The situation for farmers was even bleaker. Already suffering from a deep agricultural recession in 1928, the Depression threatened to hurl farmers—especially small farmers—into the abyss. Between 1928 and 1930 foreclosures and forced sales of agricultural property almost doubled. Banks conducted auctions of family farms all across rural Germany, unleashing a tsunami of outrage in farm communities. While the government introduced programs to rescue the large agrarian estates of the east, it seemed remarkably indifferent to the suffering of the small farmer. Already in 1928 a protest movement, the Landvolk (Rural People’s Movement), had organized demonstrations against the banks, the government, the big agricultural lobbies, and even the DNVP, the traditional party of choice for farmers. The Landvolk called for a tax revolt among farmers; bankers were ambushed, auctioneers shot; suicides skyrocketed. The Conservatives tried to co-opt the movement but discovered that it could neither manage nor contain the spreading protest in the countryside. “Day by day the farmer sinks deeper into debt and misery,” the Nazis charged in 1928. “In the end he will be driven from his hearth and home while international money and Jewish capital take possession of his land.” By 1930 that dire prophesy, the Nazis claimed, had been fulfilled.
Support for the party in 1930 was not, however, confined to the frightened petit bourgeoisie that contemporary commentators—and generations of historians—believed. Although still widely perceived as raucous and crude, its leaders vulgar and uneducated, the NSDAP was picking up support among elements of the established upper middle class—civil servants, professionals, especially doctors, and residents of affluent neighborhoods in the cities and towns. No one felt insulated from the crisis; no one, even the well-off upper middle class, was immune to the spreading virus of fear and uncertainty. The NSDAP was no longer simply a lower-middle-class phenomenon, a revolt of the frightened little men of German society. It was becoming far more broad based, less class bound, more dangerous.
In spite of the NSDAP’s sharper focus on the Mittelstand, the Nazis were determined to make a major breakthrough among working-class Germans. In January 1930 the party founded its own labor union, the NSBO, or National Socialist Shop Floor Organization. Although it was hardly a challenge to the Social Democratic labor organizations, its timing was propitious. With real wages plummeting and unemployment climbing, here at last was the opening Hitler had looked for. But the vast majority of those standing in the unemployment lines were blue-collar workers, many of them union members, a group that had been consistently resistant to Nazi blandishments in the past. Unemployment among workers in the major industrial sectors was rampant. The highest rate of unemployment was recorded among unskilled and unorganized day laborers who flooded the job-referral and unemployment agencies in 1929–30. Even for those desperately clinging to a full-time job, reduced wages and the constant fear of layoffs haunted their daily lives. Everywhere one looked, the economic landscape yielded the same desolate view.
Instead of offering concrete plans to overcome the unemployment crisis and put people back to work, the Nazis chose to lambast the Social Democrats for their betrayal of the working class, their shameless “collaboration” with Brüning and his austerity program. The Social Democrats had produced nothing for the workers in the twelve years of Weimar democracy, the Nazis charged, “but hunger, misery, and slavery.” If the German working class wanted to set itself free, it would have “to break the chains” of both capitalism and Marxism, and “only a National Socialist regime could offer the working people of Germany genuine liberation.” Under Hitler, the German worker would no longer be a social pariah but would be “integrated into the nation with full rights and obligations” and guaranteed “social justice, work . . . a decent living, and bread.” In the National Socialist people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft), class distinctions would be a thing of the past. Neither the Communists nor the Social Democrats, whose very existence was based on struggle between the classes, could achieve this. “Only a new movement, which rejects the distinction between bourgeois and proletarian, could free German society from its destructive tradition of class conflict.” The Social Democrats and Communists, of course, ridiculed Nazi “socialism” and its professed concern for the working class as a cynical fraud, claiming that the NSDAP was nothing more than “the last bulwark of big capital.” Both parties warned working-class audiences that Fascism could be defeated only by proletarian unity and then proceeded to accuse each other of sabotaging that unity. Both blasted the “counterfeit socialism” of the Nazis, but saved their most vicious invective for each other.
In appealing to working-class audiences, Nazis could also give free rein to their anticapitalist rhetoric, often lacing it with rabid anti-Semitism. Nazi appeals to working-class audiences typically linked Social Democracy with the “system” and with “the Jewish wire pullers of international capitalism.” Over and over again in the industrial cities of the Ruhr, Nazi speakers inveighed against “stock market swindlers, the powers of international capital, and the Jews who stood behind them.” The Nazis were “fighting Marxism, international big capital and Jewry,” as one speaker explained. Jewry possessed “power over the banks and industrial enterprises, and works hand in hand with the Social Democrats to bolster the existing corrupt system.” Under the Weimar system, “lice-covered Jews were allowed to cross Germany’s eastern border, insinuate themselves in German social, economic, and cultural life.” They had “taken control of the banks and stock market, and carried off to Switzerland the money they have swindled from the German people.” That money “must be taken from them and returned to the working people.” Workers could not really expect the SPD to correct the system, when the Social Democratic leadership was shot through with Jews. “As soon as the NSDAP has the rudder of government in its hands,” another speaker declared, “there will be no place for Jews in the German Fatherland.”
Despite the NSDAP’s most energetic efforts to gain a beachhead on the embattled shores of working-class politics, the parties of the bitterly divided left held their own, gathering 37 percent of the vote. The Nazis had made some headway, gaining support among unorganized workers who stood outside working-class subculture and the influence of the labor unions, but it was obvious to all that movement within working-class politics tended to remain largely confined to crossovers between the SPD and the KPD, with the more disaffected and radical sliding from the former to the latter. The Nazis were by no means daunted by their modest successes. Their vigorous efforts to win adherents within the working class were a source of growing alarm to both the Social Democrats and Communists, but at a time when the energies of the two leftist parties might have been directed more forcefully toward defeating the upstart Nazis, they were instead wasted in a bitter internecine struggle against one another.
Another problem for Nazi strategists was the continuing trouble the NSDAP experienced in predominantly Catholic areas, where the Zentrum maintained its dominance and where the Church, with its extensive network of social and cultural organizations, exerted enormous influence. In Catholic Germany, parish priests issued condemnations of Nazi heathenism on election day, declaring that a vote for either godless Communism or pagan National Socialism was inconsistent with the Christian faith. Shortly after the election, the Nazi press officer in Hessen inquired of Church officials in Mainz if, as a local priest had declared from the pulpit, it was the Church’s official position that “1) Catholics were forbidden to be members of the Hitler party, 2) that as long as a Catholic remained a member of the NSDAP, he was not permitted to participate in funerals and other Church rites, and 3) could not receive the sacraments.” The Church informed him that it was so. Similar declarations followed from the Catholic provinces across the country, confirming the Church’s position that National Socialism was fundamentally incompatible with the teachings of Christianity and the Catholic Church.
The party’s image problem with the Catholic Church was not helped by the appearance of Nazi “philosopher” Alfred Rosenb
erg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century, an impenetrable book that was both rabidly anti-Semitic and anti-Christian. Rosenberg, whose ideological fanaticism was undiluted by either reason or serious learning, attacked Christian ideals and institutions, calling for a return to the mystical religious practices of the ancient Germanic peoples, complete with the celebrations of the solstices, rune stones, and Norse gods. Although Hitler never officially endorsed such ideas and kept his distance from Rosenberg’s positions on religious matters, the damage had been done. The party, Goebbels concluded, would have to make a concerted effort to allay the fears of Christians, especially the Catholic Church whose “internationalism” came under particularly vitriolic attack by Rosenberg. This would prove to be a tall order.
* * *
In the aftermath of the election, the formation of a viable parliamentary coalition was virtually impossible. The devastating losses suffered by the parties of the center and right dashed Brüning’s hopes of reviving a Bürgerblock coalition, and the chancellor was not seriously interested in tempting the Nazis—or Social Democrats—into some form of participation in the government. Hugenberg also quickly informed the chancellor that the DNVP was not interested in serving in another Weimar cabinet. Brüning was not altogether displeased with this turn of events. After only desultory efforts to find a workable parliamentary majority, he was able to convince Reich President Hindenburg to allow him to continue the convenient presidential government based on emergency decrees. Afraid that a failure of the Brüning cabinet and new elections would only result in even more massive gains for both the radical right and left, the Social Democrats, still the largest party, were reluctantly willing to tolerate Brüning’s emergency rule.
Already paralyzed by the political extremes and deserted by the parties of the center, Weimar democracy now began a precipitous descent into authoritarian rule. The new Nazi Reichstag deputies were not interested in discussing policy, introducing bills, or passing legislation that might actually address the problems of the country; they were there to poison the well. In the chamber they chanted Nazi slogans, shouted down government spokesmen, whistled, and baited the smaller Communist delegation. The Communists responded, singing “The Internationale” and hurling insults across the chamber at the Nazis. Working sessions in the chamber became impossible. When in February 1931 the Reichstag considered a measure that would make it more difficult for the extremists to disrupt the proceedings, the Nazi and Communist delegates marched out of the chamber in protest. They did not return until October, leaving the Reichstag paralyzed.
Between 1920 and 1930 the Reichstag met in session for an average of one hundred days a year. Between the 1930 elections and March of 1931 it convened only fifty times; between March 1931 and the July elections of 1932, only twenty-four. After that, the Reichstag held only three working sessions. While the Reichstag virtually disappeared from public awareness in 1931, Brüning issued forty-four emergency decrees; in the following year, three successive Reich governments enacted no fewer than fifty-seven such measures. Government by emergency decree had become the norm. Almost three years before Hitler assumed the reins of power, Brüning had embarked on a course that resulted in the end of parliamentary government in Germany.
While the Nazis and Communists confronted one another on the floor of the Reichstag, the SA and paramilitary formations of the left fought deadly battles in the streets. Every day, in almost every town and city across Germany, Nazis clashed with the Communist Red Front and the Social Democratic Reichsbanner. Although the violence was most intense and relentless in the cities, no town, no village was out of the line of fire. The political terrorism that had lacerated the country in the early years of the Republic had subsided during the so-called Golden Twenties, but in 1929–30 it erupted with unprecedented savagery, threatening to plunge the country into chaos and civil war. Formations of armed Storm Troopers marched defiantly into working-class neighborhoods, intent on showing the swastika, on provocation. They succeeded. Advancing in ranks of four abreast, they poured into the courtyards of massive apartment complexes, the tread of their jackboots echoing from the cobblestones. They sang Nazi songs; they chanted call-and-response choruses.
“Wer hat euch verratten?” (Who has betrayed you?), the SA troop leader would call out. “Die Sozialdemokraten” (the Social Democrats) came the lusty response from the ranks. “Wer macht euch frei?” (Who will set you free?), answered by “Die Hitlerpartei” (the Hitler party). Phone calls and messengers would go out to the pubs that served as neighborhood command posts for the KPD, and within minutes armed men of the Red Front rushed to the scene. Brass knuckles, blackjacks, knives, pistols, and clubs materialized; blood flowed. Adding to the spectacle, flowerpots, ashtrays, clumps of coal, shards of glass rained down from apartment windows, and the casualties rose—just as they were intended to do. The overmatched police would arrive, make arrests, dispatch the wounded to hospitals, and make reports to headquarters. In almost every instance, the authorities tended to see the Communists as the source of the trouble, and the conservative press eagerly picked up the story and the official interpretation.
As the violence escalated, a culture of political martyrdom emerged on both sides of the ideological divide—men felled in heroic battle with the partisan enemy were given elaborate funerals attended by party dignitaries, guarded by paramilitary troops, and given extensive coverage in the party press. The Völkischer Beobachter, The Red Flag, and Forward carried photographs and commentary, punctuated by rhetoric that combined eulogistic commemoration with menacing intimations of revenge. For the Nazis, the model for this ritual celebration of party martyrdom was created by Goebbels in the winter of 1930, when a twenty-one-year-old SA man, Horst Wessel, was shot dead in his Berlin apartment by a Communist gunman. Goebbels launched a barrage of invective against the KPD and its “hired thugs” who were murdering National Socialists all around the country. The Communists responded by denying that Wessel’s murder had been politically motivated or ordered by the party. It was instead the result of a sordid private dispute. Wessel, they maintained, was a common pimp, living with his prostitute, and had refused to pay his rent to the widow of a fallen Communist. Wessel was well known in Nazi circles in the city and beyond both for his fearless assault on Communists in Friedrichshain, a working-class section of the capital, where he lived, and for a number of political songs he had written. One in particular, “Die Fahne Hoch!” (Raise the Banner), was a Goebbels favorite and already was being sung at party gatherings around the country.
Despite the murky circumstances surrounding the murder, Goebbels saw the propaganda potential in Wessel’s death. Using his Berlin newspaper, Der Angriff, he transformed the young SA man into a National Socialist martyr, a fallen hero in the epic struggle between the NSDAP and the predatory forces of the left. Goebbels orchestrated an elaborate show of Nazi strength for Wessel’s funeral. A lengthy funeral cortege followed by columns of Storm Troopers passed solemnly through the city, pelted and heckled along the way by Communist onlookers in the enormous crowds. At one point, a riot broke out as Communists tried to break through the police cordon and overturn the carriage carrying Wessel’s body. At the gates of the cemetery the funeral procession faced yet another affront, a brazen, blood-red epitaph scrawled across the walls during the night by Communists: “A Final ‘Heil Hitler’ to the Pimp Horst Wessel.” Some thirty thousand Berliners attended the funeral, and at the graveside Goebbels, speaking above the hoots and chants of the Communists beyond the gates, delivered a lengthy homily, an inspirational tribute to Wessel—the common SA man who was now ascending into the Valhalla of Nazi heroes.
Each year, the Nazis staged garland-draped memorial services on the anniversary of Wessel’s death; major figures from the party attended; the party press eulogized the fallen hero; party photographers snapped shots of the mournful proceedings. It was a hallowed event in the crowded calendar of Nazi spectacles, and “Die Fahne Hoch,” popularly referred to simply as the “Horst W
essel Song,” acquired the status of party anthem, played at every National Socialist occasion into the last days of the Third Reich. Other show funerals followed, as the brutal clashes between the Nazis and the left grew more frequent in 1931–32—pageants of political martyrdom that were, from Goebbels’s point of view, pitch-perfect propaganda for the party.
Frustrated by the rampant violence unleashed by the Nazis and Communists, Brüning produced an emergency decree in March 1931 that required all political meetings to be registered in advance with the police and subjected all political posters and leaflets to police censorship. It also gave the Reich government wide-ranging powers to combat “political excesses.” Fearful that the chancellor would invoke his new emergency powers to ban the party, Hitler issued an order to the SA to halt the street battles and to avoid violence for the foreseeable future—an order that did not sit well with the Storm Troopers. He used every opportunity to emphasize his commitment to taking power by constitutional means. There would be no Nazi Putsch. To underscore this position, Hitler volunteered in March to testify for the defense at a much publicized trial of three junior Reichswehr officers who were charged with forming an illegal Nazi cell in the army garrison in Ulm. As he had done in his 1923 trial, Hitler exploited the opportunity to make a dramatic political statement. He solemnly declared that the NSDAP was committed to a policy of legality, that it had no need to think of revolution since the party would win a majority in the next two or three elections and would then, having been put legally in power, proceed to transform the state. When the skeptical judge pressed him, asking what would happen to those who had opposed him, Hitler at first demurred, but finally responded, “When the National Socialist movement is victorious in its struggle, there will be a National Socialist court of justice; November 1918 will be expiated, and heads will roll.”
The Third Reich Page 16
