position for a leader just voted into office—he didn’t yet feel able to implement his most important “visionary” ideas.

It wasn’t that Hitler pretended not to believe in these policies—just that he was careful how he expressed this belief. The delicate line that Hitler trod was demonstrated by his action over the Jewish boycott in April 1933. Hitler was angry at the reception that measures like the Enabling Law and the mistreatment of German Jews by Nazi stormtroopers—as well as the start of the removal of Jews from the civil service and universities—had received in the foreign press. He saw in this criticism evidence of one of his most cherished fantasies—a worldwide “Jewish conspiracy.” This belief in Jewish influence crossing national boundaries was certainly shared by much of the core Nazi support. “We looked at it [anti-Semitism] in terms of global Jewry which wanted to gain power, which wanted to rule the world,” says Bruno Hähnel, one of the earliest Nazi supporters. “So it was global Jewry that we were—I don’t want to say afraid of, perhaps we were afraid of it—well, standing up to.”
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