The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  In the campaign’s most dramatic stroke, Hitler took to the skies in a highly publicized “flight over Germany” (Deutschlandflug), appearing in twenty-one cities in six days. It was a sensation. He was the first German—or for that matter, European or American—politician to campaign by airplane, and the image of a daring, innovative leader literally descending from the heavens spearheaded the Nazi propaganda offensive. When his plane touched down for the last rally of the whirlwind tour, he had spoken to a half million people.

  At each of his stops Hitler was greeted by boisterous, adoring crowds, and at each he thundered with fury, his rasping voice rising to a piercing crescendo, as he gave vent to all their anger, frustration, and resentment. He spewed venom at the Marxists, the November criminals, the system parties, who were responsible for Germany’s disgrace and his audience’s personal misery. He, and he alone, could make Germany great again by toppling the rule of Weimar’s corrupt and divisive party system and forging a new Germany united in one cohesive people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft) that would transcend class, religion, and region. That, he promised, was Germany’s future under a National Socialist regime. To his many opponents, these melodramatic tirades were the sheerest demagoguery, a paranoid amalgam of vacuous shibboleths, hate, distortions, and outright lies. To those angry multitudes caught up in the frenzy, it hardly mattered.

  As election day approached, the atmosphere in Germany was electric. Every day the SA clashed in vicious street battles with the Red Front and the SPD’s Reichsbanner. Columns of Storm Troopers marched through the streets; buildings were festooned with placards; discarded leaflets littered the streets; party banners fluttered from windows. “Berlin,” Goebbels wrote, “is no longer recognizable. Everything is in motion.” On April 10, Hitler again fell short, but this time there was not a whisper of disappointment in the Nazi camp. Hitler had captured more than thirteen million votes (36.6 percent of the total), an increase of more than two million over the first round. “For us an overwhelming victory,” Goebbels gushed, almost in disbelief. In “red Berlin” alone, the Nazi vote had jumped from 300,000 to more than 800,000. “Fantastic numbers. Hitler is completely happy. Now we have a springboard for the Prussian elections.” While Hindenburg claimed 53 percent of the vote, Hitler had dwarfed the other leaders of the anti-Republican right and left. He was now the anti-system alternative. Equally important, he had demonstrated the stature to stand on the same national platform with the venerated Hindenburg.

  First incubated within the NSDAP after 1925 and largely confined to the party’s true believers, the presidential campaigns had thrust the Führer cult into the mainstream of national political consciousness. Hitler was now not only a political force of the first magnitude, he was a national celebrity, easily the most recognizable—and controversial—figure in German political life. Even his enemies—and they were legion—were obsessed with him. His habits, his tastes, his background, his personal life were the topics of endless speculation, gossip, and analysis.

  Yet for all the attention and public scrutiny, Hitler remained an enigma, his personal life a mystery. Away from Berlin and Munich, he liked to relax in lederhosen, the traditional leather shorts worn in southern Germany. He almost always carried a whip. He loved dogs and was fond of children, with whom he was frequently photographed. He took pride in his highly publicized “Spartan” lifestyle, his simplicity in dress and diet; he was, after all, marketed as “a man of the people.” But by 1932, Hitler led anything but the simple life. For years, from 1920 to 1929, he had lived in a narrow, one-room apartment on the Thierschstrasse, its worn linoleum floor covered by cheap, threadbare carpets. But in 1929 a wealthy benefactor secured for him a luxurious nine-room apartment on the posh Prinzregentenplatz, which would remain his personal residence for the remainder of his life. His spacious Munich apartment; his Alpine retreat—Haus Wachenfeld—outside Berchtesgaden; his lengthy stays at the ornate Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin; his ubiquitous detachment of bodyguards, drivers, secretaries, and advisors; his massive chauffeur-driven Mercedes; and his innate restlessness that kept him and his entourage almost constantly on the move—all reflected a very different reality.

  He made a great point of not drawing a salary from the party or taking honoraria for his speeches, but he did accept gifts from admirers, was paid handsomely for articles published in the party press and interviews he gave to foreign newspapers, and his expenses from his numerous speaking engagements were lavishly—and excessively—reimbursed. Sales of Mein Kampf, which had been a disappointment—the second volume published in 1927 had sold only thirteen thousand copies by 1929—began to rise after the breakthrough of 1930 and continued to climb, reaching eighty thousand in 1932. He was a best-selling author and financially independent.

  Although constantly surrounded by obsequious lieutenants and fawning admirers, he had no friends, no close confidants. It was, after all, difficult to be on familiar terms with a deity. Sefton Delmer, an English reporter who was allowed to accompany Hitler during his campaigns in 1932, observed that

  Hitler was either completely silent during his meals or he was laying down the law, expounding at length with all the dogmatic assurance of the self-taught man. He had no small talk. And he did not like others to have any either. . . . Argument was taboo. Only questions were welcome. And his companions took care that the questions they asked . . . should be questions that would provide him with an opening to lecture them on some favorite topic. What he liked talking about most was war, war of the future and war of the past, particularly the war of 1914–1918.

  Only Röhm and Strasser, old comrades from the early days of the movement, dared address him with the familiar “du.” Although he liked the company of women, especially young, attractive women, he was unmarried and had no romantic connections. His one serious attachment ended in tragedy and scandal. He appears to have fallen in love with his twenty-three-year-old niece, Geli Raubal, who had come along with her mother, Angela (Hitler’s half-sister), to look after “Uncle Alf’s” house outside Berchtesgaden. In 1929 Hitler invited her to live with him at his new Munich apartment. Geli was attractive and outgoing; she drew the attention of men. For two years they were photographed around Munich, in the cafés, at the opera, the cinema. Salacious stories circulated, embarrassing Goebbels and his handlers, but Hitler didn’t seem to care. More than twenty years her senior, he was almost pathologically possessive. In time Geli grew weary of Hitler’s jealousy and domineering control, and expressed a desire to return to Vienna to pursue a singing career. He refused to let her go.

  On September 19, 1931, while he was away giving a speech in Nuremberg, Geli was found shot dead in Hitler’s apartment, his pistol by her side. The death was ruled a suicide, though rumors persisted that Hitler had murdered her or that Himmler or Goebbels or Strasser had had her removed to protect Hitler and the movement from further scandal. Hitler’s opponents couldn’t get enough of the story, the opposition press publishing one lurid rumor after another. Insinuations of domestic violence and sexual perversions of the most varied sorts made the rounds.

  Hitler was genuinely shocked at Geli’s death. For days he was despondent, unable to focus. Close associates had never seen him like this; some feared that he might be suicidal. Then, within days after her funeral in Vienna, he seemed to snap out of it. He plunged again into his political work, and the scandal gradually faded. The nature of his relationship with Geli remained shrouded in obscurity, but Hitler ordered her room to be left just as she left it, and he kept a shrine to his niece in his residence in Berlin, in Berchtesgaden, and even in the Führerbunker where he ended his life. No one outside a small coterie within the party leadership knew as yet about another young woman, in many respects very similar to Geli, whom Hitler had met in 1929. Eva Braun would remain a secret until well into the Third Reich.

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  The votes in the presidential elections were still being counted when Goebbels began preparing for important regional elections on Apri
l 24. On that day, voters in Prussia, Bavaria, Anhalt, Hamburg, and Württemberg would go to the polls. With four fifths of the country’s population voting, the regional elections amounted to yet another national campaign. The party’s propaganda apparatus was fully mobilized and ready, its coffers full. But before the campaign could get under way, Brüning convinced Minister of the Interior General Wilhelm Groener to issue a decree dissolving the SA and the SS. Once before he had tried to rein in the Storm Troopers, who were so integral a part of Nazi campaigning. At the close of 1931 Brüning enacted a decree that prohibited the wearing of uniforms by party formations. The Storm Troopers had flouted that decree by putting away their brown shirts and appearing the next day in white shirts—or in some cases no shirts at all. The prohibition was quickly dropped. But the level of political violence had escalated dramatically during the two rounds of the presidential elections, and with regional campaigns looming, Brüning felt that something had to be done.

  The decree went into effect on April 13. The Nazi press was quick to point out that no such order was issued regarding the Reichsbanner or the Red Front. It was yet another example, Hitler complained, of the government’s remorseless campaign of persecution against the NSDAP. At first Röhm considered resisting the decree—after all, the SA now numbered roughly 400,000 men, four times as many as the Reichswehr. Hitler, however, disagreed, and appealed to the SA and SS, again urging patience and a renewed commitment to participation in elections. “I understand your feelings,” he wrote in an address directed to them. “For years you have been true to my directives about winning political power by legal means. You are horribly persecuted and harassed. Yet in spite of all the gruesome agony perpetrated against you by today’s momentarily ruling parties, you have remained upright and honorable Germans.” He urged them to continue the fight as party comrades, to cooperate more than ever with local party groups in the upcoming campaigns, and “to give the current rulers no cause, under any circumstances, to set aside the elections. If you do your duty, our propaganda will strike a blow at General Groener and his accomplices a thousand times harder [than he has delivered against us].” Still, he was uneasy. As he had done during the SA unrest of the previous year, he pledged his loyalty to the Storm Troopers and demanded their fealty in return. “I will give my all for this struggle and for Germany. You will follow me, for in spite of General Groener, I belong to you as long as I live and you belong to me.”

  Two days later, on April 15, Hitler once again embarked on a “flight over Germany.” Following an itinerary determined by Goebbels, he crisscrossed the country, landing in smaller aerodromes, speaking in smaller venues. In all, he spoke in twenty-six towns in just over a week. The great prize was, of course, Prussia, where three fifths of the country’s population lived and where a coalition of Social Democrats, Zentrum, and left-liberals had held power since the early years of the Republic. It was a bastion of pro-democracy forces, with an administration and police force second in size only to the Reich government.

  Navigating the sociopolitical geography of German politics, Goebbels directed the party’s campaign in Prussia against the ruling Social Democrats and targeted the blue-collar worker for special attention. An RPL memorandum of April 2 instructed the local chapters to do all they could to remove working-class mistrust of the NSDAP and “to interest the worker in us, to bring him into our rallies, to win him.” To help with this task, the RPL bombarded local leaders with an almost ceaseless barrage of leaflets addressed explicitly to working-class voters, detailing Nazi positions on labor-oriented issues while ruthlessly assailing the parties of the Marxist left for their failures. In Bavaria, on the other hand, the party concentrated less on the working-class vote than on the Catholic electorate, and the local chapters were instructed to emphasize the NSDAP’s defense of religious values against Weimar’s cultural decadence, the shameless misuse of religion by the Zentrum, and the onslaught of godless Marxism. There the campaign theme was to be a “National Socialist Bavaria as a bulwark against centralization [from Berlin] and Godlessness.”

  On April 24 the NSDAP rolled to impressive victories all across the board. Despite the government’s efforts to reduce the party’s public presence, the NSDAP captured 36 percent of the vote in Prussia, 32 percent in Bavaria, 26 percent in Württemberg, and 31 percent in “red Hamburg.” The results in Prussia were particularly striking. Since 1928 only six Nazis had sat in the state legislature; National Socialists now occupied 162 seats, becoming the largest delegation in the chamber. In May, the parade of Nazi triumphs continued. In Oldenburg the Nazis took a spectacular 48 percent of the vote, while in Hessen, traditionally a Social Democratic stronghold, the NSDAP captured 44 percent. The specter of a Nazi majority was in sight.

  Confronted by this tidal wave of support for the NSDAP, Brüning found himself floundering in increasingly hostile seas. He was convinced that his unpopular economic initiatives were on the verge of bearing fruit, that signs of recovery would be evident by summer or early fall, and that Hitler’s popularity would fade as that recovery took hold. He also hoped to score foreign policy victories in Lausanne, where he was pressing for a final end to reparations and war debts as well as greater arms equity at a League of Nations disarmament conference. It was imperative, even in the face of growing radicalism and continued economic suffering, to stay the course. But not only had his austerity program lost all credibility with the public, powerful economic interests were increasingly disenchanted with Brüning and his policies. His failure to make headway in dismantling Weimar’s welfare state had alienated leaders of the business community, especially in heavy industry, and his plan, floated in May, to seize fatally indebted agrarian estates in the east, subdivide them into small farms, and resettle the country’s unemployed there enraged powerful agrarian interests close to the Reich President. The chancellor’s plan, in their view, amounted to nothing less than “agrarian Bolshevism.”

  Perhaps more important was Brüning’s continuing failure to coax Hitler into some sort of positive relationship with the government. Brüning had tried on several occasions in 1931 and early 1932 to lure the Nazis into the cabinet, always as a junior partner, always subordinate to other coalition parties. It was crucial, he believed, to have Hitler sharing the burden of government responsibility rather than assaulting it from the outside. Brüning’s inability to strike a deal with the Nazis was especially disappointing to the leadership of the Reichswehr. In the aftermath of the May state elections, General Schleicher, who had played a major role in maneuvering Brüning into power, came to the conclusion that the chancellor had outlived his usefulness. Schleicher clung to the illusion that it would be possible to enlist the Nazis in a coalition of right-wing forces that would enjoy the backing of business and agrarian leaders, the DNVP, the Reich President, and, most importantly, the Reichswehr. Supremely confident of his own Machiavellian skills, he was convinced that the Nazis could be “tamed” and used to drum up popular support for a new authoritarian regime. Like many military leaders, Schleicher tended to dismiss Hitler’s radical campaign rhetoric as mere demagoguery for the masses; he shared their view that Hitler was actually a restraining influence on the revolutionary hotheads in his party.

  Based on a number of behind-the-scenes meetings with Hitler and Göring, Schleicher and other military leaders had come to the conclusion that the NSDAP and the Reichswehr shared a number of common interests. In those secret discussions Hitler was sweet reason itself, at pains to emphasize that the NSDAP was eager to cooperate with the Reichswehr. After all, both were determined to reshape the German state on an authoritarian basis and to smash the armaments clauses of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler advocated a rapid buildup of the German military, music to the ears of the High Command. Nazi extremism, Reichswehr leaders convinced themselves, was a reaction to the discriminatory treatment and outright persecution the party had suffered from the Republican authorities. With more careful and accommodating handling, Hitler and the Nazis could be put to pro
ductive use.

  Schleicher began courting the Nazis before the spring regional elections, letting Hitler know by back channels that he had opposed the SA ban and believed Brüning’s days were numbered. In May, as Brüning contemplated another emergency decree that would further reduce pensions and other benefits, Schleicher persuaded Hindenburg that the time had come to dismiss him. He convinced the Reich President that a new right-of-center cabinet could secure the support of both the DNVP and the Nazis, providing a parliamentary base of support for a rightward shift. On May 29, Hindenburg stunned the public by unceremoniously sacking the chancellor who only weeks before had helped secure his reelection as Reich President. Even more surprising was his installation of Franz von Papen, an obscure representative of the Zentrum in the Prussian legislature, in the Reich Chancellery. Hindenburg’s choice, French ambassador André François-Poncet quipped, was met with scarcely concealed “incredulity.” Everyone “smiled or tittered or laughed because Papen enjoyed the peculiarity of being taken seriously by neither his friends nor his enemies.” He was also “regarded as superficial, mischief-making, deceitful, ambitious, vain, crafty, given to intrigue,” observations that events would soon prove to be all too true.