Hitler

Legal Revolution

In a tempestuous process lasting only a few months, Hitler both took power and put across a good part of his far-reaching totalitarian claims. According to the sneering commentaries published at the time of his accession to office, he would not survive as Chancellor for very long. Illusions were the order of the day; from the Center all the way to the Social Democratic and the Communist parties he was widely regarded as a “prisoner” of Hugenberg. Skeptical predictions were legion. He would run afoul of the power of his conservative partners in the coalition of Hindenburg and the army, of the resistance of the masses, of the multiplicity and difficulty of the country’s economic problems. Or else there would be foreign intervention. Or his amateurishness would be exposed at last. But Hitler gave all these prophecies the lie in an almost unprecedented process of conquering power. Granted, every detail of his actions was not so minutely calculated in advance as may sometimes appear in historical hindsight. But he never forgot for a moment what he was after, namely, to gather all the threads of power into his own hand by the time the eighty-five-year-old President died. And he knew how to go about it: namely, to continue to use those tactics of legality he had so successfully tested in past years. A dynamic program of surprise assaults enabled him to deliver blow upon blow, smashing open each new position the opponent occupied. The discouraged forces that tried to oppose him were given no opportunity to compose themselves and regroup their ranks. They unwittingly threw all kinds of chances into his path, and with growing cleverness he learned to seize them.

Hitler devoted the cabinet session of February 2, 1933, chiefly to preparations for the new elections, in which Hugenberg had reluctantly acquiesced shortly before the swearing-in on January 30. After the ceremony Hitler had promptly provided a reason for these elections by conducting sham negotiations with the Center and being unable to reach agreement. Here was his chance to repair the defeat of the preceding November. If the elections turned out well for him, and with his control of the machinery of government, such a result was assured, he would be able to shake off the control of his German-nationalist partner. Hitler’s old comrade Wilhelm Frick, now Minister of the Interior, proposed that the government set aside a million marks for the election campaign. This suggestion was rejected by Finance Minister von Schwerin-Krosigk. Nevertheless, with the power of the state behind him, Hitler no longer needed such additional help to put across that “masterpiece of agitation” foretold by Goebbels in one of his diary entries.

Characteristically, every tactical move henceforth was slanted toward the elections to be held on March 5. Hitler himself signaled the opening of the campaign with a “Proclamation to the German People,” which he read on the radio late in the evening of February 1. He had adapted swiftly to his new role and the pose it demanded. Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, was present at the reading and noted Hitler’s agitation; he has described how at times “his whole body quivered and shook.” But the document itself, which had been offered to all the cabinet members for their approval, adhered to the moderate tone of most proclamations by statesmen. Since the days of treachery in November, 1918, Hitler began, “the Almighty has withheld his blessing from our people.” Partisan dissension, hatred and chaos had converted the unity of the nation into “a confusion of political and personal opinions, economic interests, and ideological differences.” Since those days Germany “has presented a picture of heartbreaking disunity.” He deplored in general terms the inner decay, misery, hunger, lack of dignity, and the disasters of the recent past. He drew an eschatological picture of the last days of a 2,000-year-old culture faced with “a powerful and insidious attack” by Communism:

The new government would regard it as its task, he declared, “to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and co-operation.” He would be pledged to foster “Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of racial and political life.” He promised to eliminate class struggle and to restore traditions to honor. The economy would be reconstructed by means of two great Four Year Plans (the principle of which was borrowed from the Marxist enemy). As for foreign policy, Hitler spoke of Germany’s right to live, but reassured the foreign powers with placatory formulas of eagerness for reconciliation. His government, he concluded, was “determined to rectify in four years the ills of fourteen years.” But before going on to a pious appeal for God’s blessing on the work, he made it plain that his administration would not be bound by constitutional checks: “It cannot make the work of reconstruction dependent upon the approval of those who were responsible for the collapse. The Marxist parties and their leaders have had fourteen years to show what they can do. The result is a heap of ruins.”

On the whole, this address had demonstrated his capacity for restraint. But only two days later he threw off that restraint when he met with the commanders of the Reichswehr in the official residence of General von Hammerstein, the army commander in chief. Busy as he was, he had been impatient for this encounter. The reason lay not only in the key position he assigned to the military in his concept for the conquest of power. Rather, in the exhilaration of these first days in office he wanted to find others to share his grand perspectives—despite his usual bent for secrecy. In the grip of this feeling, Hitler unveiled his entire plan with remarkable candor to the army commanders.

According to one of the participants, von Hammerstein “somewhat condescendingly and ‘benevolently’ introduced the ‘Chancellor of the Reich’; the phalanx of generals responded with polite coolness; Hitler made modest, awkward bows in all directions and remained embarrassed until the time came for him to make a long after-dinner speech.” He assured the army, as the sole bearer of arms, a tranquil period of development and explained right at the outset his idea of the primacy of domestic politics. The most urgent aim of the new government was to recapture political power by the “complete reversal of present conditions in domestic politics,” by ruthless extermination of Marxism and pacifism, and by creation of a broadly based state of preparedness for attack and defense. This was to be done by “stringently authoritarian administration.” Only this, combined with a shrewd foreign policy, would put the country in a fit position to take up the struggle against the Versailles Treaty. This would be followed by a concentration of power for the “conquest of new living space in the East and its ruthless Germanization.”

By now Hitler was no longer content to justify his expansionist aims on grounds of military geography and the need to acquire new sources of food. To these arguments he now added the Depression, whose cause, he claimed to be lack of Lebensraum and whose cure lay in conquering Lebensraum. As he examined the situation, the only doubtful aspects seemed the coming years of concealed political and military rebuilding; during this period they would all find out whether France possessed statesmen. “If so, she will not allow us time, but will fall upon us (probably with eastern satellites),” one of those present recalled him saying.

This speech is another example of Hitler’s tendency to make new combinations out of disparate ideas. The structure of his thinking was such that he understood every phenomenon merely as a further argument for ideas long ago fixed—even if that involved grotesquely misunderstanding the nature of the phenomena, as he was doing with regard to the Depression. And, as always, the only solution he recognized was in the realm of violence. At the same time, the speech also reveals the continuity in Hitler’s thought. It gives the lie to those theorists who maintain that responsibility did indeed have a moderating effect upon him, and pretend to see a later change in Hitler’s personality—usually ascribed to the year 1938—when he fell back into the old aggressive hate complexes or, according to another version, into a new pathological system of delusions.

Though Hitler freely borrowed the well-tested Bolshevik and Fascist formulas for the coup d’état, he was highly original in the methods by which he consolidated his new-won power. He may be credited with inventing the classical method by which democratic institutions are crushed from within and totalitarian rule imposed with the full aid of the pre-existent state.

It was important, first of all, to adapt the terrorist practices of the preceding months to the new situation. Thus, while he continued to send his brown auxiliary troops on revolutionary rampages, he permitted a few of these “excesses” to be punished by legal action. In any particular case it would be difficult to say that justice was being done, but the impression was created that the Nazis were maintaining discipline. A convincing screen of legality concealed the real nature of the regime.

Similarly, many of the old institutional façades were left intact. In their shadow fundamental upheavals in all conditions and relationships could be carried on unhindered, until at last people no longer knew whether the system was acting justly or unjustly and could no longer decide between loyalty and opposition. Thus the paradoxical concept of the legal revolution was a good deal “more than a propagandistic trick.” It was basic to Hitler’s whole program for entrenching himself. Hitler himself later declared that Germany at that time thirsted for order, so that he was obliged to shun any open use of force. In one of his despairing moods during the last days of January, when he was reviewing all the mistakes and omissions of the past, he roundly condemned the Germans’ craving for law and order. Their mania for legalism and profound dislike of chaos had made the revolution of 1918 an indecisive affair, but it had also caused his own failure in the Munich putsch of 1923. He blamed himself along with all other Germans for the halfway measures, the compromises, and the eschewing of a bloody surprise operation: “Had we gone ahead as we should have, thousands would have been eliminated at that time…. Only afterwards does one regret having been so good.”

At the moment, to be sure, the strategy of encasing a revolution within a legal framework was proving highly successful. Before February was over, three decrees decided the whole future course of events—and yet their legitimacy seemed guaranteed by the bourgeois associates at Hitler’s side, by Hindenburg’s signature, and by the accompanying fog of nationalistic slogans. As early as February 4 the decree “For the protection of the German people” was issued. It permitted the government on the vaguest grounds to forbid political meetings and ban the newspapers and publications of the rival parties. Almost at once the government moved against deviant political views of all kinds. A congress of leftist intellectuals and artists was banned shortly after it opened, purportedly because of atheistic statements made by some of the delegates. Two days later another emergency measure, a kind of second coup d’état, ordered dissolution of the Prussian Landtag; an attempt to dissolve the Prussian legislature by parliamentary means had just failed. Another two days later Hitler, addressing German journalists, justified the emergency decree of February 4 by pointing to certain newspaper criticisms of Richard Wagner; his purpose was “to preserve the present-day press from similar errors.” Along with this he threatened harsh measures against all those “who consciously want to harm Germany.” Meanwhile, the general public was being fed carefully calculated bulletins to bring out the human side of the new Chancellor. On February 5 the Reich press agency of the National Socialist Party announced that Adolf Hitler, “who personally is also deeply attached to Munich,” was keeping his apartment in that city and had resolved not to accept his Chancellor’s salary.

With every day that passed the Nazis were penetrating deeper into the administrative apparatus. Hitler’s script for legal revolution had assigned a special role to Göring, whose fatness lent a jovial note to outright brutality. According to the new arrangements, von Papen held governmental authority in Prussia; but the real power was in Göring’s hands. While the Vice-Chancellor continued to hope that his “educational work in the cabinet” would succeed, Göring was installing a number of so-called honorary commissioners in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Such men as SS Oberfuhrer Kurt Daluege at once took hold in this ministry, which constituted the largest administrative apparatus in Germany. By a massive series of personnel shifts, dismissals, and appointments “the System bigwigs are being thrown out one after the other,” as a contemporary report put it. “From high-ranking official down to doorkeeper, this ruthless purge is going on.”

Göring kept his eye particularly on the police chiefs; within a short time he replaced most of them by high-ranking SA leaders. On February 17 he issued a decree ordering the police to “establish the finest concord with the nationalist associations (SA, SS, and Stahlhelm),” but in dealing with the Left the police were “to make free use of their weapons whenever necessary.” In a later speech he explicitly confirmed these instructions: “Every bullet that is now fired from the barrel of a police pistol is my bullet. If that is called murder, then I have committed murder, for I have ordered it all; I take the responsibility for it.”

Out of an inconspicuous minor department in Berlin police headquarters, which had been detailed to keep watch on anti-Constitutional activities, Göring began building the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), soon to become notorious as the Gestapo. Within four years, its budget had increased forty times. It had 4,000 men in Berlin alone. In order to “relieve the burden on the ordinary police in special cases,”’ on February 22 Göring set up an auxiliary police force approximately 50,000 strong, consisting chiefly of SA and SS men. This amounted to dropping the fiction of police neutrality and openly admitting the link between the party toughs and the forces of law and order. Henceforth, Nazi excesses became governmental action. “My measures,” Göring boasted, “will not be sicklied o’er by any legal scruples. My measures will not be sicklied o’er by any bureaucracy. It’s not my business to do justice; it’s my business to annihilate and exterminate, that’s all!”

This challenge was directed chiefly against the Communists. Not only were they the main enemy; they also would hold the balance in the next Reichstag. Three days after the formation of the cabinet, Göring had already banned all Communist meetings in Prussia in response to the Communist Party’s call for a general strike and demonstrations. Nevertheless, the muffled civil war continued; in the first few days of February there were clashes costing fifteen lives and ten times that number of wounded. On February 24 the police made a large-scale raid on the Communist Party headquarters, Karl Liebknccht House on Bülow Platz in Berlin. It had long since been abandoned by the Communist Party leadership, but the very next day the press and radio reported sensational finds of “tons of treasonous materials.” Subsequently these documents—which were never published—provided Nazi electioneering with atrocity stories of a projected Communist revolution: “The populace is to be terrified and cowed by preliminary measures involving murderous attacks etc. upon leaders of the nation and government, assaults upon vital factories and public buildings, poisoning of entire groups of especially feared persons, the taking of hostages, the kidnapping of wives and children of prominent men,” the police report stated. Nevertheless, the Communist Party was not banned, for that might have driven its voters into the arms of the Social Democratic Party.

The Nazis intensified their propaganda to make this campaign the noisiest and wildest of all the electoral battles of recent years. Hitler himself, who again made the greatest impact, had opened the campaign with a major speech in the Berlin Sportpalast. In it he verbosely repeated the old cry of fourteen years of shame and misery, the old denunciations of the November criminals and the parties of the “system,” and the old formulas for salvation. He ended on a pseudoreligious note. He had, he cried, the “rock-hard conviction that sooner or later the hour will come in which the millions who hate us today will stand behind us and together with us will hail what we have jointly created, toilsomely struggled for, bitterly paid for: the new German Reich of greatness and honor and power and glory and justice. Amen!”

Once again all technical media were utilized—this time with the prestige and support of the government. The country was inundated with appeals, slogans, parades, displays of banners. Once again Hitler was flying over Germany. Goebbels had hit on a new propaganda tool—radio. “Our opponents did not know what to do with its possibilities,” the propaganda chief wrote. “We must learn all the better how to handle it.” As Hitler visited city after city, the local radio station was to report on his appearance. “We will have our broadcasts held in the midst of the people and so give the listener a vivid picture of what goes on at our meetings. For each of the FUhrer’s speeches I myself will give an introduction in which I mean to try to convey to the listener the magic and the atmosphere of our mass demonstrations.”

A considerable portion of the expenses for the election campaign was obtained at an affair in the palace of the Reichstag President, to which Göring invited a number of leading businessmen on February 20. Among the participants were Hjalmar Schacht, Krupp von Bohlen, Albert Vogler of Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel), Georg von Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, the banker Kurt von Schroder, and other representatives of heavy industry, mining, and banking. In his speech to these notables Hitler once again emphasized the difference between the authoritarian ideology of employers and the democratic Constitution, which he derided as the political expression of weakness and decadence. He hailed the tightly organized ideological state as the sole possible means for combating the Communist menace, and lauded the supreme right of the great individual. He had refused to be merely tolerated by the Center, he continued. Hugenberg and the German Nationalists were only holding him back. To vanquish the enemy once and for all, he must have full control of the state. In language that abandoned even the sham of legality, he called upon his listeners for financial assistance: “We now are facing the last election. Whatever its outcome, there is no going backward…. One way or another, if the election does not decide, the decision will have to be taken in another way.” Göring followed up the appeal with a few remarks. The contribution, he said, “would surely come all the more easily to industry if it knew that the election on March 5 would surely be the last for ten years, or even for a hundred years.” Thereupon Schacht turned to the company, saying, “And now, gentlemen, to the cashier!” He proposed the creation of an “election fund” and promptly collected from the leading industrial firms at least 3 million marks, possibly more.¹

In his campaign speeches, too, Hitler abandoned a good deal of his restraint. “The period of international babble, the promise of reconciliation among nations, is over and done with; its place will be taken by the German People’s Community,” he declared in Kassel. In Stuttgart he promised to “burn out the symptoms of rottenness and eliminate the poison.” He was determined, he said, “under no circumstances to let Germany fall back into the past regime.” He carefully avoided defining his program in detail (“We do not want to lie and we do not want to deceive… and give cheap promises”); his only specific statement was his pledge “never, never… to depart from the task of exterminating Marxism and everything connected with it” in Germany. The “first point” in his program would be to notify the adversary: “Away with all illusions!” Four years hence he would give the German people another chance to vote for him, but he would give no such opportunity to the parties of disintegration. Then let the German people judge, he exclaimed, falling into that messianic tone to which he was so prone at that period. He would admit no other judge, but “for my part the people may crucify me if they think that I have not done my duty.”²

One of the stratagems of legal revolution was not to openly crush the adversary, but instead to provoke him to acts of violence so that he himself provided the pretext for legal measures of repression. Goebbels described these tactics in a diary note dated January 31: “For the present we intend to refrain from direct countermeasures [against the Communists], First the Bolshevist attempt at revolution must flare up. Then we will strike at the proper moment.” This was Hitler’s old dream: to be called in at the climax of a Communist uprising, and annihilate the great foe in a single dramatic clash. Then he would be hailed by the nation as the restorer of order and granted legitimacy and respect. As early as the first cabinet meeting of January 30, therefore, he had dismissed Hugenberg’s proposal that the Communist Party be banned outright, its seats in the Reichstag withdrawn, thus assuring a parliamentary majority by doing away with the need for new elections.

He was worried, however, that the Communists might be in no position for a full-scale, vigorous act of rebellion. At various times he had expressed doubts of their revolutionary impetus—which, incidentally, Goebbels had also done early in 1932 when he said he could no longer see them as a danger. As a matter of fact, Nazi propaganda had to work hard to create the necessary bogey man. The revelations about the tons of seditious material found in Communist Party headquarters served this purpose along with a flock of rumors, obviously inspired by the Nazis themselves from the middle of February on, concerning a plan to assassinate Hitler. Rosa Luxemburg’s vain question of 1918, “Where is the German proletariat?” remained unanswered this time as well. To be sure, a few street battles occurred during the early weeks of February, but these were all local clashes. There was no sign of a centrally directed attempt at a major uprising of the sort that could stimulate full-blown anxiety complexes. Partly, the reason for this was the Depression and the depleted energies of the working class. But the principal reason was the grotesque error of the Communist leadership in its estimate of the historical situation. In spite of persecution and torture, the flight of many comrades and the mass defections of their followers, the Communists clung to their doctrine that the real enemy was Social Democracy, that there was nothing to choose between Fascism and parliamentary democracy, and that Hitler was merely a puppet whose installation in power was only bringing the victory of Communism closer. In this stage of history, the Communist leaders preached, patience was the supreme revolutionary virtue.

These tactical errors evidently expressed an underlying shift in the realities of power. One of the strange aspects of the seizure of power was the disappearance of the enemy at the moment of confrontation. For a long time the Communists had provided Nazism with psychological nourishment. The Red menace had been the crucial inspiration, had sparked the growth of National Socialism into a mass movement. Now a Communist following numbering millions, forming a powerful and effective threat, terrifying the bourgeoisie, had evaporated without even token resistance, without dramatic action, without so much as sounding the trumpet blast for “the final conflict.” If we accept the principle that we cannot speak of Fascism without mentioning both capitalism and Communism, the historical links to both were snapped at this time. Henceforth Fascism was neither an instrument nor a negation nor a mirror image of anything. During those days of the seizure of power it came into its own. And from then on, right to the end, Communism would not again emerge as a counterforce provoking a Fascist reaction.

The dramatic Reichstag fire of February 28, 1933, must be seen against this background, as well as the years of discussion that followed over the authorship of this deed. The Communists always passionately denied any connection with the fire, and in fact they had no motive whatsoever for it. For this very reason it was possible to paint a convincing picture of Nazi responsibility, since the fire fitted so neatly into the pattern of Hitler’s strategy. For a long time the argument that the Nazis themselves were the incendiaries went almost unchallenged, although details remained unclarified.

In the early sixties Fritz Tobias published a study of the Reichstag fire which analyzed the many crude partisan fictions and myths that had grown up around the subject. Tobias came to the conclusion that the Nazis did not set fire to the Reichstag, that the act was in fact committed by the half-naked Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe who was caught in the burning building, dripping with sweat and triumphantly babbling, “Protest! Protest!” Tobias mustered a good deal of convincing evidence for his thesis. But considerable doubts remain, and the controversy has continued.³ We need not go into it ourselves, since the question of what individual set the fire is a criminological one, with only small bearing on our understanding of the political currents. By instantly taking advantage of the fire to further their plans for dictatorship, the Nazis made the deed their own and manifested their complicity in a sense that is independent of “whodunit” questions. In Nuremberg Göring admitted that the wave of arrests and persecutions would have been carried out in any case, that the Reichstag fire only accelerated those steps.⁴

The first measures were taken at once, right on the spot. Hitler had been spending the evening of February 27 in Goebbels’s apartment on Reichskanzlerplatz. A telephone call from Hanfstaengl informed Goebbels that the Reichstag was in flames. Goebbels at first assumed that this report was a “wild fantasy” and forbore to tell Hitler. But, shortly afterward, the news was confirmed, and he then passed it on. Hitler’s spontaneous exclamation, “Now I have them,” indicated how he meant to use the event tactically and propagandistically. Immediately afterward, the two raced “at sixty miles an hour” down Charlottenburger Chaussee to the Reichstag. Clambering over fire hoses, they finally reached the grand lobby. Here they met Göring, who had arrived first and was “going great guns.” He had already issued the obvious statements about an organized political action by thé Communists, statements that immediately prejudiced political, journalistic, and criminological opinion. One of Gôring’s associates of that period, Rudolf Diels, who later became first chief of the Gestapo, has provided a description of the scene:

Meanwhile, Göring ordered the entire police force on maximum emergency footing. That night some 4,000 functionaries were arrested; most of them were members of the Communist Party, but included in the bag were some writers, doctors, and lawyers whom the Nazis disliked, among them Carl von Ossietzky, Ludwig Renn, Erich Mühsam, and Egon Erwin Kisch. Several Social Democratic Party headquarters and newspaper offices were occupied. “If resistance is offered,” Goebbels threatened, “then clear the streets for the SA.” And although most of those arrested had to be fetched out of their beds, and the Reichstag faction leader of the Communist Party, Ernst Torgler, voluntarily surrendered to the police in order to demonstrate the untenability of the charges, the first official account—dated that very February 27!—stated:

Next morning Hitler, accompanied by Papen, called on the President. After giving a highly colored account of the events, he placed a prepared emergency decree before Hindenburg for signature. It utilized the pretext of the fire in truly comprehensive fashion, annulling all important fundamental rights of citizens, considerably extending the list of crimes subject to the death penalty, and providing the Reich government with numerous levers against the states. “People behaved as if stunned,” a contemporary noted. The Communist threat was taken very seriously by the ordinary man. Apartment houses organized guards against the feared pillaging. Peasants set up watches at springs and wells for fear of their being poisoned. These fears, further fanned by the whole propaganda apparatus of government and party, made it possible for the moment for Hitler to do almost anything. And with great presence of mind he made the most of the opportunity. Yet it remains incomprehensible that Papen and his conservative fellow “tamers” approved a decree that snatched all power from their hands and enabled the National Socialist revolution to burst through all the dikes.

The decisive factor was that the conservatives made no effort to preserve the rights of habeas corpus. This “fearful gap” meant that henceforth there was no limit to outrages by the state. The police could arbitrarily “arrest and extend the period of detention indefinitely. They could leave relatives without any news concerning the reasons for the arrest and the fate of the person arrested. They could prevent a lawyer or other persons from visiting him or examining the files on the case…. They could crush their prisoner with work, give him the vilest food and shelter, force him to repeat hated slogans or sing songs. They could torture him…. No court would ever find the case in its files. No court had the right to interfere, even if a judge unofficially obtained knowledge of the circumstances.”⁵

The emergency decree “for the protection of the people and the state,” supplemented by another decree “against betrayal of the German people and treasonous machinations” issued that same day, proved to be the decisive legal basis for Nazi rule and undoubtedly the most important law ever laid down in the Third Reich. The decree replaced a constitutional government by a permanent state of emergency. It has been trenchantly pointed out that this decree, not the Enabling Act passed a few weeks later, provided the legal basis for the regime. The decree remained in force until 1945; it provided the sham of a legal basis for persecution, totalitarian terrorism, and the repression of the German resistance right up to July 20, 1944. At the same time, one of its side effects was that the Nazis’ authority stood or fell on the thesis that the Communists had set the Reichstag fire. The subsequent trial, which could prove only the guilt of van der Lubbe, had to be regarded as a grave defeat for the Nazis. In these aspects, not in the criminological details, the crucial historical importance of the Reichstag fire lies. When Sefton Delmer, the correspondent of the London Daily Express, asked Hitler whether there was any truth to the rumors of an impending massacre of the domestic opposition, Hitler could reply sarcastically: “My dear Delmer, I need no St. Bartholomew’s Night. By the decrees issued legally we have appointed tribunals which will try enemies of the State legally, and deal with them legally in a way which will put an end to these conspiracies.” The number of persons arrested in Prussia alone within two weeks after the decree of February 28 has been estimated at more than 10,000. Beside himself with delight at the way things were going, Goebbels commented, “Once again it is a joy to live!”⁶

Goebbels had proclaimed March 5, the date of the election, “the day of the awakening nation.” All mass demonstrations were now directed toward it. The wild momentum of the Nazis’ propaganda activities all but drove their German Nationalist partners from the scene. The other parties were hounded and hectored, while the police looked on in silence. By election day the casualties among the opponents of the Nazis amounted to fifty-one dead and several hundred injured. The Nazis, for their part, had lost eighteen dead. The Völkische Beobachter quite rightly compared the NSDAP’s agitation and propaganda to “hard hammer blows.”

The eve of the election was celebrated with a grandiose spectacle in Königsberg. Hitler ended his speech with an injunction to the German people: “Now hold your heads high and proud, once again! Now you are no longer enslaved and unfree; now you are free again… by God’s gracious aid.” Whereupon the strains of a hymn rang out, the final stanza sung amid the clangor of bells from Königsberg cathedral. All radio stations had been instructed to broadcast the event live, and, according to a party directive, every station “that has the technical means will transmit the Chancellor’s voice to the street.” After the broadcast SA columns started marching throughout the country, while on the mountains and along the frontier so-called freedom fires were kindled. “It will be an enormous victory,” the organizers exulted.

Their disappointment was all the greater when the results were announced on the evening of March 5. With nearly 89 per cent of the electorate voting, the Nazi party won 288 seats. Their Nationalist coalition partners won 52. The Center retained their 73 seats, the Social Democratic Party held its own with 120, and even the Communists had lost only 19 of their 100 seats. The Nazis achieved real successes only in the South German states of Württemberg and Bavaria, where their representation had hitherto been less than their average for the country. But they missed the majority they had hoped for by nearly 40, winning 43.9 per cent of the votes. In a formal sense at least, therefore, Hitler was still dependent on the support of Papen and Hugenberg, whose share of the vote assured him a scanty majority of 51.9 per cent. In Göring’s apartment, where he heard the returns, he had muttered that as long as Hindenburg lived they would not be able to get rid of “that gang,” by which he meant his German Nationalist partners in the coalition. Goebbels, however, exclaimed: “What do figures matter now? We’re the masters in the Reich and in Prussia.” An editorial by Goebbels in Der Angriff advised the Reichstag, with astonishing cheek, “to make… no difficulties for the administration and let things take their course.”

It was part of the whole approach to the seizure of power, and part of Nazi psychology in general, to think only in terms of triumph, to counter all appearances by celebrating even the severest setbacks as victories. In spite of their disappointment the Nazis therefore pretended that the election results were an overwhelming success and made this assumed success the basis for a historic mission—“to execute the verdict that the people have passed upon Marxism.” Immediately after the election the Center protested the raising of the swastika flag on public buildings. Göring haughtily replied that “the preponderant part of the German population” had declared its adherence to the swastika flag on March 5. He added: “I am responsible for seeing that the will of the majority of the German people is observed, but not the wishes of a group which apparently has failed to understand the signs of the times.”

In the cabinet session of March 7 Hitler brashly claimed that the election had been a “revolution.” During the next four days he seized control in the states in the equivalent of a coup d’état. The SA everywhere played its customary part of embodying the wrath of a people outraged beyond the point of self-control. Storm troopers marched through the streets, besieged government offices, demanded the deposition of mayors, police commissioners, and finally the state governments themselves. In Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, the Free Cities, and in Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, and Saxony the same procedures forced the governments to resign and thus left the road clear for a “nationalist” cabinet.

Sometimes the careful language of legality cracked, and the real voice of the new masters was heard. “The government will strike down with all brutality anyone who opposes it,” Wilhelm Murr, gauleiter of Württemberg, declared after his manipulated election as the new governor of the state. “We do not say: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. No, if anyone strikes an eye from us, we will chop off his head, and if anyone knocks out one of our teeth, we will smash in his jaw.” In Bavaria Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, assisted by Ernst Röhm and Heinrich Himmler, forced Premier Held to resign on March 9 and promptly had the government building occupied. In Munich a few days earlier the state government, in an effort to fend off Gleichschaltung (forcible co-ordination), had considered restoring the monarchy under Crown Prince Rupprecht. The Bavarians warned that they would arrest any Reich commissioner who attempted to cross the line of the Main River. But now it turned out that the Reich commissioner had long been inside the country and that his popularity was far greater than that of any ministers of the state government. On March 9 state governmental authority was transferred to General von Epp, the same von Epp who had smashed soviet rule in Bavaria in 1919. Three days later, Hitler came to Munich. That morning he had announced over the radio that the black-red-goid colors of the Weimar Republic were abolished; henceforth the black-white-red flag and the swastika flag would together constitute the colors of the nation. Simultaneously, “to celebrate the victory” of the Nationalist forces, he had ordered a three-day display of flags. Now he declared “the first part of the struggle” ended, and added: “The co-ordination of the political will of the states with the will of the nation has been completed.”

The fact was that co-ordination—Gleichschaltung—was the peculiar form in which the Nazi revolution was carried to completion. In the preceding years Hitler had repeatedly decried old-fashioned and sentimental revolutionaries who saw in revolution “a spectacle for the masses.” “We aren’t wild-eyed revolutionaries who are counting on the lumpenproletariat.” The revolution Hitler had in mind was not a matter of rioting but of directed confusion, not anarchy but the triumph of orderly violence. He therefore noted with distinct displeasure the acts of terrorism that erupted immediately after the election, committed by SA men additionally inflamed by the noisy slogans of victory. Such acts disturbed him not because they were violent, but because they were undirected. In the Chemnitz district of Saxony five Communists were murdered within two days, and the editor of a Social Democratic newspaper was shot down. In Gleiwitz a hand grenade was thrown through the window of a Center deputy. In Düsseldorf armed storm troopers forced their way into a meeting being held by the mayor and lashed one of the participants with a whip. In Dresden the SA broke up a concert by the conductor Fritz Busch. In Kiel they killed a Social Democratic lawyer. They harassed Jewish businesses, released party members from prison, occupied banks, forced the dismissal of politically unpalatable officials. The number of deaths within the first few months has been reckoned at between 500 and 600; the number of those swept off to the abject concentration camps—the establishment of which was announced by Frick as early as March 8—has been estimated at about 100,000.

As always in Nazi behavior, the motive forces are a tangle of political elements, personal spite, and cold calculation. This is apparent from the names of some of the victims. Alongside the anarchist poet Erich Mühsam, we find, in the list of the murdered, the theatrical agent Rotter and his wife; the former Nazi deputy Schäfer, who had given the Boxheim Papers to the authorities; the professional clairvoyant Hanussen; Major Hunglinger of the Bavarian police, who had opposed Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller on November 9, 1923; the former SS leader Erhard Heiden; and, finally, one Ali Höhler, who happened to be the killer of Horst Wessel.

Yet Hitler assumed a sharp and injured tone when reproved by his bourgeois partners for the mounting “rule of the streets.” He told Papen that in fact he admired “the incredible discipline” of his SA and SS men. “Some day the judgment of history will not spare us a reproach because in a historic hour, ourselves perhaps already sicklied o’er by the weakness and cowardice of our bourgeois world, we proceeded with kid gloves instead of with an iron fist.” He would not let anyone deter him from his mission of exterminating Marxism, he said, and therefore “most insistently” requested Papen “henceforth no longer to bring up these complaints.”

Nevertheless, on March 10 he told the SA and SS “to see to it that the nationalist revolution of 1933 will never be compared with the revolution of knapsack Spartacists in 1918.”⁷

The SA men took such restraints in bad part. They had always assumed that coming to power would entitle them to the open use of force without having to account to anyone. Their brutalities, in fact, were meant in part to “give the revolution its true tone.” For years they had been promised that after victory Germany would belong to them. Was this pledge to turn into a mere figure of speech? To their minds, very specific things went with it; they were counting on being made officers and administrative chiefs, on receiving sinecures and pensions. But Hitler’s plan merely envisaged—at least in its first phase—sufficient pressure to bring about a complete change of personnel in key positions. As for the great mass of smaller bureaucrats, Hitler counted on their being tricked or frightened into co-operation. But the storm troopers had to be mollified as well. “The hour for smashing the Communists is coming!” he promised them as early as the beginning of February.

The disappointments of the SA constituted the hopes of the bourgeoisie. That class had looked to the brown pretorians to restore order, not to make things worse by excesses, killings, and the establishment of sinister concentration camps. They were therefore pleased to see that the SA was being set to such harmless activities as going around with collection boxes or marching in a body to church services. The deceptive notion of a moderate Hitler, the guardian of law and order, forever trying to subdue his radical followers—this notion so necessary for his good repute came into being in this early period.

In addition Nazi propaganda had coined a “second magic phrase” that immensely assisted the process of legal revolution. This phrase was the “National Rising.” It could serve as camouflage for the most brazen behavior on the part of the Nazis and as a cloak for a good many acts of violence. Moreover, it offered a slogan full of reverberations to a country still suffering from national inferiority feelings. By such creative use of language the Nazis were able to accomplish their aims and paralyze a broad sector of the public, from their conservative colleagues in the cabinet to the ordinary bourgeois citizen. They encountered no resistance. On the contrary, their seizure of power was actually hailed as a “nonpartisan” breakthrough.

Such was the pattern of thought and feeling that was imposed upon the nation and from which there was henceforth no escape. At its center, subject to innumerable and sometimes grotesque variations, stood the propaganda creation known as the Volkskanzler, the populist Chancellor remote from partisan disputes and petty selfish interests, concerned only with the law and the good of the nation. Goebbels personally now assumed the task of constructing and cultivating this image. On March 13 Hindenburg had signed the measure installing Goebbels in the post planned for him from the start but so far postponed out of consideration for the other partners in the coalition, the post of Reich Minister for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda. In establishing the Propaganda Ministry Hitler was riding roughshod over his previous pledge- that the composition of the cabinet would be unalterable.

The new minister snatched sizable administrative areas from his colleagues. But at the same time he adopted a manner of courteous urbanity that contrasted favorably with the victory-drunk, “slap-in-the-face” tone taken by most of the Nazi leaders. In his first speech to the press, in which he outlined his program, he stated that “in instituting the new Ministry the government is carrying out its plan of no longer neglecting the people. This government is a people’s government…. The new Ministry will enlighten the people concerning the plans of the administration, with the aim of establishing political coordination [Gleichschaltung] between the people and the government.”

Hitler had had to justify the establishment of the new ministry to the rest of the cabinet; he did so on the most innocent grounds, though with a good measure of irony. He made a great point, for example, of the need to prepare the people for what was going to be done about the oil and fats problem. And in fact his explanation was accepted without demur. It testifies to Hitler’s tact and magnetism that within a few weeks the conservatives had entirely forgotten their intention of “taming” him. Papen showed himself abjectly accommodating; Blomberg had succumbed all too readily when Hitler laid on the charm; Hugenberg muttered a bit under his breath, but that was all. The others scarcely counted. The task for which Goebbels was actually appointed, and into which he flung himself without delay, consisted in preparing the new government’s first public function, which was intended to pave the way psychologically for the planned Enabling Act. Of course, Hitler could have put across this law—which was meant as a “death blow” to the parliamentary system—by invoking the Reichstag fire decree and on the basis of that arresting enough deputies of the Left parties until he had attained the requisite two-thirds majority. As a matter of fact, Frick presented this possibility to the cabinet, citing figures, and it was discussed.⁸ But Hitler could also choose a formally correct course and attempt to win the consent of the Center parties. It is characteristic of his tactical style that Hitler used both approaches.

While the deputies of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party were intimidated, and many of them arrested, Hitler courted the bourgeois parties in the most ostentatious fashion—though not without reminding them, too, of the powers given him by the Reichstag fire emergency decree of February 28. His pronounced nationalistic pose of that period, his evocations of Christian morality, his bows to tradition, and in general the civil, statesmanlike, controlled manner he adopted were a part of the sham. His courtship of the bourgeoisie reached its apogee on the day of Potsdam.

That day was also the first test for the new Propaganda Minister, and he passed it brilliantly. Just as he had declared election day, March 5, the “Day of the Awakening Nation,” he now declared March 21, when the first Reichstag session of the Third Reich was to be held, the “Day of the National Rising.” A solemn state function in the Potsdam Garrison Church, above the tomb of Frederick the Great, was to mark the opening of the Reichstag. Potsdam, the soberly graceful residence of the Prussian kings, was linked in many ways to the sense of national pride, and so was the date. March 21 was not only the first day of spring but also the day on which Bismarck in 1871 had opened the first German Reichstag, thus celebrating a turning point in history.

Goebbels had directed every phase of the ceremony, and Hitler approved every detail of the script. The scenes that later seemed so overwhelming or so moving—the precise order of the marching columns, the child with a bunch of flowers by the roadside, the guns firing salutes, the sight of white-bearded veterans of the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1871, the troops presenting arms, the organ music—all this compelling mixture of tight precision and loose sentimentality was the product of cool planning and a remarkable instinct for theater. Goebbels had gone to have a look at the site beforehand and had noted: “With such great state ceremonies, the smallest touches matter.”

Significantly, the festive day began with services in the Protestant Nikolaikirche. Shortly after ten o’clock the first columns of automobiles arrived from Berlin and made their way slowly through streets jammed with people. In the cars sat Hindenburg, Göring, Papen, Frick, Reichstag deputies, SA leaders, generals: the old and the new Germany. Along the façades of the buildings hung garlands and bright tapestries; everywhere flags were festooned, the black-white-red alternating with the swastika flags, in a striking symbol of the new order. Hindenburg in his old field marshal’s uniform—he now more and more preferred it to the civilian black tailcoat—entered the church. After the service he was driven around the city. The Center deputies attended the Catholic services at the church of St. Peter and Paul. Hitler and Goebbels stayed away “because of the hostile attitude of the Catholic episcopate.” But then, among the others absent from this “people’s festival of national unity” were the Communists and Social Democrats, some of whom—as Frick had boldly announced on March 14—were detained “by urgent and more useful work… in the concentration camps.”

Shortly before twelve o’clock Hindenburg and Hitler met on the steps of the Garrison Church and exchanged that handshake which was subsequently reproduced a millionfold on postcards and posters. It symbolized the longing of the nation for reconciliation. Without “the old gentleman’s blessing,” Hitler had said, he would not have wanted to take power. Now the blessing had been bestowed. The choir and gallery of the church were filled with generals of the imperial army and the present Reichswehr, with diplomats and dignitaries. Members of the government had taken their seats in the nave. Behind them, brown-shirted, were the Nazi deputies, flanked by the representatives of the Center parties. The Kaiser’s seat had been left empty, but behind it the Crown Prince sat in full-dress uniform. As Hindenburg moved slowly to his seat in the nave, he paused for a moment before the Kaiser’s box and raised his marshal’s baton in salute. Respectfully, in a black cutaway coat, wearing the parvenu’s air of embarrassment, Hitler followed the sorrowful-looking old man. Behind them a sea of uniforms. Then the organ sounded the choral that the entire victorious army of Frederick the Great had sung after the Battle of Leuthen, which regained Silesia for the Prussians; Nun danket alle Gott.

Hindenburg’s address was brief. He pointed to the confidence that he and the people had come to feel in the new regime, so that a “constitutional basis for its work exists.” He appealed to the deputies to support the government in its difficult task, and invoked the “old spirit of this shrine” as a bulwark against “selfishness and party strife… and a blessing upon a free, proud Germany united within herself.” Hitler’s speech was pitched on the same note of moderate, deeply felt solemnity. He looked back upon the greatness and downfall of the nation and then declared his faith in the “eternal foundations” of its life, the traditions of its history and culture. After a stirring tribute to Hindenburg, whose “greathearted decision” had made possible this union “between the symbols of old greatness and youthful strength,” he asked Providence for “that courage and that perseverance which we feel around us in this room sacred to every German, as men struggling for our nation’s freedom and greatness at the feet of the bier of the country’s greatest king.”

Goebbels noted:

These scenes had an extraordinary effect upon all the participants, upon the deputies, the soldiers, the diplomats, the foreign observers, and the public. That day at Potsdam truly proved to be a turning point in history.

Some time before that Papen had boasted that within a few months he would have Hitler squeezed into such a corner “that he’ll squeak.” Things were clearly not turning out that way. Nevertheless, the “Potsdam emotional farce” seemed to demonstrate that the wild-eyed Nazi leader had after all fallen into the snares of nationalist conservatism. The picture was of a young, credulous and deferential Hitler bowing to the tradition embodied in the personality of Hindenburg and concentrated in the former capital of the Prussian kings. Only a minority of those present were not entirely duped. And many who had voted against Hitler as recently as March 5 now obviously began to waver in their judgments. To this day it is troubling to realize that many government officials, army officers, lawyers and judges, many members of the nationalistic bourgeoisie who had distrusted Hitler on rational grounds, abandoned their stand the moment the regime let them taste the joys of nationalistic feeling. “Like a tidal wave,” a newspaper of the bourgeois Right wrote, “nationalist enthusiasm swept over Germany yesterday and, let us hope, poured over the dikes that a good many of the parties had erected against it, and broke open doors which until now had been defiantly closed to it.”⁹ Long torchlight parades through the streets of Berlin and a gala performance of Die Meistersinger concluded the festival program.

Two days later the regime, and Hitler himself, showed itself in a different aspect. About two o’clock in the afternoon on March 23 the Reichstag met in the Kroll Opera House, its temporary quarters, for the session that had already had its ceremonial prelude in Potsdam. The very setting was unequivocably dominated by the colors and symbols of the National Socialist Party. Units of the SS had taken responsibility for cordoning off the building—this was the first time the SS was assuming an important public function. Inside the opera house stood long lines of brown-shirted SA men. At the back of the stage, where the cabinet and the presiding officers of the Reichstag were seated, hung a huge swastika flag. And Göring opened the session with a speech that rudely ignored the existence of other parties in the Reichstag. Turning to his “comrades,” he delivered a totally uncalled-for memorial address on Dietrich Eckart.

Then Hitler, likewise in a brown shirt, after having sported for the past few weeks predominantly civilian clothing, stepped forward on the platform to deliver his first parliamentary speech. Faithful to his unvarying rhetorical pattern, he once again began with a gloomy panorama of the period after November, 1918, of the distress and perils into which the Reich had fallen. Then he sketched in largely general terms the program of the government. He continued:

In spite of all these soothing assurances, each of the five articles of the Enabling Act smashed “an essential part of the German Constitution to smithereens.” By Article 1 legislation passed from the Reichstag to the administration; Article 2 gave the government power to make constitutional changes; Article 3 transferred the right to draft laws from the President to the Chancellor; Article 4 extended the application of the Enabling Act to treaties with foreign states; Article 5 limited the validity of the Act to four years and also to the existence of the present administration. With another characteristic change of tone, Hitler concluded his speech with a challenge to battle:

Since the government itself has a clear majority behind it, the number of cases in which there will be any need to resort to such an Act is in itself limited. But the Government of the National Rising insists all the more upon the passing of this bill. This government prefers a clear decision in every case. It offers the parties of the Reichstag the chance for peaceful development in Germany and the reconciliation which will spring from that in the future. But it is resolute and equally prepared to meet any announcement of refusal, and will take that as a statement of opposition. You, the Deputies, must decide for yourselves whether it is to be peace or war.¹⁰

As if rehearsing for their future role, the deputies, with all too few honorable exceptions, greeted Hitler’s speech with an ovation. Then all assembled rose to their feet and sang “Deutschland über Alles.” In an atmosphere that resembled a state of siege, thanks to the SA and SS guards drawn up everywhere, the parliamentary factions withdrew for a three-hour recess for consultations. Outside the building Hitler’s uniformed men began bellowing: “We want the Enabling Act—or there’ll be hell to pay.”

Everything depended upon the conduct of the Center Party. Its consent would assure the government the majority it needed to amend the Constitution. In negotiations with Dr. Kaas, the leader of the party, Hitler had given a number of assurances. Above all, he promised a concordat and, “as a return favor for an assenting vote by the Center Party,” had indicated that he would write a letter “concerning revocation of those parts of the Reichstag fire decree which prejudiced the civil and political liberties of citizens”; the letter would also stipulate that the decree was to be applied only in specific circumstances. What was more, Hugenberg and Brüning had held a conference on the evening of March 21 and agreed to make consent of the Center dependent on a clause guaranteeing civil and political liberties. The German Nationalist faction, it was decided, would introduce the motion formulated by Brüning.

During the recess, however, Brüning was informed that members of the German Nationalist faction had raised objections to the projected motion and would not sponsor it. Once more indecisive, the Center faction considered what it should do. The majority pleaded for assent; Brüning passionately opposed any such thing. It would be better, he cried, to go down gloriously than to expire wretchedly. But finally it was agreed that they would cast a bloc vote for the opinion of the majority. It could scarcely have been otherwise, given the party’s traditional opportunism, the impression made by the day at Potsdam, and the resigned recognition that the party was in no position to prevent passage of the act. After all, in conjunction with the promised letter, would not the Enabling Act bind Hitler to legality more effectively than he was bound at present?

By the time the recess ended, however, Hitler’s letter had not arrived. At Brüning’s urging, Monsignor Kaas went to see Hitler, and returned with the explanation that the letter was already signed and had been turned over to the Minister of the Interior for transmission to the Reichstag; it would arrive while the measure was being voted on. Kaas added that “if he had ever believed Hitler at all, he would have to do it this time, given the conviction in his tone.”

Meanwhile the Social Democratic Party chairman, Otto Weis, had stepped upon the platform in deep silence, during which the distant, menacing chanting of the SA and SS could be heard. In explaining his faction’s refusal to vote in favor of the bill, he made a last public profession of faith in democracy. Answering Hitler’s earlier statement on foreign policy, he said that the Social Democrats, too, had always been for German equality with other nations and against any attempt to impugn Germany’s honor. But to be defenseless, he declared, did not mean to be without honor (a play on the words wehrlos and ehrlos). That was just as true in domestic as in foreign politics. The elections had given the government parties the majority and therefore granted them the opportunity to govern constitutionally. Since this opportunity existed, it also constituted an obligation. Criticism was salutary; to persecute it would accomplish nothing. He concluded his speech with an appeal to the people’s sense of justice and a greeting to his friends and victims of persecution.

This moderate and dignified rejoinder threw Hitler into a fury. Violently thrusting aside Papen, who tried to restrain him, he mounted the platform for the second time. Pointing directly at the Social Democratic leader, he began: “You come late, but still you come![10] The pretty theories you have just proclaimed here, Mr. Deputy, are being communicated to world history just a bit too late.” In growing agitation, he declared that Social Democracy had no right to claim any common goals in foreign policy, that the Social Democrats had no feeling for national honor, no sense of justice. Then, repeatedly interrupted by stormy applause, he continued with even greater fervor:

At this point the Social Democrats began to shout loudly in protest. The Reichstag President’s bell rang, and Göring called out into the ebbing din: “Stop talking nonsense now and listen to this!” Hitler continued:

You say: “Now they want to shunt aside the Reichstag in order to continue the revolution.” Gentlemen, if that had been our purpose we would not have needed… to have this bill presented. By God, we would have had the courage to deal with you differently!

You also say that not even we can abolish Social Democracy because it was the first to open these seats here to the common people, to the working men and women, and not just to barons and counts. In all that, Mr. Deputy, you have come too late. Why didn’t you, while there was still time, make your principles known to your friend Grzesinski,[11] or your other friends Braun* and Severing,* who for years kept saying that I was after all only a housepainter! For years you asserted that on your posters. [Interjection by Göring: “Now the Chancellor is settling accounts!”] And finally you even threatened to drive me out of Germany with a dog whip.

From now on we National Socialists will make it possible for the German worker to attain what he is able to demand and insist on. We National Socialists will be his intercessors. You, gentlemen, are no longer needed!… And don’t confound us with the bourgeois world. You think that your star may rise again. Gentlemen, the star of Germany will rise and yours will sink…. In the life of nations, what is rotten, old and feeble passes and does not come again.

With the revealing remark that he was appealing only “on account of justice” and for psychological reasons “to the German Reichstag to grant us what in any case we could have taken,” Hitler fired his parting shot. Turning to the Social Democrats, he cried:

The minutes noted after these sentences: “Prolonged, stormy shouts of Heil, furious applause among the National Socialists and in the galleries. Hand-clapping among the German Nationalists. Stormy applause and shouts of Heil starting up repeatedly.”

Hitler’s reply has generally been considered an outstanding example of his gift for impromptu speaking. Thus it is worth knowing that the preceding speech by Otto Weis had been released to the newspapers beforehand, and evidently Hitler was already acquainted with it. Goebbels saw the enemy’s “fur flying” and rejoiced: “Never has anyone been so thrown to the ground and given such a brushing off as was done here.” In its bravura crudity and zest for crushing an opponent, the speech recalled that early performance of September, 1919, when a professorial speaker at a discussion first opened the sluices of Hitlerian oratory, to the astonished admiration of sober Anton Drexler. Now it was Hugenberg who at the cabinet meeting on the following day thanked Hitler “in the name of the other cabinet members… for so brilliantly putting the Marxist leader Weis in his place.”

When the storm of applause after Hitler’s speech had subsided, the representatives of the other parties took the floor. One after another they gave their reasons for consenting. Kaas, however, spoke with some embarrassment, and only after Frick, in response to another inquiry, had “solemnly assured him that the messenger had already delivered Hitler’s letter to his office in the Kroll Opera House.” The requisite three readings of the bill took only a few minutes. The result of the vote was 441 to 94; only the Social Democrats stuck to their nays. That was far more than the required two-thirds majority; it would have been sufficient even if the 81 Communist and the 26 Social Democratic deputies who had been detained by arrest, flight, or sickness had likewise voted no. As soon as Göring announced the result, the Nazis rushed to the fore. Arms raised in the Hitler salute, they gathered in front of the government bench and began singing the Horst Wessel song. That same evening the bill passed the already “co-ordinated” Reichsrat by unanimous vote. The promised letter from Hitler never reached any member of the Center.

With the passage of the “Law for the Removal of the Distress of People and Reich,” as the Enabling Act was officially called, the Reichstag was eliminated from any active role in German politics, and the administration had won unlimited freedom of action. The infamy lay not in the fact that the parties of the Center capitulated to a stronger opponent and bowed to a more unscrupulous will but that they actually collaborated to bring about their own exclusion from government. To be sure, the bourgeois parties were not altogether wrong when they pointed out that the so-called Reichstag fire decree of February 28 had decisively opened the way to dictatorship and that the Enabling Act was actually only a formality, the seizure of power having taken place already. But even so, the vote offered them a chance to bear witness to their objections by a memorable gesture. Instead, they chose to set the seal of legality upon the revolutionary actions of those weeks. If the decree of February 28 represented the actual downfall of the Weimar Republic, the Enabling Act meant its moral collapse. The act sealed the process of abdication by the political parties, a process that had started in 1930 when the Great Coalition was shattered.

The Enabling Act concluded the first phase of the seizure of power. It made Hitler independent of the alliance with his conservative partners. That in itself thwarted any chance for an organized power struggle against the new regime. The Völkische Beobachter was completely right when it commented: “A historic day. The parliamentary system has capitulated to the new Germany. For four years Hitler will be able to do everything he considers necessary: negatively, the extermination of all the corrupting forces of Marxism; positively, the establishment of a new people’s community. The great undertaking is begun. The day of the Third Reich has come!”

Actually, Hitler had needed less than three months to outmaneuver his partners and checkmate almost all the opposing forces. To realize the swiftness of the process we must keep in mind that Mussolini in Italy took seven years to accumulate approximately as much power. Hitler’s purposefulness and his feeling for the statesmanlike style had made their impression on Hindenburg from the start and soon prompted the President to drop his former reservations. The affirmative vote in the Reichstag now reinforced him in his change of attitude. The cold, self-centered old man ignored the persecutions which, after all, affected a good many of his own former voters. Hindenburg felt that at last he was once more in the right camp. If Hitler was doing away with that “wretched undisciplined party nonsense,” wasn’t that to his credit?

Only two days after the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor, Ludendorff had written to the aged field marshal reproaching him for having “delivered the country to one of the greatest demagogues of all time.” The man who had marched with Hitler in 1923 added: “I solemnly prophesy to you that this damnable man will plunge our Reich into the abyss and bring inconceivable misery down upon our nation. Coming generations will curse you in your grave because of this action.”¹¹ But Hindenburg appeared to be well pleased with his decision. He had “taken the leap over the hurdle and would now have peace for a considerable time.” As part of his program for withdrawing personally from the business of government, he had State Secretary Meissner explain, during the cabinet conference on the Enabling Act, that presidential collaboration on the laws issued as a result of this Enabling Act would be “not requisite.” He was glad to be relieved of the responsibility that had long been oppressive to him.

Papen’s insistence on attending all meetings between the President and the Chancellor was soon dropped. Hindenburg himself asked Papen “not to insult” Hitler, as he put it. And when Prime Minister Held of Bavaria came to the presidential palace to protest against the terrorism and violations of the Constitution committed by the Nazis, the doddering old man told him to speak to Hitler himself. In the cabinet, too, Goebbels noted, “the authority of the Führer has now been wholly established. Votes are no longer taken. The Führer decides. All this is going much faster than we dared to hope.”

For the time being the slogans and open challenges of the Nazis were almost all directed against the Marxists, but the thrust was aimed equally at their German Nationalist partner in the government. In their own shortsighted zeal against the Left, Papen, Hugenberg, and their following entirely overlooked the fact that elimination of the Left would leave Hitler in command of the means to liquidate them also. Instead, Carl Goerdeler, the conservative mayor of Leipzig, cheerfully asserted that they would soon be sending Hitler back to his hobby of architecture and resume the conduct of the state themselves. Hitler himself, his old resentments again aroused, called his bourgeois coalition partners “ghosts” and declared: “The reactionaries think they have put me on a leash. They are going to set traps for me, as many as they can. But we will not wait until they act…. We are ruthless. I have no bourgeois scruples! They think I am uncultured, a barbarian. Yes, we are barbarians! We want to be. That is an honorable epithet. We are the ones who will rejuvenate the world. This old world is done for….”¹²

But leverage against both the Left and Right was not all of the profit Hitler derived from the Enabling Act. By virtue of the act, the entire apparatus of the government bureaucracy was at Hitler’s disposal. This included the judiciary, which was indispensable to his far-reaching plans. The act offered a basis that satisfied both the consciences and the craving for security of the bureaucrats. Most government officials were pleased to note the legal nature of this revolution, which in spite of the many isolated outrages contrasted so favorably with the chaos of 1918. This legality, even more than the antidemocratic traditions of the civil service made them ready to co-operate. Moreover, a special decree had been issued, which made no acquiescent civil servants liable to punishment. What is more, resistance would have equaled illegal action.

There are those who to this day maintain that there was no definite break, that the parliamentary republic glided by degrees into totalitarian dictatorship. But examination of all the facts reveals that within the process of the legal revolution the revolutionary elements far outweighed the legal ones. The public was duped by the brilliant trick of having the change of scene take place on the uncurtained stage, so to speak. But the real drama consisted in a revolutionary seizure of power confirmed by the Enabling Act. As the act itself provided, it was formally extended in 1937, 1941, and once again in 1943. But it remained an emergency measure promulgated in a state of emergency. Nor did the language of the regime attempt to hide its revolutionary intentions. Even in his speech on the Enabling Act Hitler constantly spoke of “national revolution” when he might have used the safer euphemism of “national rising.” And two weeks later Göring in a speech explicitly repudiated this formula, replacing it by the concept “national socialist revolution.”

There remained only a rounding off of power positions already achieved. Within a few weeks the centralist Gleichschaltung of the states had been completed, and in tandem with that action the complete shattering of all political groups and associations. The collapse of the Communists took place almost silently, in an atmosphere of muffled terrorism. Some members of the Communist Party retreated into the underground; others opportunistically deserted to the National Socialists. The Nazis then turned upon the unions, which had already exposed their dismay and weakness during the early March days. They seemed to think they could buy off the impending doom by a series of placating gestures. Although the harassment and arrests of leading union members were steadily increasing throughout the Reich and the SA was staging a series of raids on local union offices, on March 20 the labor federation’s executive committee addressed a kind of declaration of loyalty to Hitler. It spoke of the purely social tasks of the unions, “no matter what the nature of the political regime.” When Hitler took over an old demand of the labor movement and declared May 1 a national holiday, the union leadership called upon the rank and file to participate in the demonstrations. Everywhere, thereupon, the unionized blue-collar and white-collar workers marched under alien banners in huge holiday parades. They listened bitterly to the speeches of Nazi functionaries but were nevertheless forced to applaud, and found themselves suddenly lined up in the very ranks they had so recently faced with fierce enmity. This confusing experience contributed more than anything else to shattering the will to resist of a movement numbering millions of workers. And while the labor-union paper, following the line of the union leadership, hailed May 1 as a “day of victory,” on May 2 the SA and SS occupied union headquarters throughout Germany. They also took over the businesses and the banks belonging to the labor federation, arrested the leading officials, and shipped a good many of them off to concentration camps. The unions went ingloriously down to destruction.

The end of the Social Democratic Party took place in an equally undramatic fashion. Isolated appeals to resistance on the part of some leaders evoked at best contrary appeals from others, revealing the impotence of a mass party that had petrified in its traditional forms. Ever since January 30 the Social Democratic Party had constantly upheld the Constitution, which had already been undermined by the Nazis, and the Social Democrats kept on pledging that their party would never take the first step away from the solid ground of the law. Literal-minded Marxists that they were, they insisted on seeing Nazism as “the last card of reaction,” which by the laws of historical determinism could never win. The party leadership therefore justified its immobility on the grounds of a tactical slogan: “Readiness is all!” This passivity had a profoundly demoralizing effect upon many of the lower branches of the organization, which were urging action.

On May 10, without a sign of resistance, all party headquarters, newspapers, and all the property of the Social Democratic Party and the Reichsbanner were confiscated on orders from Göring. After violent disagreements within the leadership, the advocates of appeasement won out: they thought they could force the government to moderation by conciliatory tactics. Following the same logic, the Social Democratic Reichstag faction decided that they would approve Hitler’s major statement on foreign policy of May 17, though they would frame their consent in a special, independent statement. But this position was much too subtle for Hitler, who was already determined to annihilate them. Blackmailed by Frick’s threat to kill the Social Democrats imprisoned in concentration camps, the party hurried to vote unconditionally for the government statement. With a mocking glance to the left, Göring could declare at the end of the Reichstag session: “The world has seen that the German people are united where their fate is at stake.” The Social Democratic Party had been so crushed and humiliated that no one expected so much as a gesture of resistance when, on June 22, it was at last banned and its seats in the Reichstag invalidated.

All other political groupings were now likewise “co-ordinated”—sucked into the whirlpool of Gleichschaltung. Almost every day the newspapers reported liquidations or voluntary dissolutions. The Stahlhelm and the German Nationalist militias led the procession (June 21). There followed all remaining employee and employer organizations (June 22). Then came the German National People’s Party, which as a fellow fighter in the national rising had vainly insisted on its right to continue in existence; its members could not see why they now had to run with the hares after they had for so long hunted with the hounds. Then came the dissolution of the State Party (June 28), of the German National Front (June 28), of the Center Association (July 1), of the Young German Order (July 3), of the Bavarian People’s Party (July 4), of the German People’s Party (July 4), and finally of the Center itself—which was tactically paralyzed by the ongoing negotiations on a concordat and then forced to capitulate (July 5).

Co-ordination of the various industrial, commercial, artisan, and agricultural associations ran parallel to the breakup of the political and paramilitary groups. But in no case was there any act of resistance. Scarcely an incident of more than local importance occurred. On June 27 Hugenberg was forced to resign, and not one of his conservative friends lifted a finger. He had just attended the World Economic Conference in London, where he had tried once more to outbid the Nazis in demagoguery by making excessive demands for a colonial empire and German economic expansion into the Ukraine. But he had succeeded only in providing Hitler with an easy opportunity to stand up for common sense and peace among nations against the Pan-German mischief-maker.

Hugenberg had held cabinet posts in the Reich and in Prussia, which now fell vacant. Two days later Hitler assigned economics to Kurt Schmitt, general manager of the Allianz Insurance Company, and food and agriculture to Walter Darre. At the same time, he ordered the permanent participation of Rudolf Hess, the “Führer’s deputy,” in cabinet meetings. In April Franz Seldte, the leader of the Veterans’ Organization, joined the National Socialist Party; this meant that the proportions of Nazis to German Nationalists in the cabinet had been nearly reversed (eight to five). Since the German Nationalist ministers no longer had the backing of a party, they were essentially demoted to mere technicians without political pull. The regime fastened its grip on what had already been achieved by issuing, on July 14, a whole catalogue of decrees. The chief of these declared the National Socialist Party the sole legal party.

This rapid, unopposed extinction of all political forces from Left to Right remains the most striking feature of the Nazi take-over. If anything could have demonstrated the sapped vitality of the Weimar Republic, it was the ease with which the institutions that had sustained it let themselves be overwhelmed. Even Hitler was astonished. “One would never have thought so miserable a collapse possible,” he declared in Dortmund at the beginning of July. Actions that only a short time before would have unleashed riots close to civil war were now met with a shrugging fatalism. The great capitulation of these months cannot be understood in political terms alone. We must consider its intellectual and psychological causes also. For over and above the illegality and violence of those weeks, the capitulation provides a certain historical justification for Hitler. Brüning, as he marched with the deputies to the Garrison Church on the day of Potsdam, felt as if he “were being led to the execution ground”—and that feeling was more prophetic than he himself imagined. One of the keen observers of the period noted that as the unanswered blows “into the face of truth, of freedom” went on, as the elimination of the other parties and of the parliamentary system progressed, there was a growing feeling “that all the things being abolished no longer concerned people very much.”

In fact all these inglorious downfalls meant that the nation was inwardly bidding good-bye to the Weimar Republic. From now on the political order of the past was no longer a concept in whose name some hope, let alone opposition, might have gathered. The feeling of a great change, which had affected people vaguely, as a kind of euphoric expectation, when Hitler entered the government, now overcame wider and wider sectors of the population. Hitler had moved rapidly from the status of demagogue to that of a respected statesman. The craving to join the ranks of the victors was spreading like an epidemic, and the shrunken minority of those who resisted the urge were being visibly pushed into isolation. Faced with a defeat apparently imposed “by history itself,” they concealed their bitterness and their lonely disgust. The past was dead. The future, it seemed, belonged to the regime, which had more and more followers, which was being hailed everywhere and suddenly had sound reasons on its side. “The only ones who give the impression of resolute refusal to accept it all, although they say nothing, are the servant girls,” Robert Musil ironically noted in March, 1933. But he, too, admitted that he lacked any alternative for which to fight; he was unable, he wrote, to imagine the new order being replaced by a return of the old or of a still older state of affairs. “What this feeling probably signifies is that National Socialism has a mission and that its hour has come, that it is no puff of smoke, but a stage of history.” Kurt Tucholsky on the Left implied much the same thing when he wrote, with that brash resignation peculiar to him: “You don’t go railing against the ocean.”

Such moods of fatalism, of cultural resignation, speeded the success of Nazism. Only a few were able to resist the swelling current of the triumphant cause. Not that the terrorism and the injustices went unnoticed. But in the old European dichotomy d’être en mauvais ménage avec la conscience ou avec les affaires du siècle, more and more people swung over to those who seemed to have history and business as well on their side. Now that it had conquered power, the regime set about conquering people.

On the Way to the Führer State

There was no pause, no sign of failing grip, in the transition from the first to the second phase of seizing power. The smashing of the democratic constitutional and parliamentary state was barely concluded in the summer of 1933 when its metal began to be smelted into the monolith of the totalitarian Führer state. “We have the power. Today nobody can offer us any resistance. But now we must educate German man for this new State. A gigantic project lies ahead.” Thus Hitler outlined the tasks of the future to the SA on July 9.

For Hitler was never interested in establishing a mere tyranny. Sheer greed for power will not suffice as explanation for his personality and energy. Unquestionably, power, the virtually unrestricted use of it, with no necessity to account to anyone—that kind of power meant a great deal to him. But he was at no time satisfied with it alone. The restlessness with which he conquered, extended, and applied that power, and finally used it up, is evidence of how little he was bom to be a mere tyrant. He was fixated upon his mission of defending Europe and the Aryan race from deadly menace, and to this end he wanted to create an empire that would last. The study of history, particularly the history of his own age, had taught him that material instruments of power alone would not suffice to guarantee duration. Rather, only a great “revolution comparable to the Russian Revolution” could develop the tremendous dynamism such a goal required.

As always, he thought of this task also chiefly in terms of psychology and propaganda. Never had he felt so dependent upon the masses as he did at this time, and he watched their reactions with anxious concern. He feared their fickleness, not only as the child of a democratic age but because of his personal craving for approval and acclamation. “I am not a dictator and never will be a dictator,” he declared, and added rather contemptuously: “As a dictator any clown can govern.” He had, he admitted, eliminated the principle of democratic voting, but that by no means meant that he was free; strictly speaking, no such thing as arbitrary rule existed, only various ways of expressing the “general will.” He solemnly assured his listeners: “National Socialism is the true realization of democracy, which has degenerated under parliamentarianism…. We have cast aside outmoded institutions precisely because they no longer served to keep in fruitful contact with the totality of the nation, because they led to idle chatter, to impudent cheating.” Goebbels was saying the same thing when he remarked that in the age of political masses, government could not function “by states of emergency and nine-o’clock curfews.” Either the people would have to be given an ideal, an object for their imaginations and their loyalties, or they would go their own ways. The scholars of the period spoke of “democratic Caesarism.”

In keeping with this view, the psychological mobilization of the country was not left to chance or whim, certainly not to the operations of dissent. It was the product of consistent, totalitarian penetration of all social structures by means of a close-knit system of supervision, regimentation, and guidance. The object was to “belabor people as long as necessary, until they succumb to us.” That meant penetrating the private realm as well as every social area: “We must develop organizations in which an individual’s entire life can take place. Then every activity and every need of every individual will be regulated by the collectivity represented by the party. There is no longer any arbitrary will, there are no longer any free realms in which the individual belongs to himself…. The time of personal happiness is over.”

But the whole of national existence could not be reshaped overnight. Part of Hitler’s keen tactical sense was a sure feeling for tempo. More than once during the hectic early summer of 1933 he worried that control of events might slip away from him: “More revolutions have succeeded in the first onslaught than successful ones have been checked and brought to a halt,” he told his followers during this period in one of those speeches exhorting them to patience.¹³ Unlike them, he was not carried away by the headiness of success. He was prepared at any time to subordinate the emotions of the moment to his further power aims. Thus he vigorously opposed efforts to push on with further seizures of the government apparatus after those first months. His instinct told him to go slow. The departmental chiefs of the shadow government that the party had developed during the years of waiting had to cool their heels a while longer. Only Goebbels, Darre, and to an extent Himmler enjoyed the fruits of victory during this second phase. Rosenberg, for example, whose ambition had been the Foreign Office, was disappointed. So was Ernst Röhm.

Hitler’s refusal to turn the government over to the party was based on two considerations. By showing constraint, he would create the sense that he was engaged in healing the nation’s wounds and thus entrench himself deeper. With the coolness of the modern revolutionary, whose nature differs fundamentally from that of the fervent barricade builders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hitler repeatedly warned his followers in the summer of 1933 “to be prepared for many years and to calculate in very long spans of time.” If in doctrinaire haste they went “looking around to see whether there was anything else to revolutionize,” they would gain nothing, he told them; rather, they must be “prudent and cautious.”¹⁴

On the other hand, he had begun to regard the government as an instrument with which to keep the party, whose leader he was, in check. The technology of power was involved. Just as he had always encouraged competing institutions and rival subleaders within the party so that he might stand above their dissensions and bickerings and maintain his omnipotence all the more unchallenged, so he now employed the various executive offices of the government as counters in an even more baffling and Machiavellian game by which he strengthened his control. In the course of time he even increased the number of such offices. Two, and after Hindenburg’s death three secretariats were at his sole disposal: the Reich secretariat (Reichskanzlei) under Dr. Hans Lammers, the Führer’s secretariat under Hess and Bormann, and, finally, the presidential secretariat under State Secretary Meissner, a holdover from the days of Ebert and Hindenburg. Foreign policy, education, the press, art, the economy, were battlegrounds fought over by three or four competing departments, and this guerrilla warfare over territory, the din of which continued down to the last days of the regime, permeated even the lowest branches of the bureaucracy. One official complained about contradictory instructions and conflicts over areas of authority when he was only trying to organize a proper celebration of the solstice. In 1942 there existed fifty-eight Supreme Reich boards as well as a plethora of extragovemmental bureaus whose orders criss-crossed, who wrestled over precedence, insisting on authority they might or might not have. With some justice the Third Reich can be called authoritarian anarchy. Cabinet ministers, commissioners, special emissaries, officials of party affiliates, administrators, governors, many of them with assignments kept deliberately vague, formed an inextricable knot of interlocking authorities, which Hitler alone, with virtually a Hapsburgian grasp of puppet mastery, could supervise, balance, and dominate.

This bureaucratic chaos was also one of the reasons the regime was so extremely bound up with the person of Hitler, so that to the end there were no struggles over ideological questions, only over the Führer’s favor. Such squabbles, it must be granted, were as fierce as any conflict over orthodoxies. While it is generally thought that authoritarian systems manifest decisiveness and energy in execution, in fact they are far more rife with chaos than other forms of governmental organization. The to-do about “order” was largely meant to conceal the deliberate confusion. During the war the SS leader Walter Schellenberg complained about the practice of issuing commands twice over and about pointlessly competing bureaus. Hitler defended such duplications in the pseudoscientific terms he loved so well: “People must be allowed friction with one another; friction produces warmth, and warmth is energy.” But what Hitler had really discovered was that such friction was useful for consuming energy which might otherwise be a threat to him. When, after 1938, he abolished cabinet meetings, it may have been because there was too much comradely spirit at such sessions. Once State Secretary Dr. Lammers wanted to invite his fellow ministers to an evening of social drinking. Hitler forbade such conviviality. His style of leadership has aptly been described as “institutionalized Darwinism,” and the widespread view of his greater efficiency has been called the selfdelusion of all authoritarian systems.

The fact that Hitler did not simply turn the government over to the party as part of the loot of victory caused great dissatisfaction among his followers. For, in spite of all the ideological motives, the material impetus that underlay the movement remained of the greatest importance. Six or more million unemployed represented a source of tremendous revolutionary energy: they longed for work, hungered for booty, and hoped for rapid careers. The Nazi victory had carried only a thin stratum of functionaries into the legislatures and the town halls, and washed others up to the desks of dismissed officials. Now the empty-handed, still nourishing the anticapitalistic moods of preceding years, were pressing into the larger and more profitable fields of trade and industry. “Old Fighters”—those who had early joined the Nazi party—wanted to become managers, presidents of chambers of commerce, directors, or simply, by force or blackmail, partners. Their robust conquistadorial ambitions gave a revolutionary complexion to events that otherwise might have passed unnoticed. Kurt W. Luedecke has reported how one of these power-hungry and job-greedy party functionaries, on entering the office he had just taken over, called out happily: “Hi there, Luedecke! Terrific! I’m a big shot!” At the other end of this social spectrum is the desperate outburst reported by Hermann Rauschning on the part of a party member who feared he would miss his chance: “I don’t want to fall back down. Maybe you can bide your time. You’re not sitting in any fire. But I’ve been unemployed, do you hear! Before I go through that again I’ll turn criminal. I’m staying on top, no matter what. We won’t climb up twice.”¹⁵

Hitler was conscious of the need to tame these radical, uncontrolled energies. His three major speeches at the beginning of July were an attempt to apply the brakes to revolutionary élan, much as he had done in March, on the occasion of the “SA revolt.” Everything depended, he said, on “channeling the released current of revolution into the secure bed of evoluton.”¹⁶ Yet he also needed to give the current greater impetus. For a freezing of existing conditions was equally dangerous. Things could too easily come to a standstill because of exaggerated anxiety about revolution or simply because of the unwieldiness of a party of millions suffocating from the constant influx of new members. Thus, while Hitler was still calling on his followers to maintain discipline, he was also worrying about the tendency toward “bourgeoisization.” An influx of 1,500,000 new members within three months had made the 850,000 “old comrades” a minority. At this point Hitler ordered a halt to admissions. For show, he had certain members expelled, with a good deal of fanfare, for having permitted themselves unauthorized raids on chambers of commerce and industrial concerns. To set an example, some were sent to concentration camps.

Among his intimates he defended the desire for personal gain as a revolutionary motive force and spoke of “justified corruption.” Bourgeois circles were criticizing him for trying former officials for corruption while his own men were lining their pockets, he said. “I have answered these simpletons,” he thundered, “could they tell me how I am to meet the legitimate wishes of my party comrades for some kind of compensation for their inhuman years of struggle. I asked them whether they would prefer me to turn the streets over to my SA. I could still do that, I said. I wouldn’t mind. And I said it would be healthier for the whole nation if there were a real bloody revolution lasting for a few weeks. Out of consideration for them and their bourgeois comfort I’d refrained from doing that, I said. But I could always make up for lost time!… If we make Germany great, we have a right to think of ourselves also.”

With this dual goal of keeping the revolution in flux and simultaneously stabilizing it, of reining it in and giving it its head, Hitler was again following his tried and tested maxims on the nature of power. “I can lead the masses only if I can wrench them out of their apathy,” he declared. “Only the fanaticized masses are malleable. Masses that are apathetic, dull, are the greatest danger for any society.”

This effort to awaken the masses “so that they may be made the instrument of my policy,” now moved entirely into the foreground. The whipped-up fear of Communism at the time of the Reichstag fire, the parades, receptions, collections, the new semantic coinages, the leader cult, in short, the whole clever mixture of trickery and terrorism was meant to prime the nation to think and feel according to a single pattern laid down by the government. Significantly, as soon as this experiment seemed to be succeeding, the long repressed ideological fixations emerged once again. With a sharpness reminiscent of the earlier years of struggle, the figure of the Jew—as the principle of evil and ever-present menace—once again took center stage.

As early as March, 1933, SA units, acting on orders, committed the first anti-Semitic excesses. So strong was the outcry from abroad that Goebbels and Julius Streicher urged Hitler to muzzle criticism by openly increasing the pressure. They would have liked Hitler to allow his followers to stage a carnival of terror against all Jewish firms, against Jewish employers, lawyers, and officials. Hitler did not assent to this, but he gave instructions for a one-day boycott. On Saturday, April 1, armed SA squads stood guard at the doors of Jewish businesses and offices, calling out to visitors or customers not to enter. Posters urging boycott were pasted to the shop windows: “Germans, do not buy at the Jew’s!” Others contained a terse: “Juden raus!” But at this point the nation’s often ridiculed sense of order turned against the regime. The action seemed highhanded and rather shameful, and the hoped-for effect was not achieved. The populace, a later report on the mood in western Germany stated, “is rather inclined to pity the Jews… Sales figures of Jewish firms, especially in the countryside, have in no way declined.”¹⁷

The boycott was therefore not resumed. In a speech redolent of disappointment, Streicher hinted that the regime had retreated under the pressure of world Jewry. Goebbels, however, for the fraction of a second opened the door just enough to permit a glance into the future when he announced that there would be a new blow, such a one “as to annihilate German Jewry…. Let no one doubt our resolution.” Legal measures, the first of which was issued a few days after the unsuccessful boycott, banished Jews from public life in a quieter fashion, forcing them out of their social and, soon afterward, out of their business positions.

“The wonder of German unification,” as the regime phrased it in its jargon of self-praise, involved the constant effort to separate the true nation from the unwanted nation of Marxists and Jews. But even more important was the need to win the nation’s applause. The failure of the boycott had taught Hitler that the public could not be swung so easily on this question. But if April 1 had proved a negative experience in community feeling, May 1, which celebrated the workers, and October 1, the day of the farmers, were each a stupendous success.

French Ambassador André François-Poncet has described the concluding ceremonies on May Day evening at Tempelhof Field in Berlin:

The foreign guests in the stands were not the only ones who carried away from the nocturnal parade of uniforms, from the play of light and the throb of the music, from the flags and the fireworks, the impression of a “really beautiful, a wonderful festival.” They were not alone in discovering an “air of reconciliation and unity throughout the Third Reich.” Such events made an even greater impression on the Germans. By the morning of May 1, 1,500,000 persons of all classes had lined up for the parade in Berlin: workers, government officials, managers, craftsmen, professors, film stars, clerks. This was the very array Hitler had conjured up the night before when he promised the end of all class differences and proclaimed the people’s community of all “workers of the hand and the head.” His rallying cry, to be sure, fell into a preacherly tone that approached travesty: “We want to be active, to work and make brotherly peace with one another, to struggle together, so that some day the hour will come when we can step before Him and will have the right to ask Him: Lord, You see, we have changed; the German nation is no longer the nation of dishonor, of shame, of self-laceration, of timidity and little faith; no, Lord, the German nation has once more grown strong in spirit, strong in will, strong in persistence, strong in enduring all sacrifices. Lord, we will not swerve from You; now bless our struggle.”

These religious exhortations and indeed the whole liturgical character of the demonstrations did not fail to take effect and restored to many Germans their lost sense of belonging and their feeling of collective camaraderie. The combination of religious service and popular amusement was, precisely because of its apparently unpolitical stamp, of the widest possible appeal. Thus we would be aiming very wide of the mark—which the regime invites because of the monstrous features it later acquired—if we divided the people of the spring of 1933 into victors and vanquished. Rather, as the historian Golo Mann has trenchantly observed, many persons felt at once triumph and uncertainty, fear and shame.¹⁹ They partook both of victory and defeat. Engulfed by the hypnotic power of mass festivals, they thought they felt the touch of history itself. Memories of the long-ago days of August, 1914, flooded back, and again they experienced the intoxication of national brotherhood.

Later, those months would live on in the nation’s memory as an almost incomprehensible jumble of euphoria, jingoism, a sense of rebirth, of transformation, though without a national explanation for such feelings. Hitler had the ability, in ways that are hard to analyze, to engender a kind of historical ecstasy. He had many instant conversions to his credit, particularly at this period. Yet his May 1 speech contained neither a concrete program for providing employment nor the expected statement of the principles of nationalist socialism and economic reconstruction. Nevertheless, his words reverberated with a sense of historical momentousness. The concomitant acts of terrorism were psychologically in accord with this mood. For the terror gave the events the quality of extreme, fateful seriousness. Many people felt the scruples that beset them as petty compared with the scale of the historical event.

The prevailing feeling was expressed by one of the prominent intellectuals of the time, who wrote that labor, freed from the curse of proletarian misery, had at last been made the basis of a new sense of community and that “part of the rights of man has been newly proclaimed.”²⁰ But only a day later the surprise action against the unions exposed the other face of Hitler’s familiar dual tactics. Similarly, on May 10, while the regime under “artist-statesman Adolf Hitler” was still talking in terms of a new Augustan age, there was a brutal gesture of open hostility to intellect: the burning of the books. With SA and SS bands playing “patriotic melodies,” preceded by torchlight parades and so-called fire sermons, nearly 20,000 specimens of “un-German writings” were burned in the public squares of university cities.

The take-over was thus accomplished by a combination of intoxicants and pressures. This compound had a special potency; after twelve years of the parliamentary interregnum people felt again that there was a firm hand at the helm of state. Here, in a new form, was the time-honored political style of the Hohenzollern authoritarian state. The new regime was taking off from there.

Initially, the measures for establishing psychological domination over the nation were often hit-and-miss. But they were soon developed into a system and given an administrative framework. In the covert struggle for power over this arm of the government, victory went to Joseph Goebbels. His Propaganda Ministry, divided into seven departments (propaganda, radio, press, film, theater, music, and fine arts), soon took charge of the entire intellectual and cultural realm. It saw to the establishment of the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), which in turn had seven separate divisions and embraced all persons engaged in artistic or publicist activities. Architects and art dealers, painters, stage designers, lighting technicians and newsstand operators—one and all, Goebbels declared with cynical candor, would be rescued by the new state from their “feeling of desolate emptiness.” These cultural organizations were meant both to politicize and supervise their members. Nonadmittance or expulsion meant that a person was debarred from his profession or occupation. Soon the police were following up a host of denunciations, tracking down the works of outlawed artists, or checking to make certain that the blacklist was not being violated. In December, 1933, a total of more than a thousand books and complete works of some writers, had been banned by no fewer than twenty-one bureaus, some of them in competition with one another. By the next year more than 4,000 publications had been forbidden. The revolution bowed before nothing, Goebbels declared in one of his “fundamental speeches” on culture; what mattered was “that in place of the individual person and his deification we now have the racial nation and its deification. The racial nation is the center of things…. The artist undeniably has the right to call himself non-political in a period when politics consists of nothing but shouting matches between parliamentary parties. But at this moment when politics is writing a national drama, when a world is being overthrown—in such a moment the artist cannot say: ‘That doesn’t concern me.’ It concerns him a great deal.” In his capacity as Reich propaganda chief of the NSDAP, Goebbels simultaneously spread a dense network of propaganda offices over the country—forty-one in all. A few years later these were raised to the status of federal bureaus.

By the spring of 1933 Gleischschaltung of radio broadcasting was largely completed; both staff and subject matter had been “co-ordinated.” The press followed. There had been approximately 3,000 newspapers in Germany. A large number of these, chiefly local papers, were eliminated by economic pressure backed by all the powers of the state. Others were confiscated. Only a few of the major newspapers, whose prestige might make them useful tools, were allowed to survive. Some of these, such as the Frankfurter Zeitung, continued on into the war years. But drastic restrictions were placed upon them even in the initial phase of the seizure of power. A shower of instructions and “language rules,” usually handed down at the daily Reich press conference, established political regimentation and banished freedom of the press to whatever small space it could find between the lines. At the same time, however, Goebbels looked kindly upon all differences in form and style. In general he tried to conceal the governmental monopoly of opinion by stressing journalistic variety. He put it in a pithy slogan : the press, like culture in general, was to be “monoform in will, polyform in the outward trappings of that will.”

If we survey the whole scene, we must grant that in the cultural realm as well, “co-ordination” proceeded without a protest, without a sign of effective opposition. Only the Protestant Church was able to resist the open seizure of power in its ranks, although at the price of fission. The Catholic bishops had hitherto attacked Nazism in a series of strongly militant statements and had officially condemned it. But their will to resist was undermined by the negotiations for a concordat, already begun during the Weimar years and eagerly resumed by Hitler. Nazi promises and sham concessions knocked the ground from under their feet. Belatedly, they would find their way back to opposition, but by then they did not see clearly how to proceed. In the universities, too, what feeble resistance came to the fore was soon subdued by the tried-and-true combination of “spontaneous expressions of the people’s will” from below followed by an administrative act from above.

The point has often been made that the corps of high-ranking military officers or big business proved to be the weakest spot in the country’s defenses against Nazism. But that thesis becomes somewhat questionable when we consider how swiftly and easily the regime succeeded in overwhelming the intellectuals, the professors, the artists and writers, the universities and academies. There were only scattered acts of rebellion here and there. During the early months, when the regime was courting recognition and decorative names, testimonials of loyalty rained down upon it unrequested. As early as the beginning of March, and again in May, several hundred university teachers of all political persuasions publicly declared their adherence to Hitler and the new regime. A “pledge of loyalty by German writers to the People’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler” was signed by such distinguished names as Rudolf Binding, Walter von Molo, and Joseph Ponten; another such document bore the names of noted people like Ferdinand Sauerbruch, the great surgeon, and Martin Heidegger, the philosopher. Alongside these lists of signatures, there was a great deal of applause from individuals. Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel prize winner, whom Goebbels had mocked for years as a “unionized Goethe,” published an article titled “I Say Yes!” It turned out later that the editors had added the title—which nevertheless accurately summed up the content. Hans Friedrich Blunck, president of the Reichsschrifttumskammer, the writers’ organization, described the attitude appropriate to the new era with the formula: “Humility before God, honor to the Reich, flowering of the arts.” The critic Ernst Bertram composed a “fire song” for the book burning, in which the works of his friend Thomas Mann were consumed:

Even Theodor W. Adorno noticed in the composition of a poetry cycle by Baldur von Schirach “the strongest conceivable effects” of the “romantic realism” proclaimed by Goebbels.

Meanwhile, in the early weeks of the regime, 250 notable writers and professors left the country. Many others were harassed, relieved of their posts, or otherwise made aware of their vulnerability. Soon the spokesmen for a regime with cultural ambitions had to acknowledge that the first “summer of art” in Germany looked more like a battlefield than a field of ripening grain. The Minister of the Interior announced the expatriation of writers and scholars, one after another, among them Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Kerr, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Theodor Plievier, Anna Seghers, and Albert Einstein. But those who remained were not averse to taking the evacuated seats in the academies and at banquets, insensitive to the tragedies of the expelled and the outlawed.

Those who were asked placed themselves at the regime’s disposal: the composer Richard Strauss, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, the actors Werner Krauss and Gustaf Gründgens. Such actions surely cannot always be ascribed to weakness or opportunism. A great many were sucked in by the emotional surge of the national rising, wanting to take their place in the ranks and “co-ordinate” themselves. Others felt it their mission to strengthen the affirmative forces within the “great idealistic popular movement” called National Socialism. They meant to take those honest but primitive Nazi ruffians under their wings, to sublimate those unthinking energies, to refine the “well-meant but still clumsy ideas of Adolf Hitler, the ‘man of the people,’ ” and in this way “show the National Socialists what really is contained within their dim strivings and thus make possible a ‘better’ National Socialism.”²¹ This was the hope, so frequently found in revolutionary eras, of averting something worse—oddly coupled with the notion that under the banner of the new fraternity idealism could be introduced into “dirty politics.” Cowardice and conformism were certainly present and widespread; but in such intellectual illusions can be found the specifically German continuity within Nazism.

But we would still have only a partial understanding of the phenomenon if we failed to consider the dominant feeling of the age. The eternally unsettled question of how the blatantly anti-intellectual Hitler movement could have enjoyed such success among writers, professors, and intellectuals in general may to some extent be answered in terms of the antiintellectual tendency of the age. Even Max Scheler, the philosopher, gave a certain sanction to the irrationalist movements of the period—although he indicated that he did not subscribe to the modish denigration of the intellect. In a lecture toward the end of the twenties he spoke of a “systematic instinctual revolt in men of the new epoch… against the exaggerated intellectuality of our fathers” and called it a “healing process.” The victory of the Hitler movement was widely seen as the political form of this healing process. Certainly Nazism embodied, in political terms, all those pseudoreligious tendencies to escapism, that hatred of civilization, and revulsion against the intellect with which the period was rife. This will explain why Nazism exerted a seductive influence upon many intellectuals who, isolated within their disciplines, longed for fraternization with the masses, for sharing in the vitality of the common people, for mental torpor and historical effectiveness. Again, this mood was an all-European phenomenon. Not only Edgar Jung, the nationalist-conservative writer, affirmed his “respect for the primitivity of a popular movement, for the militant vitality of victorious gauleiters and storm troop leaders…”; Paul Valéry, too, found it “charming that the Nazis despise the intellect so much.”²² We can find the whole catalogue of motivations—the illusions, the hopes, the self-delusions—spelled out in the famous letter the poet Gottfried Benn sent to Klaus Mann in exile:

Such statements reveal how irrelevant it was to charge Nazism with ideological poverty. Compared with the ideational systems of the Left, it might seem to offer no more than collective warmth: crowds, heated faces, shouts of approval, marches, arms raised in salute. But that was precisely what made it attractive to a body of intellectuals who had long been in existential despair. They had emerged from the many theoretical disputes of the age with the one insight that one could “no longer approach things with ideas.” It was the very craving to escape from ideas, concepts, and systems into some uncomplicated sense of belonging that provided Nazism with so many deserters from other causes.

Nazism tried to satisfy this craving by inventing a multitude of new social arenas; one of Hitler’s fundamental insights, acquired in the loneliness of his youth, was that people wanted to belong. It would be a mistake to see nothing but coercion in the multitudinous organizations of the party, the politicized professional associations, the chambers, bureaus and leagues that proliferated throughout the country. Rather, the practice of taking every individual into the fold according to his age, his function, and even his preferences in leisure or entertainment, of leaving people nothing but sleep as their private domain, as Robert Ley remarked on occasion—this practice sprang from a widespread craving for social participation. Hitler was not exaggerating when he asserted, as he regularly did, that he had asked his followers for nothing but sacrifices. In fact he had rediscovered the old truism that most people have a need for fitting into an organized whole, that there is joy in fulfilling a function, and that for the majority of the German people, the demand for selfless service frequently had a far greater appeal than the intellectuals’ demand of freedom for the individual.

Hitler succeeded in converting all the diffuse impulses awakened during that first spring after his coming to power into purposeful social energies—that was one of his most remarkable achievements. Challenging the individual to total disinterested effort, he kindled enthusiasm in people nerve-wracked by unemployment, misery, and hunger. He was able to proclaim convincingly: “It is glorious to live in an age that confronts its people with great tasks.” He went to unprecedented lengths in travel and speechmaking. By an endless succession of cornerstone layings and ground-breaking ceremonies, he created a mood of general mobilization. In hundreds of let’s-get-to-work speeches he initiated labor campaigns which, in the military jargon of the regime, soon developed into labor battles and were triumphantly concluded by a series of victories or by breakthroughs on the agricultural front. The metaphor of warfare that made such formulas effective also sparked a readiness for sacrifice. And all sorts of slogans furthered the mood, though sometimes these slogans verged on the preposterous, as for example: “The German woman is knitting again!”

Like the festivals and parades, these stylistic devices aimed at making the regime popular by concretizing it. Hitler had a remarkable knack for translating into simple images the abstract character of modern political and social functional relationships. Of course, the masses had lost their political autonomy; their rights had been reduced or abolished. But those liberties of the past had hardly profited them—they remembered them with nothing but contempt—whereas Hitler’s unrelenting image projection, his eagerness for public display, engendered in the masses a clear feeling that they were participating in the operations of government. After years of gloom it seemed to many people that their work was once again becoming meaningful. The most menial jobs were being raised to praiseworthy importance. As Hitler put it, it was an honor “to clean the streets as a citizen of this Reich.” Remarkably enough, he seemed to succeed in generating this state of mind.

This capacity for awakening initiative and self-confidence was all the more amazing in view of the fact that Hitler had no specific program. At the cabinet meeting of March 15 he for the first time admitted his dilemma, saying that it was necessary to employ demonstrations, pomp, and a show of activity “to divert attention to the purely political affairs, because the economic decisions will have to be postponed for a while.” And as late as September at the groundbreaking ceremony for the first section of the Frankfurt-Heidelberg autobahn he let slip the revealing statement that it was now essential “by grand, monumental works to set the German economy in motion again at some point.” As Hermann Rauschning saw it, Hitler took power with virtually no other guideline than his total confidence in his own ability to deal with things on the primitive but effective maxim: give an order and it will get done, more or less roughly, perhaps, but for a while something will be moving, and meanwhile we’ll look around for the next step.

As things stood, however, this conception proved to be a kind of magic, since it overcame the prevailing feeling of discouragement. Although there was no visible improvement in material conditions until 1934, from almost the very first day Hitler’s approach generated an enormous “suggestion of consolidation.” At the same time, it assured Hitler considerable room for maneuvering, which enabled him to adjust his plans to changing requirements. The style of his rule has rightly been called “permanent improvisation.” Even while he insisted on the unalterability of the party program, he was filled with that lively instinct of the born tactician not to commit himself. Thus he forbade the press in the first few months to publish unauthorized quotations from Mein Kampf. Even republication of one of the twenty-five points of the party program was banned on the grounds that henceforth what mattered would not be programs but practical work. As a pamphlet of the period put it: “The new Chancellor has so far refused, quite understandably from his standpoint, to set forth a program in detail. (‘Party Comrade No. 1 did not answer,’ the Berlin joke has it.)” One of the early party functionaries believes that Hitler at no time had a clearly formulated goal, let alone a strategy for attaining his ends. And indeed it does seem as if he had only visions, and an unusual capacity for taking in at a glance changing situations, and rapidly and forcefully seizing the opportunities they offered. The grandiose phantasmagorias, floating in eschatological mists of cosmic dooms and racial twilights, were just as much his element as tenacious, cunning, cold-bloodedly staged rapid-fire events—he was a curious combination of visionary and tactician. But the realm in between, that of soundly planned, patiently practiced politics, the realm of human history, was and remained alien to him.

There could be no doubt, from his actions, that programs did not concern him. He forced the “reactionary” Hugenberg out of the cabinet, even as he compelled Gottfried Feder, now State Secretary in the Ministry of Economics, to modify to the verge of recantation the great idea of his life, his “breaking the bondage of interest.” Hitler now dismissed Feder’s idea, which had long ago flashed through him like an illumination, as one of a group of “officially approved fantasies.” The small shopkeepers, the original members of the party, were already looking over the department stores to find the spots where, according to Point 16 of the party program, they would set up their sales booths in the near future. As late as July, 1933, Rudolf Hess was still allowed to state that the attitude of the party on the question of the department stores was “unchanged in principle.” In reality Hitler had discarded that point in the program for good and all.

What had happened to Feder happened to many other old fighters in the party ranks, who. as ideological lone wolves, found themselves more and more openly ridiculed and excluded from the positions of power. As the party embracing all the discontented and resentful, during the period of its rise, the NSDAP had attracted many mini-utopians: people obsessed with an idea, a conception of a new order. They had imagined that their desire for reform was most emphatically represented by the dynamic Hitler party. Now, however, that there was a chance of these ideas being realized, the unreality and in many cases the ludicrous quality of many of these notions came to light, while others held no interest for Hitler, since they offered no promise for increasing his power. The idea of the corporate state, constitutional reforms, rearrangement of the relationships between the states and the Reich, the idea of Germanic law, nationalization of the trusts, land reform, or the idea of the state’s feudal tenure of the means of production—nothing ever came of these save for a few isolated projects no one ever followed up. Moreover, the ideas were often so contradictory that their spokesmen turned fiercely upon one another, whereupon Hitler again could leave everything suspended. Complaints about “lack of organization” left him unmoved. This lack allowed his will free scope and made it the real law of the regime.

But although the energies that National Socialism had unleashed were incapable of tracing more than the beginnings of a new order, they were nevertheless strong enough to undermine the old conditions. Even in this early phase the peculiar weakness of the regime was revealed. To be sure, it had with uncanny accuracy exposed the anachronistic structures and empty claims of the old order. But it was never able to legitimize its destructive ingenuity by a constructive sequel; in the larger historical context it assumed solely functions of clearance. It could not even develop rational, purposeful forms in which to clothe its power-political aims; even in establishing the totalitarian state it hardly went beyond initial steps. It was behemoth rather than leviathan, as Franz Neumann put it; a non-state, a manipulated chaos, not the terroristic coercive state that still is a state. Everything was improvised with one purpose or another in view. That was true for the great campaign of conquest that dominated Hitler’s imagination so powerfully that it overrode everything else. Certainly, he had no interest in ordering the social and political structures and arranging for their continuance beyond his own life. If he thought and spoke in terms of a millennium, this was vague literary phraseology. Consequently, the Third Reich developed into a peculiarly unfinished makeshift, a field of rubble patterned on contradictory sketches. Façades left over from the past covered newly laid foundations, among which jutted pieces of wall started and abandoned, fragments destroyed or torn down. What alone imposed meaning and consistency upon it all was Hitler’s monstrous will to power.

Socialistic notions still survived in the Nazi party, isolated leftovers from the Strasser phase. Hitler’s attitude toward these doctrines is interesting, for here again we see how all his decisions were governed by the power factor. As leader of a movement which had profited from the bourgeoisie’s dread of revolution, he had to avoid all activities that might move the regime anywhere close to the traditional concept of revolution. In particular, he must avoid the appearance of nationalization or an overplanned economy. But since this was what he really intended, he used the slogan of “national socialism” to proclaim unconditional co-operation by everyone, on all levels, with the state. And since all authority ultimately issued from him, this meant nothing less than the abolition of all private economic life under the fiction of its continuance. As compensation for the state’s intrusion into their affairs, the businessmen received imposed labor peace, guaranteed markets, and in the course of time a good many vague hopes of a tremendous expansion of the national economic base. The whole idea was conceived, however, for short-term benefits: it was Hitler’s way of providing himself with henchmen. Among his intimates he justified this course with some cynicism and acuteness: he had not the slightest intention, he declared, of killing off the propertied class, as had been done in Russia. Rather, he would force it in, every conceivable way to use its abilities to build the economy. Businessmen, that much was sure, would be glad if their lives and property were spared, and in this way they would become true dependents. Why should he change this advantageous relationship when to do so would only mean he would afterward have to thresh everything out with Old Fighters and overzealous party comrades who would be forever reminding him of all they had done for the party? Formal title to means of production was only a question of detail, was it not? How much landed property or how many factories people owned did not matter when they had consented to a master they could no longer overthrow. “The decisive factor is that the State through the party controls them whether they are owners or workers. Do you understand, all this no longer means anything. Our socialism reaches much deeper. It does not change the external order of things, but it orders solely the relationship of man to the State…. Then what does property and income count for? Why should we need to socialize the banks and the factories? We are socializing the people.”²⁴

Hitler’s pragmatism was remarkably effective in overcoming mass unemployment. He did not doubt that both the fate of the regime and his personal prestige hung on this question. It was all important that the condition of the suffering population be significantly improved. He had been walking the high wire propagandistically for so long that there was no way to make good his promises except by some such miracle. Moreover, it was also the only way he could pacify the Old Fighters who were grumbling at his many compromises and adjustments, which in their view amounted to a “betrayal of the revolution.”

Hitler grasped the psychological aspect of the Depression as none of the Weimar politicians had done. Undoubtedly, the gradual recovery of the world economy also came to his aid. But more important, at least as far as the tempo was concerned, was his perception that gloom, apathy, and slump sprang from deep-seated, pessimistic doubts regarding the world order and that the masses required stimulus just as much as did the economy. His many comments friendly to business and his consistent efforts to keep the economy out of the revolutionary turmoil of the early phase were primarily aimed at generating a mood of confidence. Most of the measures initiated during the early months were introduced less for their economic rationale than for the sake of making a vigorous gesture. In a number of cases Hitler fell back on older plans, such as the “program for the immediate provision of work,” which belonged to the Schleicher regime. Other projects that were now spectacularly launched also came out of the Weimar files; democratic red tape, timidity about decisions, or the resignation prevalent during the Weimar years had kept them dormant. For example, the autobahn project, so closely linked with the regime’s reputation from the very outset, had been under discussion for years but had never been begun.

When Dr. Hans Luther, president of the Reichsbank, clung to his deflationary tight-credit policy and refused to make large sums available for providing work, Hitler forced him to resign. To the anger of many of his followers, he replaced Luther by the “notorious capitalist” Hjalmar Schacht. With his eagerness for results and his absence of scruples, Hitler cranked up production by a variety of impressive measures. In his May 1 speech he appealed to the “entire German people,” declaring that “every individual… every entrepreneur, every homeowner, every businessman,” had the obligation to provide for work in a sustained community effort. The government, for its part, would take action by means of a program Hitler described as “gigantic”—one of his favorite words. “We will clear all obstacles and begin the task grandly,” he promised. Government contracts for housing projects and roads together with a system of public and private stimuli to investment, loans, tax concessions and subsidies, promoted an upswing in the economy. And along with it all went more and more words, slogans, proclamations. They contributed to the success of the effort and gave surprising significance to Hitler’s epigram: “Great liars are also great wizards.”

The establishment and extension of the initially voluntary Labor Service was also part of the psychology of generating confidence. The Labor Service was useful, to be sure, as a catchment basin for unemployed youth. But in addition it gave vivid expression to the regime’s constructive optimism. Reclaiming swamps and wetlands, reforestation, building autobahns and regulating streams became visible and inspiring signs of accomplishment and faith in the future. At the same time, the organization served to overcome class barriers—especially after it became compulsory in 1935—and to improve the status of manual laborers.

All these factors operated together, and by 1934 a shortage of technicians was noted, although there were still 3 million unemployed. Two years later full employment was attained.

The initial upswing also opened the way for considerable effective action in the realm of social politics. To be sure, strikes were banned and a single state-controlled union was created, the German Labor Front. But for fear of seeming reactionary, the regime attempted to cover up such manifestations of authoritarianism by ostentatious prolabor activities. Thus vast institutions were created to organize the people, to provide them with vacation travel, sports festivals, art shows, dances, and training courses. These organizations—Kraft durch Freude (“Strength Through Joy”) and Schönheit der Arbeit (“Beauty of Work”)—served their purpose, and at the same time superintended and placated the masses.

There was labor opposition, to be sure. Some lists giving the results of factory elections held in April, 1935, have been discovered; these reveal that in some plants at this time no more than 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the personnel voted for the Nazi unity list, and thus for the new order. But in 1932 the NSBO,. the Nazi factory organization, received on the average only 4 per cent of the votes. Even such a leftist historian as Arthur Rosenberg had to admit that Nazism realized certain unfulfilled demands of the democratic revolution. In the long run, at any rate, the regime’s stubborn, wide-ranging wooing of the workers had its effect, especially since many of them saw the difference between present and past “less in lost rights than in regained employment.”²⁵

Employment was indeed the key factor for the success of the Third Reich’s rigorous social policies. The loss of freedom and of social autonomy, the strict supervision, the distinctly smaller share of labor in the growing national product—all this did not greatly bother the workers. Ideological slogans persuaded them even less than the bourgeoisie. What really mattered was the feeling of restored social security after traumatic years of anxiety and gloom. This feeling dissolved the initially widespread tendencies toward opposition. It roused the determination to produce and helped enormously to create that image of social contentment to which the new rulers could proudly point: class struggle was not only tabooed and banned; it had also been largely abandoned. The regime insisted that it was not the rule of one social class above all others, and by granting everyone opportunities to rise, it in fact demonstrated class neutrality. What class consciousness remained was stamped out by the political pressures to which businessmen, blue- and white-collar workers, and farmers were subjected.

These measures did indeed break through the old, petrified social structures. They tangibly improved the material condition of much of the population. Yet no really new sociopolitical concepts can be detected underlying these programs. Hitler’s only ideas were concerned with the seizure of power; he had no vision of the new state or the new society. Fundamentally he did not want change; he wanted only to put his hand on the wheel. Just as the party had served him as an instrument for conquering Germany, Germany was now to serve him as an instrument “for pushing open the gate to lasting domination of the world.” Hitler’s domestic policy must be seen as an adjunct to his foreign policy.

In addition to his use of the available social energies, he employed the dynamism of nationalistic motivation to mobilize the masses. The onetime victors in the World War had already conceded German equality in principle, but in reality she had remained the pariah nation. France, above all, deeply disturbed by Hitler’s accession to power, was unrelenting, whereas England showed some discomfort at the contradictions into which she was being forced by her former ally. During the first year and a half of his rule Hitler exploited France’s fears, England’s scruples, and Germany’s indignation in a masterful manner. He succeeded in overturning the entire European system of alliances, in uniting Germany, and in preparing the ground for his Lebensraum policy.

The initial situation was by no means favorable to his ambitions. The terroristic aspects of his coming to power, the beatings and killings, above all, the persecution of a single segment of society solely because of their origin, ran counter to all civilized views of political conduct and produced a grim image of what was going on in Germany. There was the famous Maundy Thursday debate in the House of Commons, when Sir Austen Chamberlain, the former Foreign Secretary, declared that this was not the time to consider any further revision of the Versailles Treaty. He spoke of brutality, racial arrogance, and the policy of the iron heel. The slogan “Hitler means war,” so long dismissed as a piece of refugee hysteria, suddenly seemed credible. There were anti-German outbreaks here and there in Europe, and the Polish ambassador went so far as to ask whether France was. prepared to wage a preventive war in order to eliminate the Hitler regime. In the summer of 1933 Germany was almost totally isolated in the sphere of foreign policy.

Given these circumstances, Hitler found it advisable to make placating gestures and to stress continuity with the moderate Weimar policy. Although he despised the personnel of the Foreign Office and occasionally spoke of “those Santa Clauses in the Wilhelmstrasse,” he left both the bureaucracy and the diplomatic corps almost untouched. For at least six years, he told one of his followers, he must maintain a kind of truce with the European powers; all the saber rattling of nationalistic circles was a mistake, he said.²⁶ Typical of his strategy was his grand “peace speech” of May 17, 1933, although he mingled his sincere-sounding offers of reconciliation with some strong words against the persisting distinction between victors and defeated and even threatened to withdraw from the Disarmament Conference and from the League of Nations altogether if the victors continued to deny equal rights to Germany. But in the present situation he could easily assume the role of an advocate of reason and fairness by taking the European powers at their word, invoking their own slogans of “self-determination” and a “just peace.” So great was the general gratification at Hitler’s moderation that no one detected the warning contained within his speech. Along with the London Times many influential voices throughout the world supported Hitler’s demand that Germany be treated on a footing of equality with the other powers. President Roosevelt was actually delighted with Hitler’s tone.²⁷

The most visible success of this policy was the Four Power Pact between England, France, Germany, and Italy that was drawn up in the summer of 1933. Although never ratified, it signified a kind of moral acceptance of Germany into the society of great powers. But Germany’s first partner in international negotiations was the Soviet Union, which hastened to renew the Berlin Treaty that had expired in 1931. Russia was followed closely by the Vatican, which in July concluded the arrangements for a concordat with the Reich. But even though things were going well, in the autumn Hitler swung the rudder around with an abruptness that seemed to spring from a blind emotion and managed thereby to perceptibly improve his whole position.

His field of operations was the Disarmament Conference in Geneva, which had been meeting since the beginning of 1932. Because of her military weakness, Germany exerted a particularly strong moral sway at this conference. The principle of equality compelled the other powers either to disarm or to accept the rearmament of Germany. In speech after speech, statement after statement, Hitler could stress Germany’s readiness to disarm; the more France’s anxieties came to the fore, the more simple-heartedly and persuasively Hitler could argue. France was watching events in Germany with deep uneasiness; she found these developments far more telling than Hitler’s bland assurances, even though her persistent distrust—which blocked all negotiations—cast her in a bad light internationally. But by pointing to the system of repression inside the Reich, to the increasing militarization, the constant marching, the flags, uniforms and parades, the organizational vocabulary with its “storm troops,” “brigades” and “headquarters guards,” and the battle songs in which the whole human race trembled before a Germany that owned the world, France at last managed to bring the other powers around. The equality conceded to Germany in principle was made dependent on a four-year period of probation, so that the others could observe whether their former enemy was sincerely ready for reconciliation and had abandoned all revanchist notions.

Hitler reacted by flaring up. On October 14, shortly after British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon had presented the Allies’ new views, Hitler announced his intention to quit the Disarmament Conference. Along with this, he proclaimed Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. His state of mind is indicated by his orders to the army—revealed at the Nuremberg Trials—to resist with armed force if an attempt were made to apply sanctions.²⁸

This first coup, with which Hitler took the regime’s foreign policy into his own hands, created stupefaction. It is true that he had not made the decision on his own—as has been widely thought. He was supported strongly by Foreign Minister von Neurath, who had previously advocated a deliberate sharpening of Germany’s foreign policy. But the emotional posturing, the tone of grand indignation, unquestionably derived from Hitler himself. And it was also he who posed the alternatives as “withdrawal or dishonor.” In a radio address delivered on the evening of October 14 he applied to foreign affairs the dual tactics which had proved of such value to him in domestic affairs: he masked his belligerence by a torrent of words and show of amicability. He called France “our ancient but glorious opponent” and stated that “anyone who can conceive of a war between our two countries is mad.”

These tactics paralyzed the European powers, who in any case were hardly disposed to take decisive counteraction. None of their spokesmen had any idea what do do. Hitler was contemptuously tossing back in their faces the “honor” for which the Weimar regime had so long and patiently sued. His brashness stunned them. But some hid their surprise and embarrassment by congratulating the others on being rid of an inconvenient partner in negotiations. A few demanded military intervention; in the lobbies at Geneva angry exclamations of “C’est la guerre!” could be heard. But this was not meant to be taken seriously. Yet amid the tumult it seemed to dawn on people for the first time that this man was demanding of old Europe an admission of bankruptcy. Moreover, it was becoming apparent that he had delivered a fatal blow to a wounded League of Nations already undermined by fear, mistrust, and selfishness. At the same time, the idea of disarmament was killed off. If it is true, as has been remarked, that Hitler’s conquest of power was actually a declaration of war upon the system of peace instituted at Versailles,²⁹ then the declaration was made on that October 14, 1933. But no one acknowledged it. General annoyance with the protracted Geneva palaver, with paradoxes and hypocrisies, was expressed above all in the British press. The conservative Morning Post declared that it would shed no tears over the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference; the proper feeling was relief that such “a humbug” had come to an end. When the newsreel in a London theater showed Hitler, the audience applauded.³⁰

Fearing that the easy success of the surprise tactics would go to Hitler’s head, Hermann Rauschning, coming from Geneva, called on him at the Berlin chancellery. He found Hitler “in the best of spirits; he was all keyed-up and eager to take action.” With a contemptuous gesture he waved away what Rauschning had to say about the indignation at Geneva and the call for military sanctions. “You say they want war?” he asked. “They have no thought of it…. A sad crew is assembled there. They don’t act, they only protest. And they’ll always think of things too late…. These people will not stop Germany’s rise.”

For a time, Rauschning’s report continues, Hitler paced back and forth in silence. He seemed to be aware that for the first time since January 30 he had entered a risky zone, which he must now cross, and that his forceful act could have the direst consequences for the country. Without looking up, Hitler justified his decision in a kind of monologue. In doing so he offered Rauschning a remarkable insight into the structure of his decision making:

Shortly afterward it became apparent that he had reasoned rightly. For Hitler characteristically linked withdrawal from the League of Nations with another step that went considerably beyond the original pretext. He decided to hold a plebiscite on the issue, the first such plebiscite of his regime, and one staged with an enormous display of propaganda. This in turn was combined with new elections. For the Reichstag that had been elected on March 5 was to some extent still anachronistically divided on the pattern that had prevailed under the Weimar Republic.

The outcome of the voting could not be in doubt. Feelings of humiliation harbored for years, deep-seated resentment over the tricks by which Germany had been kept under since Versailles—all such emotions now broke forth, and even critics of the regime, who would soon be going over to active resistance, hailed Hitler’s gesture. As the British ambassador reported to London, all Germans were united in the desire to avenge themselves upon the League of Nations for its manifold failures. Since Hitler had intertwined his policies as a whole with the resolution to withdraw from the League by framing his plebiscite question in general terms, there was no way for the voter to express approval of his position on the League of Nations and at the same time condemn his domestic policies. Thus the plebiscite was one of the most effective chess moves in the process of consolidating his power within Germany.

Hitler himself opened the campaign on October 24 with a major speech in the Berlin Sportpalast. He announced that the plebiscite was to take place on November 12, one day after the fifteenth anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. Once more facing an electoral challenge, Hitler worked himself up into a trancelike paroxysm. “For my part I declare,” he cried out to the masses, “that I would sooner die than sign anything that in my most sacred conviction is not tolerable for the German people.” He also asserted that “if ever I should be mistaken in this matter or if the people should ever believe that they can no longer support my actions… I wish them to have me executed. I will quietly await the blow!” As always, when he felt slighted, he ranted demagogically about the injustice that had been done to him. Speaking to the workers of the Siemens-Schuckert Works, dressed in boots, military trousers, and dark civilian jacket, standing on an enormous derrick, he stated:

Once again, as in earlier years, a frantic “poster war” was launched. “We want honor and equality!” In Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt a procession of crippled veterans in wheelchairs was mounted. The veterans held signs: “Germany’s Dead Demand Your Vote!” Considerable use was made of quotations from the wartime British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who asserted that right was on Germany’s side and that England would not have put up with such a humiliation for any length of time.³² A wave of gigantic marches, protest festivals, and mass appeals once again rolled over the country. A few days before the election the nation was asked to observe two minutes of total silence in remembrance of its dead heroes. Hitler declared that the military tone of life in Germany was not for the sake of demonstrating against France “but to exemplify the political decisionmaking that is necessary for the conquest of Communism…. When the rest of the world barricades itself in indestructible fortresses, builds vast fleets of airplanes, constructs giant tanks, makes enormous cannon, it can scarcely talk about a menace when German National Socialists march entirely weaponless in columns of four and thus provide a visible expression of the German racial community and effective protection for it…. Germany has a right to security no less than other nations.”

All the resentments of the people were expressed in the results of the plebiscite—but it also showed the effects of an intensification of propaganda. Ninety-five per cent of the voters approved the government’s decision to withdraw from the League. And although this result was manipulated and accompanied by terroristic electioneering practices the outcome still more or less corresponded to public mood. In the simultaneous Reichstag election 39 million of the 45 million eligibles gave their vote to the Nazi “unity” candidates. The day was exuberantly hailed as “the miracle of the birth of the German nation.”

During his coming to power Hitler had proved the value of a series of surprise actions on the domestic front; now he applied the same tactics to foreign affairs. The dismay at his break with Geneva was not yet over, and there was still indignation at his arrogant attempt to turn the democratic principle of the plebiscite against the democracies themselves, when he again seized the initiative. His purpose now was to arrange a dialogue on a new and more favorable plane with the powers he had just offended. In a memorandum issued in mid-December he rejected the idea of disarmament but declared himself willing to accept a general limitation of armaments to defensive weapons, provided Germany was allowed to raise a conscript army of 300,000 men.

This was the first of those offers, placed with such remarkable feeling for the situation, which for years prefaced each of his foreign-policy coups right up to the outbreak of the war. For the British the terms were just barely acceptable as a basis for negotiations, for the French unacceptable, just as Hitler had calculated in each case. And while the two Allies took council endlessly—the consultations protracted by French distrust—on how far each was willing to go in making concessions, Hitler could exploit their differences, and the fact that no binding agreements had yet been arranged, to push forward his own plans.

Again, about a month later—on January 26, 1934—a new move of Hitler’s abruptly changed the picture: he concluded a ten-year nonaggression pact with Poland. To understand the startling effect of this move, we must call to mind the traditionally tense relations between Germany and Poland and the fund of old resentment between the two countries. Some of the bitterest points of the Versailles Treaty had been those concerned with territorial losses to the new Polish state, the creation of the Polish Corridor, which cut off East Prussia from the rest of the Reich, and the establishment of the Free City of Danzig. These areas became bones of contention between the two countries and the focuses of constant menaces. The Germans had been greatly disturbed by Polish border violations and injustices during the early years of the Weimar Republic, partly because they had pointed up Germany’s general impotence, partly because of the offense to the old German sense of being able to lord it over the Slavic vassals. As France’s ally, moreover, Poland fed the Germans’ encirclement complex. Weimar foreign policy, including that of Gustav Stresemann, had stubbornly resisted any suggestions that Germany guarantee Poland’s possession of her existing territory.

These anti-Polish feelings dominated the traditionally pro-Russian diplomatic and military circles and the old Prussian landowning class as well. Yet Hitler brushed them aside with hardly a qualm. On the other side Marshal Piłsudski displayed equal resolution: faced with France’s halfhearted and nervous policy, he restructured Poland’s entire pattern of alliances. Essentially he was acting on the premise that Hitler, as a South German, a Catholic and a “Hapsburger,” could disassociate himself from the political traditions that Poland feared.

Here Hitler once more gave the lie to the popular view of him as an emotional politician, the victim of his whims and manias. Unquestionably he shared the national German enmity toward Poland. But he did not allow this to affect his policy. Although he had not yet defined what place Poland would occupy within his general concept of a vast eastward expansion, it may be assumed that there was no room for an independent Polish ministate within the framework of Hitler’s continental visions. As recently as April, 1933, Hitler had made it plain to Ambassador François-Poncet that no one could expect Germany to accept in the long run the present state of her eastern border. But as long as Poland was independent, militarily strong, and protected by alliances, he acted on the basis of the situation he could not change and coolly tried to turn it to his advantage. “Germans and Poles will have to learn to accept the fact of each other’s existence,” he stated in his anniversary report to the Reichstag on January 30, 1934. “Hence it is more sensible to regulate this state of affairs which the last thousand years have not been able to remove, and the next thousand years will not be able to remove either, in such a way that the highest possible profit will accrue from it for both nations.”

The profit Hitler derived from the treaty did in fact prove to be enormous. In Germany itself the pact was scarcely popular; but to the outside world Hitler could repeatedly adduce it as evidence of his conciliatory temper even with regard to notorious enemies. British Ambassador Sir Eric Phipps commented in a report to London that the German Chancellor had now proved that he was a statesman by sacrificing some of his popularity to a rational foreign policy.³³ At the same time, Hitler had succeeded, by his Polish alliance, in discrediting the system of the League of Nations, which in all the preceding years had not managed to dampen the Polish-German tinderbox. Things had been left, as Hitler convincingly complained, so that the “tensions gradually… assumed the character of a hereditary political taint on both sides.” And now, seemingly without effort, in the course of a few bilateral conversations, he eliminated the problem.

Finally, the pact proved that the barriers which had been erected around Germany were not nearly as stout as had been assumed. “With Poland, one of the strongest pillars of the Treaty of Versailles falls,” General von Seeckt had once said, expressing one of the tenets of the Weimar Republic’s foreign policy—and obviously suggesting that the problem could be solved by military action. Hitler was now demonstrating that imaginative political methods could achieve great effects. For the alliance not only freed Germany from the Franco-Polish threat on two fronts; it also knocked a sizable piece out of the system of collective guarantees of peace and left that system permanently irreparable. The Geneva experiment had, fundamentally speaking, already failed; Hitler had destroyed it with his first assault. Moreover, he had maneuvered France into the role of international troublemaker. The Foreign Ministers of the Weimar Republic had worn themselves out trying to wring concessions from an all-powerful and unyielding France. Hitler had simply turned his back on her temporarily. Henceforth he could devote himself to those bilateral negotiations, alliances, and intrigues that were central to his strategy of international relations. For he could win only if he confronted isolated opponents, never a united front. The game he had so skillfully staged in the domestic arena was now beginning again on the international plane. Already his fellow players were pressing forward. The first of them, in February, 1934, was the British Keeper of the Privy Seal, Anthony Eden.

The unpredictability of Hitler’s manner must be counted among his prime tricks as a negotiator. Just as Hugenberg, Schleicher, Papen, and a vast entourage had once done, Eden, Sir John Simon, André François-Poncet, and Benito Mussolini thought they would be meeting a moody, limited, booted party boss who, to be sure, possessed a certain demagogic talent. The fellow who had obviously had to overcome his insignificance and borrow character for himself from a mustache, a forelock, and a uniform, who in an ordinary business suit looked rather like an imitation of the man he pretended to be, was for some time the favorite butt of European humor. He was pictured as a kind of “Gandhi in Prussian boots” or a feeble-minded Charlie Chaplin seated on a much too high chancellor’s throne—at any rate “to the highest degree exotic,” as a British observer, Arnold Toynbee, wrote ironically, “one of these political ‘mad mullahs,’ non-smokers, non-drinkers of alcohol, non-eaters of meat, non-riders on horseback, and non-practisers of blood-sports in their cranky private lives.”³⁴ Negotiators and visitors who came to Hitler with such preconceptions were therefore all the more surprised. For years he astonished them by a schooled statesmanlike manner which he could easily put on and for which they were totally unprepared. Eden was amazed at Hitler’s smart, almost elegant appearance, and wondered at finding him controlled and friendly. He listened readily to all objections, Eden wrote, and was by no means the melodramatic actor he had been described as being. Hitler knew what he was talking about, Eden commented in retrospect, and respect still rings in his remark that the German Chancellor had had complete command of the subject under discussion and had not once found it necessary to consult his experts even on questions of detail. Sir John Simon remarked to von Neurath on a later occasion that Hitler was “excellent and very convincing” in conversation, and that before meeting him he had had a completely false picture of him. Hitler also surprised his interlocutors by his quickwittedness. When the British Foreign Minister hinted that the English liked people to abide by treaties, Hitler showed ironic surprise and replied: “That was not always the case. In 1813 the German Army was prohibited by treaty. Yet I do not recollect that at Waterloo Wellington said to Blucher: Your Army is illegal. Kindly leave the field.”

When Hitler met Mussolini in Venice in June, 1934, he contrived to combine “dignity with friendliness and candor” in his manner, according to a diplomatic eyewitness, and left a “strong impression” behind among the initially skeptical Italians. Arnold Toynbee was surprised to hear him discourse on Germany’s guardian role in the East; his remarks, moreover, made excellent sense. In his relations with foreign visitors Hitler showed himself quick-witted, well prepared, often charming; and as François-Poncet noted after one meeting with him, he also contrived to give the impression of “fullest sincerity.”³⁵

Like the Germans who had once come to gape at Hitler as if he were an acrobat in a circus, the foreigners came in growing numbers, and in so doing extended the aura of greatness and admiration that surrounded him. They listened all too eagerly to his words about the people’s longing for order and work, to his assurances of his love of peace, which he was fond of connecting with his personal experiences as a soldier at the front. The foreigners showed understanding for his sensitive sense of honor. It was already beginning to be customary, especially within Germany itself, to distinguish between the fanatical partisan politician of the past and the responsible realist of the present. For the first time since the days of the Kaiser a majority of the German people had the feeling that they could identify with their own government without feelings of pity, anxiety, or shame. Papen, who otherwise was certainly no spokesman for the general mood, was probably expressing a widely held view when he paid tribute, at a cabinet meeting of November 14, 1933, to the “genius of the Chancellor.”

Meanwhile, the decibel level of propaganda was stepped up, and more was made of Hitler as the leader and savior than ever. On the morning of May 1 Goebbels prolonged his introductory speech until the sun, which had been battling with the clouds, began to break through and Hitler could step before the masses in a blaze of light. Such clever symbolism conferred upon the image of the Führer the sacredness of a supernatural principle. And the concept of the “leader” was made to permeate the entire social system down to the very smallest units. The rector was described as the “leader of the university,” the businessman as the “factory leader.” Everyone was fitted into some leader-follower relationship, and all these relationships culminated in the archleader Hitler. An ecstatic Thuringian churchwarden went so far as to declare: “Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler.”

The personality and the destiny of the great, lonely, chosen man, who had turned away the country’s miseries or taken them upon himself, became the subject of a multitude of Führer poems, Führer films, Führer pictures, or Führer dramas. In Richard Euringer’s Thingspiel,[12] Deutsche Passion (German Passion), performed with great success in the summer of 1933 and subsequently hailed as the model of National Socialist drama, Hitler appeared as a resurrected Unknown Soldier, a crown of thorns made of barbed wire upon his head, entering a world of profiteers, stockholders, intellectuals, and proletarians—the representatives of the “November Republic.” He has come because, in the words of the play, which continually sounds Christian motifs, he “had mercy on the people.” When the mob wants to scourge and crucify him, he checks them by a miracle and leads the nation “to warfare and workfare” (zu Gewehr und Gewerk). He reconciles the living with the war dead in the great people’s community of the Third Reich. Then “a glory breaks” from his wounds and he ascends into heaven with the words: “It is finished!” The stage directions for the final scene read: “Organ tone from the skies. Nostalgia. Sacral. Rhythmically and harmoniously mingled with the secular marching song.”

Closely akin to such literary rubbish was the broad and polluted stream of kitsch culture. Everyone jumped in, trying to cash in on the mood of the moment. A brand of canned herring was called “Good Adolf.” Coin banks were made in the form of SA caps. Pictures of Hitler appeared on ties, handkerchiefs, hand mirrors, and the swastika decorated ash trays and beer mugs. Some Nazi officials warned that the Führer’s picture was being exploited and profaned by a money-grubbing band of pseudoartists.

It is clear that the excessive tributes had their effect upon Hitler himself. He was aware that the whole thing was artificially manufactured in line with his program: “The masses need an idol,” he declared. Nevertheless, the lineaments of the “leader-pope” began coming to the fore again, after having been suppressed somewhat just after the seizure of power. Now, however, this kind of leadership was extended from the party to the entire nation. As early as February 25, 1934, Rudolf Hess, speaking at the Königsplatz in Munich amid the roar of cannon and addressing by radio nearly a million political bosses, leaders of the Hitler Youth and the Labor Service, had made them take the oath: “Adolf Hitler is Germany and Germany is Adolf Hitler. He who pledges himself to Hitler pledges himself to Germany.”

Reinforced by his band of disciples, Hitler became more and more at home with this equation, which meanwhile was being given a theoretical foundation in an extensive literature on political science. Sample: “The new and decisive aspect of the Führer Constitution is that it goes beyond the democratic distinction between rulers and ruled to create a unity in which the Leader and the following have merged.” All selfish interests and all social antagonisms were abolished within him; a total unity of the German people corresponded to the total enemy on the outside. The Führer had the power to bind and to loose; he knew the way, the mission, the law of history.

Hitler’s speeches show him in full agreement with all this; he reckoned in centuries and occasionally suggested that he was on special terms with Providence. And just as he had overruled the many Old Fighters who had believed the party program, so he made his Danzig followers hew to the new line on Poland. He insisted on discipline, with no allowance made for local interests. “Everything in Germany begins with this man and ends with him,” his adjutant Wilhelm Brückner wrote.

The surer Hitler felt in the possession of power, the more conspicuously his old bohemian traits came to the fore, his lapses into torpor, his moodiness. For the present he still kept regular office hours, entered his office punctually at ten o’clock in the morning, and to evening visitors displayed the mountains of documents he had worked through. But he had always hated routine. “A single idea of genius,” he used to say, “is more valuable than a whole lifetime of conscientious office work.” Scarcely, therefore, had the excitement of being a Chancellor faded, with the glamour of the historical decor and the thrill of sitting at Bismarck’s desk, than he began discarding it all—just as in his youth he had dropped the piano, school, painting. Sooner or later, in fact, he would drop everything—at the end even the political game and his love of oratory. Ultimately, all he held on to were his obsessive ideas, those products of anxiety and ambition.

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.

The Röhm Affair

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.”

That was also the meaning of the slogan “The Second Revolution,” which henceforth began to circulate through the barracks and headquarters of the SA. This slogan implied that the seizure of power in the spring of 1933 had bogged down in a thousand wretched halfway measures and compromises, had been altogether betrayed and must be pushed on to the point of total revolution, to a taking possession of the entire state. Many have pointed to this as proof that there was indeed some kind of constructive social concept, no matter how sketchy, within the brown formations. But no such definable concept ever arose out of the fog of phrases about the “sacred socialist seeking-the-whole,” and no one attempted to describe how the SA state would be made up. This socialism never went beyond a crude, unconsidered soldier’s communism—even more radicalized in Röhm’s case by the cliquishness of homosexuals against a hostile world. The gist of it was that the SA state would be the kind of state that would solve the desperate social problem of so many unemployed storm troopers. There were also the cheated expectations of political adventurers who had masked their nihilism in the ideology of the Nazi movement and refused to understand why, now, after the victory had been won at last, they should bid adieu to excitement, fighting, and turmoil.

The very aimlessness of the SA’s revolutionary fervor had in the meantime aroused anxieties in much of the public. No one knew against whom Röhm was planning to turn the enormous force that he flaunted in a furious series of parades, inspections, and spectacular demonstrations throughout Germany. Ostentatiously he set about reviving the old military tendencies within the SA, but he also sought connections and suppliers of funds in industry. He set up a task force of his own, the SA field police, and was likewise beginning to build up the SA’s own judiciary. The latter set extremely severe penalties for unwarranted beatings, robbery, theft, or plundering by the SA; but it also ruled that “as retribution for the killing of an SA man the SA leader in charge of the case can require that up to twelve members of the enemy organization which prepared the murder may be condemned.” The language was just sufficiently ambiguous to suggest that “condemned” meant “executed.” At the same time, Röhm tried to secure a footing in the administration of the states, in academic and publishing fields, and in general to project the special claims of the SA everywhere. He was continually criticizing the regime, its foreign policy, its attacks on the unions, and its repression of freedom of opinion. He denounced Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, and Hess in the bitterest terms. As for his opinion of Hitler, he was personally outraged by the Fuhrer’s deviousness and would freely air his grievances when among friends:

What Röhm most wanted was to absorb the numerically smaller Reichswehr into his brown mass army and thereby create a National Socialist militia. It seems that Hitler had no intention whatever of letting him do this. The disagreement on the purpose of the SA was old, and Hitler continued to hold that the brown formations should carry out a political, not a military function. They were to be an enormous “Hitler shock troop,” not the cadres of a revolutionary army. Outwardly, however, he faked indecisiveness, obviously hoping to hit upon some compromise between Röhm’s ambitions and the claims of the Reichswehr. Undoubtedly he shared with Röhm a profound aversion, reinforced by his experiences of 1923, for the arrogant, stiff, monocle-wearing “old fogies,” and Himmler once heard him remark about the generals, “One day they’ll take a shot at me.”³⁸ But their backing was indispensable if he were to consolidate his power. He kept in mind the great lesson of the November putsch, never again to get involved in open conflict with the armed forces. He attributed his defeat at that time to the opposition of the army, just as he attributed his success in 1933 to the support or at least the benevolent neutrality of the army leadership. Moreover, he would need their technical expertise for the rearmament program which he had already launched in the summer of 1933. In view of his expansionist plans, he knew there was no time to lose. Moreover, only the regular army possessed the offensive power that he required—a militia such as Röhm had in mind was, strictly speaking, an instrument of defense.

Yet Hitler must have been pleasantly surprised by the way top army men behaved toward him. In Defense Minister von Blomberg and in the new chief of staff, Colonel Walther von Reichenau, he found two partners who, for different reasons, were entirely amenable to his wishes.

Blomberg was an enthusiast by temperament. He had in turn subscribed to democracy, anthroposophy, the idea of a Prussian socialism, then “something close to Communism”—this after a trip to Russia—and finally been drawn more and more to authoritarian ideas until he succumbed to Hitler’s blandishments. In 1933, Blomberg later avowed, he had been vouchsafed things he no longer could have hoped for: faith, veneration for a man, and complete dedication to an idea. A friendly remark of Hitler’s, a contemporary source tells us, could bring tears to his eyes; and Blomberg used to say that a cordial handshake of the Fuhrer’s could cure him of colds.³⁹

Reichenau was of a different stamp: a sober man with a Machiavellian turn of mind who kept his ambitions free from emotion. He quickly decided that he could make use of Nazism to further his personal career and the power of the army. At the proper moment the Nazis could be tamed, he thought. As intelligent as he was coolheaded, by nature decisive, sometimes to a fault, he was the almost perfect embodiment of the modern, technically trained and socially unbiased army officer who unfortunately carried his lack of prejudices to moral categories also. At a meeting of army commanders in February, 1933, he opined that the general breakdown could be stemmed only by dictatorship. This thesis so well suited Hitler’s purposes that he must have asked himself why he should turn down the proffered allegiance of the military experts in favor of the troublesome Röhm. Among his intimates he tended to make fun of these “bandylegged SA men who think they’re the material for a military elite.”

Hitler’s usual way of handling his enemies was to play them off against each other and let them fight it out between them. But in this case he was fairly frank about which side he favored. It is true that he constantly whipped up the SA’s militant activism and would, for example, exhort the storm troopers: “Your whole life will be nothing but struggle. From struggle you came; do not hope for peace today or tomorrow.” His appointment of Röhm to the cabinet on December 1 and his remarkably cordial letter of thanks to the chief of staff at the end of the year were widely interpreted, within the SA, as an official blessing. Nevertheless, he repeatedly assured the army that it was and would remain the sole armed force in the nation. And his decision at the beginning of the new year to reintroduce compulsory military service within the framework of the army ran counter to all Röhm’s plans for a vast militia. But Röhm continued to believe that Hitler was, as always, playing some deep game and secretly agreed with him now as he supposedly had in the past.

Consequently, Röhm decided that he was being blocked by some of Hitler’s advisers. Accustomed to overcoming all difficulties by frontal assault, he resorted to noisy invective and heavy pressure. He called Hitler a “weakling” who had fallen into the hands of “stupid and dangerous creatures.” But he, Röhm, was going to “free him from those fetters.” And while the SA began posting armed guards around its headquarters, Röhm sent a memorandum to the Ministry of Defense declaring the defense of the country was the “domain of the SA” and leaving the army the sole task of military training. Incessantly speechmaking and fulminating, he thus gradually set the stage on which his destiny was to be played out. At the beginning of January, 1934, only a few days after Hitler had thanked his chief of staff and intimate friend in such warm words for his services, the Chancellor ordered Rudolf Diels, chief of the secret state police office (the incipient Gestapo) to gather incriminating documents on “Herr Röhm and his friendships” and also on the SA’s terroristic activities. “This is the most important assignment you have ever received,” he told Diels.

Meanwhile, the army had not been idle. Röhm’s memorandum had made it plain to the Reichswehr leaders that there was no midcourse: Hitler would have to choose between themselves and the SA. Ostentatiously meeting the Nazis halfway, early in February Blomberg directed that the “Aryan clause” be applied to the officer corps and made the swastika the official symbol of the armed forces. Army Commander in Chief General von Fritsch justified this step on the grounds that it would “give the Chancellor the necessary impetus against the SA.”⁴⁰

In fact, Hitler now found himself forced to take an unambiguous position. On February 2 he delivered an address to the gauleiters assembled in Berlin. The speech both reflected his perplexities at the time and constituted a noteworthy statement of principles. The minutes of the meeting record:

These principles were in fact to obtain deep into the war years. The practical conclusions were not long in coming. As early as February 21, 1934, Hitler confided to Anthony Eden that he intended to reduce the SA by two thirds and insure that the remaining formations received neither weapons nor military training. A week later he summoned the commanders of the army and the leaders of the SA and SS, headed by Röhm and Himmler, to the Ministry of Defense, on Bendlerstrasse. In a speech that the army officers received with applause and the SA leaders heard with horror, he sketched the basic lines of an agreement between the Reichswehr and the SA. The duties of the brown-shirted storm troops would be limited to a few minor military functions; their chief assignment was to be the political education of the nation. Hitler begged the SA leadership not to obstruct him in such grave times—and added menacingly that he would crush anyone who tried to.

Röhm failed to note these warnings or regarded them as mere verbal maneuvers. For the time being he kept his composure and invited everyone present to a “reconciliation breakfast.” But as soon as the generals had left, he freely vented his anger. He is said to have called Hitler an “ignorant corporal” and declargd bluntly that he “had no intention of keeping the agreement.” He is also alleged to have said that Hitler was “disloyal and badly in need of a vacation.” Subsequently SA Obergruppenführer Lutze went to see Hitler at Obersalzberg and in a conversation lasting several hours reported Röhm’s insults and veiled threats.

In all this Röhm was actuated not just by defiance and the arrogance of knowing that, as he declared, he had the power of thirty divisions behind him. Rather, he understood only too well that Hitler was confronting him with an unacceptable alternative. To tell him that he must either educate the nation or quit was the equivalent to giving him the sack. For no one could seriously imagine that those “bandylegged” SA men were the right people to instruct the Aryan master race.

Convinced of the hopelessness of his situation, Röhm seems to have called on Hitler early in March and proposed a “little solution”: that the army take in several thousand SA leaders. This would at least provide for some of Röhm’s people. But both Hindenburg and the army leadership would not hear of this. Röhm found himself driven by an outraged and increasingly impatient following, and by his own craving for status, to take once more the path of revolt.

From the spring of 1934 on, the slogans of the second revolution were again in currency. But although there was talk of putsch and rebellion, there is no indication of a specific plan of action. In keeping with the rough-and-tough stance of these blusterers, they were satisfied with bloodthirsty phrases. Röhm himself had spells of resignation, occasionally considered returning to Bolivia, and at one point told the French ambassador that he was sick. Nevertheless, he kept trying to break out of the ever more tightly closing ring of isolation and to make contact with Schleicher and probably with other oppositional circles. He organized a new wave of giant parades and, in general, tried by incessant triumphant marches to make a show of the SA’s unbroken vigor. At the same time, he obtained sizable quantities of arms—partly by purchases abroad—and stepped up the militarytraining program of his units. Of course, all this may only have served to keep his disappointed and irritably loafing storm troopers occupied. But such activities were regarded by Hitler and the army leadership as a challenge. Certainly they provided a disquieting background to the rebellious bluster.

It appears that by the spring Hitler stopped trying to settle matters amicably with Röhm and instead steered toward a solution by violence. On April 17, at a spring concert given by the SS in the Berlin Sportpalast, Hitler appeared in public with Röhm for the last time. Extending the assignment given to Diels, he now directed several party bureaus—by his own later testimony—to look into the rumors about a second revolution and to track down their sources. It is tempting to associate the build-up of the Sicherheitsdienst (the security service of the SS, the notorious SD), which began simultaneously with this assignment, and likewise Heinrich Himmler’s take-over of the Prussian Gestapo. Obviously there was a connection with the fact that the judicial authorities at this point began to prosecute SA crimes for the first time. Theodor Eicke, the commandant of Dachau concentration camp, supposedly received instructions to draw up a “Reich list” containing the names of “undesirable persons.”

It was a veritable roundup that Röhm could scarcely misconstrue. Plainly they were out to get him. His principal enemies were the functionaries of the Political Organization (PO), above all Göring, Goebbels, and Hess, who envied the SA chief of staff his enormous power base and the position of second man in the state that went with it. Heinrich Himmler soon joined them; as commander of the SS, then still a subdivision of the SA, he stood to profit by Röhm’s fall. Alongside these party people, cautiously operating in the background but more and more making its presence felt, was the army leadership. By skillfully peddling information about Röhm and by playing up its own docility, it hoped to draw Hitler over to its side. In February, 1934, the corps of army officers voluntarily set aside one of its dearest traditions, the principle of drawing its members from a special stratum of society. Instructions were issued to the effect that henceforth “origin in the old officer caste” was not to be the basic requirement for a military career, but rather “consonance with the new government.” Shortly afterward, the Reichswehr introduced political education for the troops. On Hitler’s birthday, April 20, Minister of Defense Blomberg published an extravagant article in praise of the Führer. Simultaneously, he renamed the Munich barracks that housed the List Regiment, in which Hitler had once served, the Adolf Hitler Barracks. The army’s strategy was to stir up the ill-feeling between Hitler and Röhm until an open quarrel ensued from which the army generals would emerge the victors. They reasoned that Hitler would not realize that by stripping Röhm of power he was disarming himself and placing himself at the mercy of the army.

The rising tension was palpably communicated to the public mind. For a year Hitler had continued to keep the population breathless by fireworks, speeches, appeals, coups, and histrionics. Now both the public and the producer seemed equally exhausted. The pause for reflection offered the nation a first opportunity to take account of its real condition. Not yet completely overwhelmed and corrupted by propaganda, it noted coercion, pressure and regimentation, persecution of defenseless minorities, concentration camps, difficulties with the churches, the specter of inflation caused by reckless spending, terrorism and threats from the SA, and growing distrust on the part of the rest of the world. The result was a reversal of sentiment that even a noisy “campaign against gripers and criticasters,” launched by Goebbels, was unable to stem. What emerged in the spring of 1934 was not a massive mood of dissatisfaction that found vent in any broadly based oppositional spirit; but unmistakably a sense of skepticism, of uneasiness, of suspicion, was spreading, and along with it an intimation that something was rotten in the state of Germany.

The spreading disenchantment suggests that we glance once more at the conservative stage managers of the events of January, 1933. And, in fact, although they now had forfeited all power to act, they seemed to feel that something should be done. In June, 1934, when Hindenburg was about to leave for his summer vacation at Neudeck, his parting words to his Vice-Chancellor were: “Things are going badly, Papen. Try to straighten them out.” Since, however, there was no question of the President’s intervening himself—the old man was visibly failing—the conservatives took up the idea of a monarchist restoration. Hitler had rejected this idea in no uncertain terms, the last time in his Reichstag speech of January 30, 1934. But Hindenburg now, on Papen’s urging, promised to add a passage to his testament recommending a return to the monarchy. After all, the monarchist faction reasoned, under pressure of events Hitler would sooner or later have to accept a good many things he did not like.

In view of the reports of Hindenburg’s condition, a rapid decision on Hitler’s part was all the more urgent. His own plans assumed he would take over the office of President. This would assure him supreme command of the army and would thus form the concluding act in the seizure of power. On June 4, therefore, he once more met Röhm in order—as he explained in his later self-justifying speech—“to spare the Movement and my SA the shame of such a disagreement, and… to solve the problem without severe conflicts.” In a discussion lasting for some five hours he pleaded with Röhm “of his own accord to oppose this madness” of a second revolution. But Röhm was far from ready to capitulate and gave him only the customary empty assurances.

The propaganda campaign against the gripers was screwed to a higher pitch of intensity. In addition to the SA, the conservative positions of the old bourgeoisie, of the nobility, of the churches, and above all of the monarchy came under the fire of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. But Röhm, evidently unsuspecting, went on vacation. In an order of the day he informed his followers that he was suffering from a rheumatic complaint and had to go to Bad Wiessee for a cure. To ease the tension somewhat, he sent the majority of the SA formations on leave for the month of July. His order warned “the enemies of the SA” against harboring any false hopes that the storm troopers would not return from their leaves, and in grimly ambiguous terms he threatened those enemies with an “appropriate answer.” Interestingly enough, the order of the day did not mention Hitler’s name.

Contrary to all his subsequent asseverations, it appears that Hitler could not have believed that Röhm, however recalcitrant, had plans for occupying the capital, seizing control of the government, and, in the course of a “conflict of the bloodiest kind, lasting several days,” removing him personally.

Nine days later, Hitler went to Venice for his first trip abroad. He looked nervous, distracted and ill-humored as, wearing a light-colored raincoat, he walked forward to meet the Italian dictator. According to a political joke that went the rounds in Germany, Mussolini allegedly murmured, “Ave, Imitator!” Certainly there could not have been a less auspicious beginning for this curious relationship, filled with mutual admiration and no doubt blindness, soon to be dominated by Hitler with his conception of “brutal friendship.”⁴² At least during this period Hitler’s mind was on other things than the threat of Röhm.

There were other threats, however. Concerned that the obviously impending death of Hindenburg would destroy the last chance to steer the regime onto a more moderate course, conservative backers of Franz von Papen urged him to take some sort of stand. On Sunday, June 17, while Hitler was meeting with his assembled party leaders in Gera, the Vice-Chancellor delivered a speech at Marburg University. It had been ghosted for him by the conservative writer Edgar Jung and had far more bite than anything Papen himself might have produced. In a sensational fashion he came out strongly against the National Socialist revolution for its violence and unbridled radicalism. He condemned the roughshod methods of Gleichschaltung. He protested against the “unnatural claim to totality” and against the plebeian contempt for intellectual work. Then he continued:

No nation can afford an eternal revolt from below if that nation wishes to continue to exist as a historical entity. At some time the movement must come to an end; at some time a firm social structure must arise, and must be maintained by an incorruptible judiciary and an uncontested State authority. Permanent dynamism cannot shape anything lasting. We must not let Germany become a train tearing along to nowhere in particular….

The government is well informed concerning the elements of selfishness, lack of character, mendacity, beastliness and arrogance that are spreading under the guise of the German Revolution. Nor is the government unaware that the treasure of confidence that the German people bestowed upon it is in jeopardy. Those who want closeness and intimate contact with the people must not underestimate the people’s intelligence, must have confidence in them in return, not forever try to keep them in leading strings…. Not by whipping people up, especially whipping up the youth, and not by threats against helpless parts of the nation, but only by an honest dialogue with the people, can confidence and eager commitment be intensified…. Every word of criticism must not instantly be dubbed ill will, and despairing patriots must not be labeled enemies of the State.

The speech created a tremendous stir, even though it was heard by very few. Goebbels abruptly canceled the projected evening radio broadcast and kept the speech from appearing in the press. Hitler himself evidently took Papen’s re-emergence as a personal challenge and went into a rage before his party leaders. He furiously denounced “all the little pygmies” and threatened that they would be “swept away by the force of our common ideal…. A while ago they had the power to prevent the rising of National Socialism; but never again will they be able to put the awakened people to sleep…. So long as they do nothing but gripe, we do not have to be concerned about them. But if they should ever try to move even in the slightest degree from criticism to a new act of treachery, they had better realize that what faces them today is not the cowardly and corrupt bourgeoisie of 1918, but the fist of the entire people.” When Papen thereupon said that he would resign, Hitler backed off by proposing that they go together to call on Hindenburg in Neudeck.

It seems in fact that for a moment Hitler lost his grasp of the entire situation and misread the signs. He had no doubt been told occasionally that the President was not pleased by this or that. He was also aware of the worries of the army leadership. With his knowledge of Herr von Papen, he assumed that the man would not have spoken as he had in Marburg if he had not had a whole coalition behind him: the entire power of the army leadership, the President, and the still influential conservative circles.

On June 21 Hitler went to Neudeck and once more slighted Papen by not asking him to come along—contrary to the agreement he had made only two days before. But the purpose of his visit was precisely to undermine the alliance between Hindenburg and Papen. He also wanted to ascertain the President’s mood and capacity for making decisions. On such a mission, the Vice-Chancellor would only be a burden. Even before he called on the President, Hitler heard from Walther Funk, his Reich press chief, who was staying in Neudeck, about the old field marshal’s typical military response: “If Papen cannot keep discipline, he has to take the consequences.”

The talk with Hindenburg seems to have reassured Hitler. Nevertheless, the incident had taught him that he had no time to waste. Immediately after his return he withdrew to Obersalzberg for three days, in order to think the situation through. Everything points to the probability that the final decision to strike was taken then, and the date for action also determined. On June 26, back in Berlin, Hitler at once ordered the arrest of Edgar Jung. When Papen tried to remonstrate, Hitler refused to see him. To Alfred Rosenberg, who happened to be with him in the chancellery garden, Hitler said with a threatening gesture in the direction of the neighboring vice-chancellory. “Yes, it all comes from there. One of these days I’ll have that whole office cleaned out.”

As far back as the beginning of June the SS and SD had received orders for an intensified watch on the SA and been put on an active footing. SS Commandant Eicke, of Dachau, conducted “war games” with his staff in preparation for some strike in the region around Munich, Lechfeld, and Bad Wiessee. Rumors circulated about contacts Röhm was supposedly having with Schleicher and Gregor Strasser. Someone warned former Chancellor Brüning that his life was in danger; he secretly left Germany. Schleicher, who received many similar warnings, left Berlin for a while, but soon returned. Colonel Ott, a friend, proposed that they visit Japan together. Schleicher refused; he was not going to run out on the country, he said.

A so-called “Reich list” had been drawn up; it held the names of persons who at the proper moment were to be arrested or shot. This list circulated among Göring, Blomberg, Himmler, and Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, who was now beginning to emerge into prominence. Heydrich and SD Chief Werner Best could not agree about Obergruppenführer Schneidhuber of the Munich SA; the one man thought him “decent and loyal,” the other regarded him as “just as dangerous” as the rest. Viktor Lutze discussed with Hitler whether only the very top leadership or a larger group of “chief culprits” should be liquidated. Lutze was later to bewail the wickedness of the SS, which to settle its own scores enlarged the original group of seven victims first to seventeen and finally to more than eighty persons.

On June 25 an alleged secret order from Röhm calling the storm troops to arms, came into the possession of the Abwehr (Conterintelligence) Department in the Defense Ministry. It should have been evident that the document was a forgery, if only because it included in its list of recipients Himmler and Heydrich, Röhm’s worst enemies. Probably that same day Edmund Heines, SA Gruppenführer in Silesia, received word that the army was making preparations for some kind of action against the SA. Simultaneously, General von Kleist, the district commander of Breslau, received information that presented a “picture of feverish preparations on the part of the SA.”⁴³ Day after day warnings were issued in radio speeches or at public demonstrations to the spokesmen of the second revolution, and other warnings to the conservative opposition.

On June 21 Goebbels, at a summer solstice festival in Berlin Stadium, declared: “Only force impresses this type, pride and strength. They’re going to feel it…. They will not hold back the forward march of the century. We will pass over them.” Four days later Hess, in a radio address, inveighed against the “players at revolution” who distrusted the “great strategist of the revolution,” Adolf Hitler. “Woe to him who breaks faith!” On June 26 Göring, at a meeting in Hamburg, gave a firm no to all monarchist plans: “We the living have Adolf Hitler!” He uttered threats against the “reactionary clique with their selfish interests.” As he put it: “If one of these days the cup should run over, then I’ll strike! We have worked as no one ever worked before, because behind us stands a nation that trusts us…. Anyone who sins against this trust has forfeited his head.” Hess made it clear that National Socialism was there to stay: “Any withdrawal of National Socialism from the political stage of the German people would… bring on chaos throughout Europe.”

While the bluff storm troopers prepared for their leaves, Röhm and his closest associates had settled into the Hotel Hanslbauer in Wiessee. On June 25 the League of German Officers expelled Röhm.

In so doing, they were withdrawing their protection from him and consigning him to his fate. A day later Himmler informed all SS and SD top leaders of the “impending revolt of the SA under Röhm.” Additional opposition groups would take part in it, Himmler said. Next day SS Gruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, commander of the SS Guard Battalion Berlin, asked the chief of the organization section of the army for additional weapons to carry out a secret assignment from the Führer. To help matters, Dietrich showed the men a “firing squad list,” purportedly prepared by the SA, on which the name of the officer he was speaking to figured. To soothe any doubts that might arise, Colonel von Reichenau employed, as did Himmler, deception, lies, and frightening fictions. Soon the rumor was going around that the SA had threatened to kill “all older army officers.”

Meanwhile, the upper stratum of the Reichswehr leadership had been alerted to the SA putsch and had been told that the SS was on the side of the army and therefore should receive arms from it if necessary. An order issued by Lieutenant General Beck on June 29 warned all officers at army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse in Berlin to have their pistols at hand. That same day the Völkische Beobachter published an article by Defense Minister Blomberg that took the form of a declaration of total loyalty. It was also a request to Hitler, in the name of the army, to take measures to curb the SA.

Everything was now prepared. The SA had been kept in ignorance. The SS and SD, backed by the army, were ready to strike. The conservatives were intimidated, and the President, ill and relapsing into the vagueness of senility, was in distant Neudeck. One last attempt by several of Papen’s associates to get to Hindenburg and have him impose a state of emergency was frustrated by Oskar von Hindenburg’s fear and stupidity.

Hitler himself had left Berlin early in the morning on June 28 in order to, as he himself later explained, “present an outward impression of absolute calm and to give no warning to the traitors.” A few hours later he was in Essen to attend the wedding of Gauleiter Terboven. But all around him frenzied activity was already developing, while he himself repeatedly dropped into sulky, absent-minded brooding. That evening he telephoned Röhm and ordered him to summon all the higher SA leaders to Bad Wiessee for a frank discussion on Saturday, June 30. Evidently the telephone conversation went amicably, if only because Hitler wished to lull any suspicions his chief of staff might have. At any rate, when Röhm rejoined his fellows at table in Bad Wiessee, he looked “very contented.”

All that was needed now was the uprising. In fact, the SA had remained calm, and a good many of its members had dispersed. The weeks of investigation by the Sicherheitsdienst had produced no results that would have justified bloody proceedings. While Hitler went to Bad Godesberg on June 29 and Göring ordered his Berlin units on full alert, Himmler set about producing the SA “mutiny” provided for in the plans, which so far had failed to take place.⁴⁴ Summoned by handwritten, anonymous notes, units of the Munich SA suddenly appeared on the streets and marched about aimlessly. Their surprised leaders were called and promptly ordered their men to go home; but Gauleiter Wagner of Munich could now report to Bad Godesberg the appearance of allegedly rebellious SA formations. Hitler had just attended a Labor Service ceremony in front of the Hotel Dresden, overlooking the Rhine, an affair that culminated in 600 Labor Service workers bearing torches forming a glowing swastika on the slope of the hill across the river. The message from Gauleiter Wagner reached Hitler shortly after midnight. Simultaneously, word arrived from Himmler that the Berlin SA was planning a sudden occupation of the government district next day. “In these circumstances I could make but one decision,” Hitler later declared…. “Only a ruthless and bloody intervention might still perhaps halt the spread of the revolt.”

It may be that Hitler was genuinely alarmed by the two messages; possibly he imagined that Röhm had seen what was up and was preparing a counterstroke. To this day no one has been able to establish to what extent Hitler himself was among the deceived, whether and how much he was misled by Himmler in particular. For, by eliminating the leadership of the SA, Himmler was indubitably furthering his own rise.

In any case, Hitler discarded his original plan of flying to Munich next morning and decided to leave at once. At dawn, which came around four o’clock, he arrived in Munich accompanied by Goebbels, Otto Dietrich, and Viktor Lutze. The action began. At the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior Hitler settled accounts with the “mutineers” of the previous day, Obergruppenführer Schneidhuber and Gruppenführer Schmidt. In a fit of fury he ripped the epaulets from their shoulders and ordered them taken to Stadelheim Prison.

Immediately afterward, he set out for Bad Wiessee in a long column of cars. “Whip in hand,” as his chauffeur, Erich Kempka, described the events, Hitler entered “Röhm’s bedroom, two police detectives with cocked pistols behind him. He blurted out: ‘Röhm, you’re under arrest!’ Sleepily, Röhm raised his head from the pillows and stammered: ‘Heil, mein Führer!’ ‘You’re under arrest!’ Hitler bellowed for the second time, turned on his heel and left the room.” The procedure was the same for the other SA leaders who had already arrived. Only a single one of them, Edmund Heines of Silesia, who was surprised in bed with a homosexual, put up any resistance. Those who were still on their way to Bad Wiessee were intercepted by Hitler on his way back to Munich. Like their comrades they were taken to Stadelheim—making a total of some 200 of the higher SA leaders from all parts of the country. Toward ten o’clock in the morning Goebbels telephoned Berlin and gave the agreed code word: “Hummingbird.” Thereupon Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich also dispatched their squads. The SA leaders on the Reich list were picked up, taken to the Lichterfelde Cadet Academy, and in contrast to their fellows in Munich were lined up against a wall and shot without more ado.

Meanwhile, Hitler had gone to the Brown House, now heavily guarded by army troops. After a brief address to the party paladins who had been hastily convoked, he at once began drawing up the guidelines for the forthcoming propaganda on the purge. For several hours he dictated instructions, orders, and official explanations, in which he himself figured in the third person, as “der Führer.” But in his haste to cover up and color the events he made a strange oversight. Contrary to the later official version, none of the many announcements made on June 30 mentioned a putsch or attempted putsch by Röhm. Instead there was talk of “gravest misconduct,” “opposition,” “pervert dispositions,” and although occasionally something about a “plot” was thrown in, the overwhelming impression was that Hitler had acted as a guardian of morality. As Hitler put it in one of his less happy metaphors: “The Führer gave the order for the ruthless cleaning out of this pestilential sore.” Now, however, the public was safe. “In the future he will no longer stand for millions of decent people being incriminated and compromised by a few persons with perverted dispositions.”

Quite understandably, to the very end many SA leaders could not grasp what was going on. They had planned neither a putsch nor a plot, and Hitler had never before looked into their morality. Berlin SA Gruppenführer Ernst, for example, who, according to the messages from Himmler, had planned an attack on the government quarter for the afternoon of June 30, was actually in Bremen about to set out on his honeymoon. Shortly before he was to board the ship, he was arrested. Thinking this was a coarse wedding joke on the part of some of his fellows, he enjoyed the whole thing immensely. He was taken by plane to Berlin, where he was still laughing as he showed his handcuffs and joked with the SS squad that conducted him from the plane to the waiting police car. The extras that were being sold outside the airport building were already reporting his death, but Ernst still suspected nothing. Half an hour later he died at the wall in Lichterfelde, incredulous to the last, a perplexed “Heil Hitler!” on his lips.

Hitler flew back to Berlin that evening. Before leaving, he had ordered Sepp Dietrich to go to Stadelheim Prison, ask for the surrender of certain persons, and execute these persons at once. Hans Frank, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, intervened and succeeded—if we are to believe him—in reducing the number of victims. Reich Commissioner von Epp, on whose staff Röhm had long ago served as the friend and promoter of the rising demagogue, vainly tried to dissuade Hitler from his bloody course. It may be, however, that his intercession had some effect and induced Hitler to postpone the decision on Röhm.

In Berlin Hitler was received by a large delegation at cordoned-off Tempelhof airfield. One of those present set down his impression of the arrival shortly after the event:

Impatient and nervous, Hitler asked to see the list of those liquidated even before he left the airfield. Because of the “unique opportunity,” as one of the participants later stated, Göring and Himmler had extended the killings far beyond the group of “Röhm putschists.” Papen escaped death solely because of his personal relationship with Hindenburg. Nevertheless, his position as Vice-Chancellor was ignored, his protests disregarded, and he was placed under house arrest. Two of his closest associates, his private secretary, von Bose, and his ghost writer, Edgar Jung, were shot, and two others arrested. A squad had killed Under-secretary Erich Klausener, the head of Catholic Action, at his desk in the Ministry of Transportation. Another squad had tracked down Gregor Strasser in a pharmaceutical plant, brought him to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, and shot him in the cellar of the building. Around noon a troop of killers had broken into Schleicher’s home in Neu-Babelsberg, asked the man sitting at his desk whether he was General von Schleicher, and without waiting for a reply fired. Frau von Schleicher was likewise killed.

Among the murdered were also one of General von Schleicher’s associates, General von Bredow, and former General State Commissioner von Kahr, whose “treachery” on November 9, 1923, Hitler had never forgiven. Another victim was Father Stempfle, who had been one of the editorial readers of Mein Kampf but had since moved far from the Nazi party. Another was the engineer Otto Ballerstedt, who had crossed Hitler’s path during the period of the party’s rise. An utterly innocent music critic, Dr. Willi Schmid, was killed because of a confusion with SA Gruppenführer Wilhelm Schmidt. The rage for murder seemed to have been most violent in Silesia, where SS leader Udo von Woyrsch lost control over his units. Significantly, the liquidations frequently took place wherever the victim was found, in offices, in homes, on the street, with utterly brutal casualness. Many corpses were not found until weeks later, in woods or rivers.

June 30 was not a good day for any of Röhm’s followers, even if they were engaged in praiseworthy actions against Jews. Three SA men who happened to demolish a Jewish cemetery on that day were expelled from the SA and given a year’s prison term.⁴⁶

At a press conference held that very day, Göring actually boasted that he had stretched his assignment on his own initiative. We do not know how many of these arbitrary executions Hitler approved of. The purge represented a break with his tactical imperative of strict legality, and every additional victim made that break all the more obvious. For years Hitler had practiced all the arts of dissimulation, had abstained from the old wild poses and carefully built up the image of himself as a temperate, if also imperious, politician. Now, so close to his goal of total power, he was risking the loss of his painfully earned credit in a single act of self-unmasking. Suddenly he and his cronies had dropped their disguise and appeared in all the harshness of their nature. If Hitler intervened, as several accounts have claimed, to moderate the course of events, it must have been from such considerations.

Still, Hitler let the killing take on the miscellaneous quality that it did. By shooting in all directions he would deprive all sides of any hope of profiting from the crisis. Hence the barbarous insouciance of the killings anywhere and everywhere, the corpses left where they dropped, the ostentatious traces left by the murderers; and hence, also, the abandonment, for once, of any pretence of justice. There were no trials, no weighing of evidence, no verdicts; there was nothing but an atavistic slaughter. Later, Rudolf Hess tried to justify the indiscriminate killing: “During those hours when the very existence of the German nation was at stake, it was not permissible to judge the amount of guilt borne by individuals. Despite the harshness there is a profound meaning in the practice of the past, in which mutinies among soldiers were punished by a bullet for every tenth man, without the slightest inquiry into guilt or innocence.”

Once again Hitler had acted wholly in terms of the ends of power. The contemporary polemicists were surely mistaken when they pictured him as a sadist decking out his blood lust by references to pitiless Renaissance princes.⁴⁷ The other view of him is equally mistaken: that he was emotionally indifferent, cold and unfeeling as he eliminated comrades, followers, and intimate friends of many years’ standing. In fact, the first view applies more accurately to Göring, the second to Himmler; both went about their murderous business efficiently—with total lack of scruple. Unlike them, Hitler seemed to feel considerable inner pressure. All those who met him during this period noted his extraordinary agitation. The strain on his nerves was evident in all his movements. In his speech of justification to the Reichstag he himself spoke of the “bitterest decisions” of his life. And unless all indications are deceptive he was haunted for months afterward by memories of his murdered friends and followers—for example, in that highly secret conference of January 3, 1935, when he hastily summoned the heads of the party and the army and in a dramatic scene exhorted them to achieve unity. On this, as on many other occasions, it turned out that his nerves were not as armored as his conscience. In keeping with his maxim that one must always strike faster and harder than the enemy, the smooth course of the June 30 purge was based largely on a surprise assault. How conspicuous, therefore, is Hitler’s hesitation before he ordered the first execution of seven SA leaders, and his hesitation again before the killing of Röhm. In both cases, Hitler’s conduct can be adequately explained only on grounds of sentimentality. He was obeying the reflex of an emotional tie which at least for a few hours proved stronger than the cold rationale of power.

By Sunday, July 1, Hitler had overcome the previous day’s uncertainties and was once more in firm control of his own reactions. Toward noon he appeared repeatedly at the historic window in the chancellery to greet a crowd rounded up by Goebbels, and in the afternoon he actually gave a garden party for the party bigwigs and members of the cabinet, to which their wives and children were also invited. While the firing squads were still at work in Lichterfelde, a few miles away, he moved about among his guests in excellent humor, chatting, drinking tea, showing affection for the children—all the while breathless and in flight from reality. There is an element of high drama in this scene; what comes to mind is the physiognomy of one of those Shakespearean villains who are not fully up to the requirements of evil. And from the midst of this sham that he had so hastily set up he evidently gave the order to kill Ernst Röhm, who was still waiting in his cell in Stadelheim. Rudolf Hess had for hours tried in vain to obtain instructions for the execution. Shortly before six o’clock, Theodor Eicke and SS Hauptsturmführer Michael Lippert entered Röhm’s room. Together with the latest edition of the Völkische Beobachter, which carried a lengthy account under banner headlines of the events of the previous day, they laid a pistol on Röhm’s table and told him he had ten minutes in which to use it. Nothing disturbed the quiet; prison guards were told to fetch the weapon. When Eicke and Lippert entered the cell, shooting, Röhm was standing in the middle of the room, his shirt histrionically ripped open exposing his chest.

Base and repellent as were the circumstances surrounding this murder of a friend, we must nevertheless ask whether Hitler had any alternative. No matter how far Röhm might have been willing to go in bringing about the SA state, his real goal was the primacy of the ideological soldier. In his proud sense that he had a following of millions pressing behind him, he was incapable of recognizing that he was being overambitious. For he would necessarily encounter bitter opposition from both the Political Organization and the army, and at least passive resistance on the part of the general public. It is true that he thought he was still being loyal to Hitler. But it was only a question of time before the objective contradictions would lead to personal antipathy. With his keen tactical sense, Hitler had instantly realized that Röhm’s aims also threatened his own position. After the elimination of Gregor Strasser from the party, the SA chief was the only remaining individual who had preserved personal independence of Hitler and who resisted the hypnotic spell of Hitler’s will. Hence he was Hitler’s only serious rival, and it would have flouted all the principles of tactics to grant him as much power as he wanted. Certainly Röhm had not planned a putsch. But he embodied, for a suspicious Hitler, the permanent threat of a potential putsch.

On the other hand, Röhm could not simply be deposed or isolated. He was not just any lieutenant; he was a popular generalissimo. An attempt to strip the chief of staff of his powers would indeed have sparked some sort of uprising. And even if Röhm could have been deposed, he would have remained a permanent threat, for he had many connections and influential friends. A court trial was virtually out of the question. After the unsatisfactory outcome of the Reichstag fire trial, Hitler had little confidence in the judiciary. But above and beyond that, Hitler’s own secrecy complex made it unthinkable to give an intimate friend, and one who was driven to the wall, the opportunity to defend himself in public. Too much would have come out. It was precisely their many years of friendship that made Röhm so strong, but also left Hitler no other way out. A bare three years later Hitler declared that to his “own sorrow” he had been forced “to destroy this man and his following.” And on another occasion, speaking to a group of high-ranking party leaders, he remarked upon the decisive share that this greatly gifted organizer had had in the NSDAP’s rise and conquest of power. When the time came to write the history of the National Socialist movement, he said, Röhm would always have to be remembered as the second man, right beside himself.⁴⁸

In view of this situation, Hitler had no choice but a “vigilante killing on a grand scale.”⁴⁹ Röhm, too, could not simply give up his position. He had obligations to the dynamism and the unsatisfied cravings of his millions of followers. Both rivals were governed by objective necessities. Perceiving this, we cannot fail to see in the bloody affair of June, 1934, a measure of tragedy—the only instance of tragedy in Hitler’s career.

The consequences at home and abroad made June 30, 1934, the decisive date, after January 30, 1933, in the Nazi seizure of power. Hitler immediately set about concealing the importance of the event by a great show of restored normality. As early as July 2 Göring instructed all police stations: “All documents concerning the action of the past two days are to be burned… Word went out from the Propaganda Ministry forbidding the press to publish the death notices of those killed or “shot while trying to escape.” And at the cabinet meeting of July 3 Hitler had the crimes sanctioned by slipping in among some twenty decrees of rather secondary importance one consisting of only a single paragraph: “The measures taken on June 30, July 1 and 2 to suppress treasonous assaults are legal as acts of self-defense by the State.”

But Hitler seemed to realize quickly that all efforts to hush up the affair were a waste of time. For a while he seemed perplexed and was evidently haunted by the murders of Röhm and Strasser. Otherwise his ten days of silence, breaking all the rules of psychology and propaganda, can hardly be explained. On July 13 he at last delivered to the Reichstag his speech of self-justification. But its verboseness, its lapses in logic, the gaps in the explanations, and its one imperious gesture mark it as one of his poorer oratorical achievements.

After a rambling introduction summing up his own cares and merits, and once more resorting to the most reliable theme in his rhetorical stock, the Communist peril—which, he promised, he would combat in a war of extermination if it took a hundred years—he heaped all the blame on Röhm. Röhm had repeatedly confronted him with unacceptable alternatives, had admitted corruption, homosexuality, and excesses into his circle, had encouraged all these vices. Hitler spoke of the destructive, rootless elements who had “completely lost sympathy with any ordered human society” and who “became revolutionaries who favored revolution for its own sake and desired to see revolution established as a permanent condition.” But the revolution, Hitler continued, “is for us not a permanent condition. When a fatal check is imposed by force upon the natural development of a nation, this artificially interrupted evolution may be set free by an act of violence so that it can resume its free natural development. But periodically recurring revolts… cannot lead to salutary development.”

Once again he rejected Röhm’s concept of a National Socialist army, and, referring to a promise he had given the President, he reassured the Reichswehr: “In the State there is only one bearer of arms, and that is the army; there is only one bearer of the political will, and that is the National Socialist Party.” It was only toward the end of his speech, which lasted several hours, that Hitler became aggressive.

Hitler’s uncharacteristic wavering from justification to aggression reflected the profound shock that the events of June 30 had been to the public. Instinctively, the public seemed to sense that on this day a new phase had begun and that other frightening adventures, might lie ahead. Up to then, illusions about the nature of the regime had still been possible; it might have been argued that injustice and terrorism were the inevitable concomitants of a revolution, that they would cease with time’, and that on the whole the new regime was aiming at orderliness. But no such belief in a happy ending could survive the massacre.

Hitler had openly claimed for himself the role of the “supreme judge,” who could dispose over life and death without let or hindrance. Henceforth, there were no longer any legal or moral guarantees against arbitrary acts by Hitler or his cohorts. As if in explicit corroboration of these tendencies, all the accomplices in the crime, from Himmler and Sepp Dietrich down to the low-ranking SS bullies, were rewarded and praised. On July 4 at a ceremony in Berlin they were all presented with an “honorary dagger.” It is by no means a fabrication of hindsight to see a direct connection between the killings of June 30 and the subsequent practice of mass murder in the camps of the East. In fact, Himmler himself in his famous Posen speech of October 4, 1943, established this link and thus confirmed that “continuity of crime” which permits of no distinctions between a purportedly constructive initial period of Nazi rule, inspired by passionate idealism, and a later period of self-destructive degeneration.

The public’s uneasiness soon gave way to a certain relief that the SA’s revolutionary activities—which had revived deep-seated fears of disorder and mob rule—had at last been brought to an end. Official propaganda tried to pretend that the public reaction had been one of “incredible enthusiasm.” There was nothing of that kind, which explains Hitler’s often-repeated charge against the middle class: that it was obsessed with constitutionality and always raised a loud outcry “when the government renders a noxious menace to the nation harmless, for example by killing him.” But the public did tend to interpret the two-day orgy of killing in terms of its traditional antirevolutionary feelings. The movement was at last “overcoming its adolescence”; the moderate, order-oriented forces around Hitler were triumphing over the chaotic energies of Nazism. This notion was supported by the fact that among those liquidated were notorious murderers and sadistic ruffians. Actually, the whole operation against Röhm presents itself as a paradigm of Hitler’s trick of striking in such a way that reaction would be split, so that those who were most outraged had reason to thank him. How well he had put it across can be seen in the telegram from President Hindenburg expressing his “profoundly felt gratitude.” “You have saved the German people from a grave peril,” the President wired. He also bestowed the ultimate accolade: “He who wishes to make history must also be able to shed blood.”

The reaction of the army was perhaps even more decisive in alleviating the public’s doubts and premonitions. Feeling itself the real victor of those three days, the army blatantly expressed its satisfaction at the elimination of the “brown trash.” On July 1, while the killing was going on unabated, the Berlin Guards Company goose-stepped down the Wilhelmstrasse, past the chancellery, to the tune of Hitler’s favorite Badenweiler March. Two days later Defense Minister von Blomberg congratulated Hitler for the successful completion of the “purge.” And, contrary to his policy of earlier years, Hitler now made a point of reinforcing the Reichwehr’s sense of triumph. In his Reichstag speech he not only named it the sole bearer of arms in the state but also declared that he would preserve “the army as an unpolitical instrument.” He assured the officers and soldiers that he could not “demand from them that as individuals each should take up a clear-cut position towards our Movement.”

By these unusual and never-to-be-repeated concessions Hitler expressed his gratitude to the army leadership for having remained loyal to him in the recent critical hours, when his fate lay in their hands. Once again, everything had hung in the balance after the SS squad had killed General von Schleicher, his wife, and General von Bredow. If at this moment the army had insisted on a legal investigation, the theory of a conspiracy would have been exploded and the blow against the conservatives exposed as the murderous coup it was. The bourgeois Right would not have been permanently paralyzed; it might possibly have emerged from the affair with increased confidence. It would have preserved moral standing. In any case, Göring would not have gone uncontradicted when he concluded the Reichstag session of July 13 by declaring that the entire German people, “man by man and woman by woman,” was united in a single outcry: ‘We always approve everything our Führer does.’ ”

Hitler, with his intuition for power relationships, had realized that if the army would stand for the murder of army men, he had achieved the breakthrough to unlimited control. An institution that accepted such a blow could never again effectively oppose him. At the moment the army leadership was still gloating, and Reichenau was commenting complacently that it had not been a simple matter to have the whole thing appear as a purely internal party dispute. But Hitler had not intended to give the army a large enough part in the elimination of Röhm to put him under obligation to it. He involved it just far enough to corrupt it. It was an unequal alliance that these dilettantes in uniform, who were dabbling in politics, struck up with Hitler. Defense Minister von Blomberg had made the unforgettable statement that henceforth the German officer’s honor must consist in being cunning. But, as has been trenchantly pointed out,⁵⁰ the military were guided by political incompetence and arrogance.

If the public order was actually threatened by rebels and conspirators, as von Blomberg later represented the situation, then the army probably had the duty to intervene. If that were not the case, then it should have called a halt to the killing. Instead, it had waited, had made weapons available, and in the end its leaders had congratulated themselves on their acuteness at emerging with clean hands and nevertheless as victors. They succumbed not to the “nemesis of power,” as the English historian John W. Wheeler-Bennett has asserted, but to their failure to recognize how short-lived this victory would be. At the height of the killing former State Secretary Planck urged General von Fritsch to intervene. The commander in chief of the army replied that he had no orders to do so. Planck warned him: “If you, General, stand by idly watching, sooner or later you will suffer the same fate.” Three and a half years later, Fritsch, together with Blomberg, was dismissed under a dishonoring cloud. The charge, as in the cases of Schleicher and Bredow, was based on forged documents, and now it was the turn of the SA to rejoice over the “revenge for June 30.” Les institutions périssent par leur victoires.

This aphorism was totally borne out by subsequent events. It is true that June 30 dealt a fatal blow to the SA. Its formerly rebellious self-assertive profile henceforth almost vanished behind petty bourgeois features. Brass knuckles and rubber truncheons gave way to collection boxes. But the army did not assume the place vacated by the storm troopers. Three weeks later Hitler coolly took advantage of the manifest weakness of the army leadership. On July 20, 1934, he freed the SS “in view of its great services… especially in connection with the events of June 30” from its subordination to the SA and raised it to the rank of an independent organization directly subordinate to himself. At the same time, it was allowed to rival the army in maintaining armed fighting forces—at first of only one division.

Few acts so clearly reveal the core of Hitler’s technique as this decision. No sooner was the SA eliminated than he was promoting the building of a new power center of the same kind, in order to be able to continue his game of protecting his own rule. All those who were intimately or remotely participants in the events of June 30 naïvely assumed that the purge had resolved a question of power. But Hitler secured his own personal power precisely by never really settling the power conflicts within his entourage. He merely shifted them to other planes and continued playing out the game with new pieces, in altered confrontations.

Politically, as well as tactically, the SS took over many of the functions of the SA. But it markedly avoided that claim to independence which Röhm’s following had always so obtrusively made. For the SA had never wholly submitted to the principle of blind obedience; it had always emphasized its aloofness from the despised corps of party people. By contrast, the SS felt itself to be a totally loyal elite, serving as the sentinel and vanguard of the National Socialist idea, a pure instrument of the Führer’s will. In this spirit it began, on June 30, its inexorable process of expansion in all directions. Soon the SA and then the party also vanished in its mighty shadow, so that there ceased to be any road to power that bypassed the SS.

The rise of the SS, which so crucially determined the history and features of the Third Reich and by no means ended with the downfall of the regime, incidentally revealed something else: that Röhm had rightfully considered himself as being, in the last analysis, of one mind with Hitler. Himmler, constantly prodded by Reinhard Heydrich restively operating in the background, tranformed the Reichsführung-SS[13] into a mighty, many-branched apparatus. Ultimately, it became a genuine subsidiary government that penetrated into all existing institutions, undermined their political power, and gradually began replacing them. What Himmler thus accomplished was nothing less than Ernst Röhm’s impatient though ultimately vague vision. Röhm’s ambitious lieutenants had dreamed of an SA state. Himmler brought into being, at least in its initial phases, an actual SS state. Röhm was liquidated because he wanted to achieve by immediate action what Hitler, as he explained to intimates, sought to arrive at “slowly and deliberately, by taking the tiniest steps at a time.”

June 30 also signified the elimination of a type of personality that had been almost indispensable for the history of Hitler’s rise: the rough daredevil, usually a onetime army officer, who had fought first in the Free Corps and then as one of Hitler’s street-battle heroes, trying to carry over his wartime experiences into civilian reality and suddenly left without any assignment once the goal was reached. Machiavelli. pointed out in a famous aphorism that power is not maintained with the same following that has helped to win it. Mussolini is said to have made this comment to Hitler when they met in Venice. In the course of the conquest of power a limited degree of revolution from below had been permitted. By destroying the top leadership of the SA, Hitler choked off that limited revolution. The Röhm affair concluded the so-called period of struggle and marked the turning point away from the vague, utopian phase of the movement to the sober reality of a disciplined state. The romantic barricade fighter was replaced by the more modern revolutionary types such as the SS produced: those passionless bureaucrats who supervised a revolution whose like had never been known. Thinking not in terms of the mob but in terms of structures, they placed their explosive charges deeper than perhaps any revolutionaries before them.

But Röhm’s impatience would scarcely have been a mortal flaw had not Hitler had other things in mind besides eliminating the SA chief. As the propaganda campaign preceding the operation indicated, the events of June 30, 1934, were aimed at any opposition, at any independent position in general. For years to come there was no serious organized resistance. The dual thrust of the operation also disclosed an aspect of Hitler that one might have thought he had transcended. Strictly speaking, he charged the SA leaders only with premature haste and stupidity. But his boundless hatred, nourished by old resentments, erupted against those conservatives who had thought to “hire” and outwit him:

What he knew, and really meant, was that there would be no next round for these opponents.

To sum up, the challenge facing Hitler before June 30 required the simultaneous solution of no fewer than five problems. He had to quash Röhm and his rebellious band of SA permanent revolutionists definitively. He had to satisfy the demands of the army. He had to dispel public dissatisfaction with the rule of the streets and visible terrorism. He had to head off the conservatives’ counterplans. All this had to be done without becoming the prisoner of one side or the other. He took care of it all by means of a single limited operation and at a cost of relatively few victims. With this behind him, he could move directly to his principal aim, which would complete the process of seizing power. That aim was to succeed Hindenburg as President.

From the middle of July on, the President’s condition was visibly deteriorating. His death was expected any day. On July 31 the government for the first time issued an official bulletin on the state of his health. And although on the following day the news sounded somewhat more optimistic, Hitler irreverently anticipated the event by presenting to the cabinet a law concerning the succession. The new law was to take effect on Hindenburg’s death. It provided for combining the office of President with that of the Führer and Chancellor, a measure that could be justified by evoking the law of January 30, 1934, which gave the administration powers to alter the Constitution. But since this authority derived from the Enabling Act, any action based on it should have taken into account the guarantees explicitly set forth in that act. Inviolability of the office of the President was one of the guarantees. But the “law concerning the head of state” boldly ignored that limitation—once more violating Hitler’s principle of legality—and thus broke through the last barrier to Hitler’s dictatorship. Hitler’s exuberant highhandedness is further shown in his affixing the signature of ViceChancellor von Papen to the new law, though Papen was not even present at the cabinet session.

That same day Hitler went to Neudeck to visit Hindenburg on his deathbed. But the old man was only conscious for moments and addressed Hitler as “Your Majesty.” In spite of his imposing stature he had always felt comfortable only in relationships of dependency or feudal homage. He died on the following day, in the morning hours Of August 2. In a government proclamation he was hailed as a “monumental memorial of the distant past,” whose “almost incalculable services” culminated in the fact that “on January 30, 1933… he opened the gates of the Reich for the young National Socialist Movement,” that he led the Germany of yesterday to “profound reconciliation” with the Germany of tomorrow and became in peace what he had been in war, “the national myth of the German people.”

The death of Hindenburg made no tangible break. In the plethora of obituaries and testimonials of grief, the legal measures went almost unnoticed. But those carefully prepared measures sealed the new situation. A decree of Hitler’s instructed the Minister of the Interior to prepare a plebiscite in order to give the union of chancellorship and presidency—which was presented as already “constitutionally valid”—the “explicit sanction of the German people.” For Hitler declared he was “firmly permeated with the conviction that every state power must proceed from the people and be confirmed by the people in free and secret elections.” To disguise the absolute power that would now center in himself he announced that the “greatness of the departed” did not permit him to claim the title of President for himself. He therefore wished, “in official as well as in unofficial communication to continue to be addressed only as Führer and Chancellor.”

On the day of Hindenburg’s death the army leadership also felt called upon to offer its unconditional loyalty to Hitler. In an act of opportunistic overzealousness, for which legal authority was not created until three weeks later, Defense Minister von Blomberg had all the officers and enlisted men of the armed forces in all garrisons take an oath of allegiance to the new commander in chief. The old oath had been to “nation and fatherland”; now the men had to swear “by God” unconditional obedience to Hitler personally. It confirmed the totalitarian character of Hitler’s leader state, which could never have been brought into being without the aid of the armed forces. Soon afterward, this personal oath of allegiance was required of government officials, including the cabinet ministers, and thus “something resembling monarchy” was restored.

The obsequies for the deceased President gave Hitler the opportunity for one of those great displays of theatrical veneration of the dead that the regime had brought to a high art. It was also an occasion for Hitler to flaunt his heightened sense of power. After the Reichstag’s memorial session on August 6, the central feature of which was Hitler’s tribute to the deceased and music from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the army paraded past its new commander in chief outside the Kroll Opera House. But hard on the heels of the “only bearer of arms in the nation,” in the same parade step, wearing the same steel helmets and in part with fixed bayonets, came an honor shock troop of the SS Adolf Hitler Bodyguard Regiment, a special formation of the Hermann Göring Police Battalion, an honor unit of the SA, and other groups of paramilitary formation outside the Reichswehr. On the following day Hindenburg was interred at the site of his 1914 victory, in the court of the Tannenberg monument in East Prussia. In his funeral oration Hitler declared that the name of the deceased would remain immortal, “even when the last trace of this body has vanished.” He concluded: “Dead warlord, now enter into Valhalla!”

The plebiscite on August 19 served the same purpose as these elaborate obsequies. In an interview with the British journalist Ward Price at this time Hitler stressed that the German public was thus being given the opportunity to confirm or reject the policies of its leaders. And with a touch of malicious irony he added: “We wild Germans are better democrats than other nations.”⁵² But in reality the plebiscite, noisily organized with all the tried-and-true methods of propaganda, once again served the purpose of mobilizing unpolitical feelings for political purposes. This sound and fury was meant to dispel the tangible and lasting uneasiness over the virtually “Oriental” solution in the Röhm affair. And once again Hitler was wooing the public, attempting to win back its momentarily lapsed affection. In his funeral oration to the Reichstag Hitler had implored the public to let bygones be bygones and henceforth “to look from the transitory moment into the future.”

But the. prestige of the new rulers had evidently been seriously damaged. Far from the 100 per cent elections of totalitarian regimes, the affirmative votes did not rise above 84.6 per cent. In some districts in Berlin, also in Aachen and Wesermünde, they did not even reach 70 per cent. And in Hamburg, Lubeck, Leipzig, and Breslau nearly a third of the population voted “no.” For the last time some elements of the country were registering opposition, chiefly the socialist and Catholic groups.

Hitler’s chagrin at the outcome of the plebiscite was clearly reflected in the following day’s proclamation. It announced the conclusion of the fifteen-year struggle for power, since “starting with the highest leadership of the Reich and extending through the entire administration down to the officials of the smallest town… the German Reich is today in the hand of the National Socialist Party.” But the struggle for the allegiance of “our dear people,” Hitler declared, must continue with undiminished vigor until “even the last German wears the symbol of the Reich as a profession of faith in his heart.”

Two weeks later Hitler struck a similar note, adding, however, a threat against all malcontents, in the proclamation with which he opened the sixth party rally at the Kongresshalle in Nuremberg. As usual he let Gauleiter Wagner of Munich, whose voice was almost identical to his own, read his message: “We all know whom the nation has entrusted with the leadership. Woe to those who do not know it or forget it! Revolutions have always been rare in the German nation. With us, the agitated age of the nineteenth century has at last come to an end. In the next thousand years there will not be another revolution in Germany.”

At this same time the real revolution in Germany was beginning. To be sure the forces within the movement that had aimed at violent overturn were now eliminated. Their energies had been channeled chiefly into propaganda and keeping an eye on the populace. Insofar as Hitler had undertaken to control them in deference to Hindenburg and the army, the “lion-taming” concept of the spring of 1933 was celebrating its last belated victory. But Hitler’s imperious statement in Nuremberg that on that day he had “the sole power in Germany in everything” went along with his resolve to try everything.

The barbarous aspects of the regime, its anti-Semitism, the German claims to hegemony, the sense of a special national mission—all these have focused attention upon the related ideological and political forces. But the social impulses that supported Nazism were no less strong, perhaps stronger. Many middle-class groups expected that after assuming power the Nazis would smash the frozen authoritarian structures and the social bonds that the revolution of 1918 had failed to budge—but would do so in the course of an orderly upheaval. For these groups Hitler meant above all a chance to complete the German revolution. After so many unsuccessful beginnings they no longer trusted the democratic forces to do it and had never wanted to trust the Communists.

Obviously, the new flood of proclamations about the end of the revolution aimed principally at soothing the emotions of a still distraught public. And by the autumn of 1934 signs of a return to more orderly conditions began to appear. Not that they in any way changed Hitler’s long-range goals. These remained unalterable. In the midst of all the reassuring phraseology, he explicitly warned in his final speech at Nuremberg against the illusion that the party had lost its revolutionary impetus and abandoned its radical program: “In its teaching unalterable, in its organization hard as steel, in its tactics supple and adaptable, but in its over-all image an Order.” Thus it would face the future. Among intimates he made similar remarks to the effect that he was putting an end to the revolution only to outward appearances and that he was now shifting it inward.

Because of these disguises, so deeply rooted in Hitler’s character, the revolutionary nature of the regime is not immediately apparent. The social change it produced was accomplished within unusual forms. Among Hitler’s remarkable achievements, which assure him a place in the history of great political upheavals, was the realization that insurrectionary revolutions were irrevocably things of the past. Hitler for the first time drew the logical conclusion from the insight—already formulated by Friedrich Engels in 1895—that revolutionaries of the old type were necessarily weaker than the established power. Consequently, it was Hitler who created the modern concept of revolution. For men like Röhm, revolution was always commotion and took place in the streets. Modern revolution, on the other hand, did not overcome power but “seized” it, and employed bureaucratic rather than bellicose methods. It was a quiet process. Shots hurt their ears, to generalize Malaparte’s remark about Hitler.

For all that, this revolution reached deep and spared nothing. It gripped and changed the political institutions, shattered the class structures in the army, the bureaucracy, and to some extent in the economy. It broke up, corrupted, and enfeebled the still influential nobility and the old upper crust. In a Germany that owed its charm as well as its provinciality to the same backwardness, it introduced that degree of social mobility and egalitarianism indispensable to a modern industrial society. It would not be fair to object that such modernization was only incidental or even contrary to thé declared intention of the brown revolutionaries. Hitler’s admiration for technology was well known. Where methods were concerned, he thought entirely in modern terms—especially since he needed, for his expansionist aims, a rational and efficient industrial state.

The structural revolution that the regime brought in was distorted by an antiquarian perspective that made much of folklore and ancestral heritage. In other words, the sky over Germany was and remained romantically darkened. The peasantry, for example, became the object of widespread sentimentalizing, while its actual economic plight visibly accelerated, and the so-called “flight from the land” reached a new statistical high between 1933 and 1938. Similarly, by its industrialization programs (especially in central Germany with its militarily vital chemical plants) the regime furthered the very urbanization that it simultaneously denounced. Though for the first time it integrated women into the industrial process, it continued to condemn all the liberal and Marxist tendencies to defeminize women. It made a cult of tradition, but a “confidential report” circulated early in 1936 stated: “The link with tradition must be thoroughly destroyed. New, altogether unknown forms. No individual rights…”

In an attempt to grasp this two-faced character of the phenomenon some writers have spoken of a “double-revolution,”⁵³ a revolution against the bourgeois order in the name of bourgeois standards, against tradition in the name of tradition. The cozy romantic decor need not be considered as cynical masquerade; quite often it was an effort to fix in thought or in symbol something irrevocably lost in reality. The majority of Nazi fellow travelers, at any rate, interpreted the idyllic trimmings of National Socialist ideology in this way. Hitler himself in his secret speech to the officer class of 1938 spoke of the anguish and depressing conflicts caused by political and social progress whenever it clashed with those “sacred traditions” that rightly claimed men’s loyalty and attachment: “There have always been catastrophes…. Those affected have always had to suffer…. Precious memories always had to be abandoned, traditions always had to be superseded. The past century, too, inflicted deep grief upon many. It is so easy to talk about ages, so easy to talk about, let us say, other Germans who in those days were pushed out. It was necessary! It had to be…. And then came the year eighteen and added a new great sorrow, and that too was necessary, and finally came our revolution, and it has drawn the ultimate conclusions, and it too is necessary. There is no other way.”⁵⁴

The dual nature of the National Socialist revolution to a high degree marked the regime as a whole and gave it its peculiar Janus-faced appearance. The foreign observers who poured into Germany in growing numbers, lured by the “Fascist experiment,” and who reported on a peaceful Germany in which the trains ran on time as they had in the past, a country of bourgeois normality, of rule of law and administrative justice, were just as right as the exiles who bitterly lamented their misfortune and that of their persecuted and harried friends. The suppression of the SA undeniably put a halt to the dominion of violence and ushered in a phase of stabilization in which the authoritarian forces of political order braked the dynamism of totalitarian revolution. For a while it appeared as if normality once again replaced the state of emergency. At least, for the time being, there was an end of those conditions in which (in the words of a July 1, 1933, report to the Bavarian Prime Minister) everybody arrested everybody else, and everybody threatened everybody else with Dachau. It has been observed that in the Germany of 1934 to 1938, in the midst of coercion and flagrant injustice, there were idyllic enclaves that were sought out and cultivated as never before. Emigration abroad fell off considerably, and even the emigration of Jewish citizens continually diminished.⁵⁵ But many were emigrating inwardly, into the cachettes du coeur. The old German mistrust of politics, the aversion to its commitments and importunities, seemed confirmed and vindicated during those years.

A dual mentality corresponded to the “dual state.” Political apathy went hand in hand with displays of jubilant approval. Again and again Hitler created pretexts for lashing the nation to enthusiasm: coups and sensations in foreign policy; spectacles, monumental building programs, and even social measures, all of which had the effect of stimulating the imagination and raising self-confidence. The essence of his art of government consisted largely in understanding how to manipulate popular need. The consequence was a curiously nervous, exceedingly artificial graph of popularity, marked by abrupt upswings amidst phases of disgruntlement. But Hitler’s own charisma and the respect the nation accorded him for having succeeded in restoring order were the basis for his psychological power. Those who compared the horrors of the years past—the riots, the unemployment, the arbitrary brutality of the SA, and the humiliations in foreign policy—with the hypnotic counterimage of power-conscious order, as manifested in parades or party rallies, would seldom track down his errors. Moreover, the regime made a point of stressing its authoritarian-conservative features, representing itself as a more stringently organized version of government by militant German Nationalists. Papen’s idea of the “new state” might have been conceived along similar lines.

And, for all its austerity and police-state sterility, the regime satisfied to a high degree the craving for adventure, heroic dedication, and that gambler’s passion in which Hitler shared and for which modern social-welfare states leave so little room.

Behind this picture of order, however, a radical energy was at work. Very few of the contemporaries had any idea of how radical it was. The frightened bourgeois soon convinced themselves that Hitler had acted as a conservative, antirevolutionary force in defeating Röhm. But in fapt he had been obeying the law of revolution, had been the more radical as against the merely radical revolutionary. “A second revolution was being prepared,” Göring had accurately stated on the afternoon of June 30, “but it was made by us against those who have conjured it up.”

Even then, anyone who looked closer should not have failed to see that a state consecrated to order, full employment, and equal rights on the international front could not possibly satisfy Hitler’s ambition. In November, 1934, it is true, he assured a French visitor that he was not thinking of conquests. He was, he said, concerned with building a new social order that would earn him the gratitude of his people and consequently a more lasting monument than any dedicated to a victorious general. But such statements were empty rhetoric. His dynamism had never been nourished by the ideal of a totalitarian welfare state with its spic-and-span dreariness, its complacency, and all the common man’s felicity he despised. The source of his inner drive was a fantastically overwrought, megalomaniacal vision leaping far beyond the horizon and claiming for itself a life span of at least a thousand years.