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 ta
ct 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.
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