Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (56 page)

The Right shared the same illusion that Hitler was a lightweight, a ridiculous Austrian demagogue whose oratorical gifts they could exploit – 1932 was his
annus mirabilis
when he made his finest speeches – while ‘managing’ and ‘containing’ him. ‘If the Nazis did not exist,’ Schleicher claimed in 1932, ‘it would be necessary to invent them.’
⁸⁶
In fact the exploitation was all the other way round. The events immediately preceding Hitler’s accession to power are curiously reminiscent of Lenin’s rise – albeit the first used the law and the second demolished it – in that they both show how irresistible is clarity of aim combined with a huge, ruthless will to power. Schleicher, seeking to separate Hitler from his thugs, had had the SA banned. In May 1932 he got Brüning turned out and replaced by his own candidate, the slippery diplomat Franz von Papen. Hoping to get Hitler’s co-operation, Papen lifted the ban on the SA and called fresh elections. Hitler gave him nothing in return and denounced his government as ‘the cabinet of the barons’. On 17 July he provoked a riot in Altona, and Papen used this as an excuse to take over the Prussian state government, with its police force, the last
remaining Social-Democratic stronghold. He thought by this act to strengthen the hand of central government, but in fact it marked the end of the Weimar Republic and directly prepared the way for a government of illegality.

At the elections, Hitler doubled his vote to 37.2 per cent, and he and the Communists now held more than half the seats in the Reichstag. When Hindenburg refused to make him Chancellor, Hitler sent his men into the streets, and on 10 August five stormtroopers beat to death a Communist Party worker in front of his family. Hitler wrote an article justifying the murder and making it perfectly clear what a Nazi government meant. At yet another election in November the Nazi vote fell to 33 per cent, but the big gainers were the Communists, who now had 100 seats (the Nazis 196) in the Reichstag, so the result, paradoxically, was to make the Right more anxious to get Hitler into the government. Schleicher replaced Papen as Chancellor, hoping to tame the Nazis by splitting the Strasser wing (by now unimportant) from Hitler himself. The effect was to goad Papen into intriguing with Hindenburg to form a Papen—Hitler coalition, with General Werner von Blomberg brought in as Defence Minister as further ‘containment’. The details of this manoeuvre are exceedingly complicated – a
totentanz
or ‘dance of death’ – but the essence is simple: on one side shifting and divided aims, and an inability to focus on the real essentials of power; on the other, an unwavering aim and a firm grasp of realities.

After two days of Byzantine negotiations, Hitler emerged as Chancellor on 30 January 1933. There were only three Nazis in a cabinet of twelve, and Hitler was thought to be further boxed in by Blomberg on the one side of him, and his ‘pupper-master’, Hugenberg, on the other. But Hitler, Goering and Frick, the three Nazi ministers, had the three posts that mattered: the Chancellorship, with permission to use Article 48; the Prussian Ministry of the Interior; and the National Interior Ministry. Apart from the army, the only force in the country capable of handling the half-million Brownshirts was the Prussian police. This had already been taken out of the hands of the Social Democrats, and was now given to Goering! Blomberg could not be expected to fight both. As for Hugenberg, he had been secretly betrayed by Papen, who had agreed that Hitler should have new elections (which he could now manage), certain to cut Hugenberg down to size.
⁸⁷

30 January 1933, therefore, was a point of no return, for Germany and indeed for the world. As Goebbels remarked, if we have the power we’ll never give it up again unless we’re carried out of our offices as corpses.’
⁸⁸
The moment he set foot in the Chancellery Hitler acted with the same speed as Lenin in October 1917. He immediately
moved 25,000 men into the ministerial quarter of Berlin. That night a massed torchlight parade of his men took place, marching through the Brandenburg Gate and in front of the Chancellery for nearly six hours, while Hitler’s own police ‘specials’ kept a vast, cheerful crowd in order. At one of the illuminated windows, the excited figure of Hitler could be seen. At another was the impassive shape of Hindenburg, the Wooden Titan, pounding his cane in time to the military beat of the band.
⁸⁹

The crowd was cheerful because politics were unpopular with most Germans and Hitler had promised to end them and substitute a one-party state. The great theme of his speeches throughout the previous year was that ‘politicians had ruined the Reich’. Now he would use politics to wage war on politicians, his election was an election to end elections, his party a party to end parties: ‘I tell all these sorry politicians, “Germany will become one single party, the party of a great, heroic nation.”’ What he was proposing was a revolution for stability, a revolt against chaos, a legal
putsch
for unity. As such he was in a powerful German tradition. Wagner had presented politics as an immoral, non-German activity. Thomas Mann had denounced ‘the terrorism of politics’.
⁹⁰
Hitler offered what the Marxist writer Walter Benjamin called ‘the aestheticization of politics’, the art without the substance. In 1919 the Surrealists had called for a ‘government of artists’. Now they had one. Of the Nazi bosses, Hitler was not the only ‘Bohemian’, as Hindenburg put it. Funk wrote music, Baldar von Schirach and Hans Frank poetry, Goebbels novels; Rosenberg was an architect, Dietrich Eckart a painter. Hitler gave the Germans the unifying side of public life: spectacle, parades, speeches and ceremony; the divisive side, the debates, voting and decision-making, was either abolished completely or conducted by a tiny élite in secret. The parade on 30 January was a foretaste of the first, which Hitler did better than anyone else and which was the first aspect of his regime Stalin began to imitate.

The second began the next morning with Goering’s take-over of the Prussian state machine, marked by massive changes in personnel, especially of senior police-officers, and the issue of orders for the rapid expansion of the state
Geheime Staatspolizei
(Gestapo) under Nazi officers. Four days later Hitler issued a decree, using his powers under Article 48, ‘For the Protection of the German People’, which gave the government complete discretion in banning public meetings and newspapers. On 22 February Goering created an additional ‘auxiliary police’, 50,000 strong, composed entirely from Nazi units. The idea was to break up any non-Nazi organizations capable of resisting. As he put it: ‘My measures will not be qualified by legal
scruples or by bureaucracy. It is not my business to do justice. It is my business to annihilate and exterminate – that’s all!’ He said to his police: ‘Whoever did his duty in the service of the state, whoever obeyed my orders and took severe measures against the enemy of the state, whoever ruthlessly made use of his revolver when attacked, could be certain of protection …. If one calls this murder, then I am a murderer.’
⁹¹

Goering’s task was made much easier by the burning of the Reichstag on 28 February, now generally seen as indeed the work of the feeble-minded Martinus van der Lubbe, but in any event mighty convenient to the new regime. The same day Hitler put through the Emergency Decree of 28 February 1933, ‘For the Protection of the People and the State’, supplemented by another ‘Against Betrayal of the German People and Treasonable Machinations’. They formed the real basis of Nazi rule, since they enabled the police to bypass the courts completely.
⁹²
The key passage reads:

Articles 114–18, 123–4 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are for the time being nullified. Consequently, curbs on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, of associations, and of assembly, surveillance over letters, telegrams and telephone communications, searches of homes and confiscations of as well as restrictions on property, are hereby permissible beyond the limits hitherto established by law.

This decree gave Hitler everything he needed to set up a totalitarian state and was indeed the basis of his rule, remaining in force until 1945. But following the elections of 5 March, which gave the Nazis 43.9 per cent of the votes (288 seats), Hitler brought in an Enabling Act, which he got debated and passed by the Reichstag (sitting temporarily in the Kroll Opera House, surrounded by
SA
and
SS
units) on 23 March. The first article transferred the right to legislate from the Reichstag to the administration, the second gave the latter power to make constitutional changes, the third passed the right to draft laws from the president to the chancellor, the fourth extended the act to treaties and the fifth limited it to four years (it was extended in 1937, 1941 and again in 1943). It was, in effect, an act for the abolition of the constitution and legal government – and Hitler never saw the need, or took the trouble, to replace the old Weimar Constitution with one of his own. It really added nothing to the 28 February decree, except in a metaphysical sense. It was actually debated, the only political debate Hitler as ruler ever allowed, just like Lenin with the solitary meeting of the Provisional Assembly. The parallels are almost uncanny, except that Hitler, unlike Lenin, took part in the debate himself – furiously retorting to
a speech on behalf of the Social Democrats, who opposed the bill (twenty-six of them and eighty-one Communists were already under arrest or in flight). But the Right and Centre parties voted for the bill, which was carried 441–94, so this act of abdication marked the moral death of a republic which had died in law already on 28 February.

Resistance was feeble or non-existent. Some of the Communist leaders, who only a few weeks before had believed Hitler’s entry into office would be an ephemeral prelude to their own triumph, were simply murdered. Others fled to Russia where the same fate soon awaited them. The great mass of the Communist rank-and-file humbly submitted and nothing more was heard of them. The unions surrendered without the least hint of a struggle. On 10 May the Social Democrats, insisting that the Nazis were merely ‘the last card of reaction’, allowed all their property and newspapers to be taken from them. A week later their deputies actually voted for Hitler’s foreign policy, so that Goering was able to declare: ‘The world has seen that the German people are united where their fate is at stake.’ In June all the non-Nazi parties of Right, Left and Centre, together with their paramilitaries, were declared dissolved. At the end of the month, Hugenberg, the great ‘container’ of Hitler, was ignominiously pitched out of his office. Finally in July the National Socialists were declared the only legal party. It had taken Hitler less than five months to destroy German democracy completely, about the same time as Lenin. Not a soul stirred. As Robert Musil put it: ‘The only ones who give the impression of absolutely refusing to accept it all – although they say nothing – are the servant-girls.’
⁹³

With the mature Soviet model to guide him, Hitler set up the apparatus of terror and the machinery of the police state even more quickly than Lenin – and soon on a scale almost as large as Stalin’s. The initial agent in this endeavour was Goering, using the Prussian police and his newly created Gestapo of
SA
and ss men, operating from its Berlin
HQ
on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. It was Goering who destroyed the Communist Party in the space of a few weeks by a policy of murder – ‘A bullet fired from the barrel of a police-pistol is my bullet’ was the assurance he gave his men – or internment in the concentration camps he began setting up in March. The breathtaking brutality of Goering’s campaign, conducted without the slightest regard for legality, goes a long way to explain the silence or compliance of those groups who might have been expected to oppose the new regime. They were simply afraid. It was known that people the Nazis disliked simply disappeared without trace: murdered, tortured to death, buried in a camp. All opposition was
enveloped in the blanket of fear, and that was precisely the effect Goering wished to create. Hitler praised his work as ‘brutal and ice-cold’.
⁹⁴

It was Hitler’s custom, however, to duplicate or double-bank all his agencies, so that he could back one against another, if need be, and rule through division. He had never quite trusted the
SA
,
now a million strong, which was Roehm’s creation. After his release from Landsberg he had created, from within the
SA
, a personal bodyguard of
Schutzstaffel
(ss), or security units. In 1929, when the black-shirted ss numbered 290, Hitler entrusted it to the twenty-nine-year-old Heinrich Himmler, the well-connected son of a former tutor to the Bavarian royal family. Despite his prim appearance and habits (his diaries record when he shaved, took a bath or had a haircut, and he kept all receipts and ticket stubs), Himmler was a
Freikorps
thug and violent anti-Semite, who wore his rimless pince-nez even when duelling. He had been a surveyor of the secret arms dumps hidden in the countryside to deceive the Allied Control Commission, and his army and social connections allowed him to raise the tone of the ss above that of the
SA
. Some of its unit commanders were noblemen. It included many doctors. Senior civil servants and industrialists were among its honorary members. Himmler, unlike Roehm, would not recruit the unemployed.
⁹⁵

With Hitler’s encouragement, Himmler expanded the ss rapidly, so that it numbered 52,000 at his accession to power. Hitler’s personal ss guard, the
Leibstandarte
, was a whole division. Himmler was never one of Hitler’s intimates. He was treated as a functionary who could be filled with the loyalty of awe and terror; and it is a curious fact that Himmler, the one man who could have destroyed Hitler, feared him right to the end. Hitler regarded the ss as his own instrument of power, and he gave it special tasks. From 1931 it had a Race and Settlement Office, charged with practical applications of Nazi race theory, keeping stud books of party members and the drawing up of race-laws. The ss thus became the natural instrument to carry through Hitler’s gigantic eastern extermination and settlement policy when the time came. At the same time, Himmler recruited a former naval officer, Reinhard Heydrich, whom he saw as the ideal Aryan type, to take charge of a new security and intelligence service, the
Sicherheitsdienst
(SD
), which Hitler instructed him to set up to watch Roehm’s
SA.