The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  The mounting resentment voiced by so many Storm Troopers had been exacerbated by the fact that plans with specific timetables and objectives had been set for SA “actions” to be taken after each election in 1932. SA units had been on alarm status, ready to take “military action” to ensure the promised Nazi seizure of power. In each instance, these operations had been canceled, and the result was a growing exasperation within the SA.

  Adding to the sense of desperation expressed by many SA men was their dismal economic situation. Many SA units were in desperate financial shape and were increasingly unable to provide aid to their often destitute members. These SA men, many of whom were unemployed, laid great hopes on a Nazi seizure of power to provide an immediate solution to their economic problems. This mounting economic pressure, some SA leaders were convinced, greatly aggravated their exasperation at the repeated postponements of the long-anticipated “march orders.” As an SA commander in Schleswig-Holstein warned in September, “the material and spiritual misery is so great with many SA men that they can no longer hold out.” The situation was critical. “The lofty political expectations of the recent past on the one hand and the economic despair, even hunger, on the other,” an SA leader from Baden urgently implored, “demand an act of deliverance.”

  Although the intensity of these complaints was troubling to the political leadership, their substance hardly came as a surprise. Dissatisfaction with the lack of financial support from the party, with efforts of party leaders to subordinate the SA to their needs, and with the party’s emphasis on electoral campaigning had long been a source of friction. SA men and their leaders cherished their identity as “soldiers of the Third Reich,” military men belonging to an elite, uniformed party organization that stood outside the hierarchy, with special military tasks. But the party’s political leadership, and especially Goebbels and his propaganda staff, insisted that the Storm Troopers were “political soldiers,” important instruments to be employed in the party’s critical grassroots agitation. With their marches, parades, canvassing, and, not least, their violent confrontations with the left, the Brown Shirts were indispensable in the party’s campaign activities.

  Some SA leaders tried to support the party’s efforts to change the organization’s self-image, but tensions between the party and the SA lingered, and the September morale reports were punctuated with complaints about party leaders who exceeded their authority, interfered in SA matters, or did not understand the special mission of the SA. In language usually reserved for the “bosses” of the Marxist left, some SA commanders continued to complain bitterly about local party leaders, dismissing them as “arrogant little political bureaucrats” and “paper pushers.” Party officials at all levels expressed mounting concern that the restless Storm Troopers were becoming sullen and unruly.

  Aggravating these problems was the introduction in 1932 of uniforms for the NSDAP’s political functionaries. Much of the SA’s sense of elitism, of superiority over the other elements of the NSDAP, was bound up in its conception of its unique role as the uniformed branch of the party. To discover that all party officials were now entitled to wear uniforms was a harsh blow to SA self-esteem and yet another diminution of its status by the party. The September morale reports burned with the acid contempt with which the new uniforms were greeted by the SA rank and file. “The SA man does not recognize these National Socialists stuck in brown shirts and bursting with overflowing badges and braids,” the Dessau SA indignantly reported. “The magnificent preening of the political functionaries has provoked the indignation of the SA,” the Upper Bavaria SA acknowledged. “The SA man who proudly wears his plain brown shirt, which until now has been the robe of honor of the active fighter, cannot understand how the brown shirt can be debased in this way.”

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  For all these troubles, the NSDAP was the largest party in Germany, its leader, along with Hindenburg, the most recognizable political figure in the country, and a functioning government without Nazi participation or at least toleration was impossible. The Papen government had few supporters within the Reichstag before July 31; it had fewer now. Worse still, two parties that were determined to destroy the embattled Republic now held a majority in the Reichstag. Adding insult to injury, Hermann Göring, as representative of the largest party, assumed the position of president of the Reichstag.

  In this impossible situation, Papen was determined to dissolve the Reichstag before a vote of no confidence could be taken, rule by emergency decree, and postpone new elections indefinitely, although elections within sixty days of a dissolution were required by law. This plan was brought to naught by a dramatic turn of events in the Reichstag itself. As soon as Göring gaveled the first working session to order on September 12, the Communists called for a vote of no confidence in the government. Papen had not even delivered his opening remarks. In a raucous scene, never before witnessed in the Reichstag chamber, Göring simply ignored parliamentary procedure and the outraged protests of the chancellor, who stood furiously waving his opening address, and allowed the vote to proceed. Göring’s action was a blatant violation of the parliamentary practice, which stipulated that the session was not officially convened until the sitting chancellor had spoken. In the tumult, few seemed to care. The result was not only a humiliating defeat for Papen—544 deputies voted against his government; only 42 deputies from the DNVP and DVP stood by him—but one more nail in the coffin of German democracy. The cabinet could not produce a parliamentary majority, and the Reichstag had been dissolved before it had even been officially convened. Already convulsed by economic calamity, social ferment, and political terrorism, parliamentary government in Germany had been reduced to farce. Who could take such a circus seriously? How could such an impotent, dysfunctional system solve Germany’s glaring problems? In this chaotic atmosphere, with no realistic parliamentary solution in sight, Hindenburg finally called for new elections. The date was fixed for November 6. It would be the fourth national campaign of the year.

  Although the party’s treasury was greatly depleted and the organization near exhaustion, the RPL geared up once again for a national campaign. “Down with the Reaction! Power to Hitler!” was to be the party’s central theme for the new campaign. In the summer election, the Nazis had targeted the parties of the left, emphasizing their defense of the middle class against the ravages of Marxism; in the fall campaign the Nazis would train their fire on Papen and his reactionary government. “Papen is already finished,” Goebbels wrote to regional leaders in October. “A feeling of utter panic about Papen must be awakened in the broad masses, a feeling so strong that Papen and his cabinet will be completely discredited and can no longer be seen as a bulwark by the wavering middle class.”

  As usual, the NSDAP waged an aggressive, often violent campaign, blasting the Marxist left but also unleashing a ferocious assault on “Papen’s reactionary gentlemen’s club.” With the liberal and special interest parties virtually eliminated as serious political competitors, the battle for the middle-class vote would be waged between Hugenberg’s DNVP and the NSDAP, so the Nazis were at pains to maintain their anti-Marxist credentials. At the same time, the party’s campaign strained to portray National Socialism as a dedicated enemy of the Reaction and a stalwart champion of the German worker. As the campaign progressed, Nazi attacks on Papen and the special interests behind him became so steeped in the language of class struggle that they might have been spoken by the Communists. At one point, Hitler, acting through his deputy Rudolf Hess, intervened, cautioning against the “class warfare tendencies” in the party’s propaganda and ordering the RPL to tone down its rhetoric against those forces associated with the traditional right. After all, many of the voters who cast ballots for the NSDAP in July were presumably crossovers from the conservative right, and it would hardly do to alienate them.

  Goebbels was also convinced that in July the party had allowed its radical anti-Semitism to slide too much into the background. As the party prepared for yet anoth
er national election, he issued a secret directive to the party’s propaganda operatives, ordering that “In the coming campaign, the Jewish question must be pushed more than before into the foreground. Again and again we must make it clear to broad masses that Papen is praised by the Jewish press, that his economic program comes from the Jew [banker] Jakob Goldschmidt, that his cabinet is supported by Jewish money interests. There is only one salvation from this Jewish peril in Germany and that is Hitler and the NSDAP.”

  Goebbels did make a halfhearted attempt to tamp down the party’s offensive against the right, but the blistering attacks on the reactionary nature of the Papen government did not subside. At the same time, the NSDAP was determined to burnish its “socialist” image. Under the watchword “Work and Bread,” its appeals to workers stressed the party’s support for full employment, the right to work, and other measures to cast off the crushing burden of joblessness. Winning working-class votes was essential, Goebbels stressed, but these efforts had to be done in a way that would not frighten away middle-class voters. It was a balancing act that not even the RPL could manage.

  The party’s pronounced “swing to the left,” as its conservative opponents repeatedly described it, reached a dramatic crescendo during the final week of the campaign, when Goebbels, acting on his own, decided to throw Nazi support behind a wildcat strike of the Berlin transportation workers—a strike with high national visibility and one vigorously championed by the Communists. For days the public witnessed the spectacle of Nazis and Communists working side by side, as buses, trams, and subways staggered to a halt, paralyzing the capital. Coming as it did in the very first days of November, Nazi support for the strikers was a calculated gamble, drawing heightened attention to Nazi “socialism” at a critical stage of the campaign.

  Goebbels certainly understood the risk, but felt it was one worth taking. “The entire press is furious with us and calls it ‘Bolshevism,’ but as a matter of fact we had no alternative. If we had held ourselves aloof from this strike . . . our position among the working classes, so far firm, would have been shaken.” The strike offered “a great opportunity . . . to demonstrate to the public . . . that the line we have taken up in politics is dictated by a true sympathy with the people.” Many in “bourgeois circles” would no doubt be “frightened off by our participation in the strike. But that’s not decisive. These circles can later be very easily won back. But if we’d have once lost the workers, they’d have been lost forever.”

  Despite Goebbels’s effort to rouse the troops, the party faced daunting challenges. After months of intense, almost constant campaigning symptoms of strain had begun to surface. The party treasury was virtually empty, and complaints about the lack of money poured into party headquarters. Four major campaigns in nine months had left the party’s organization on the brink of exhaustion. An RPL memorandum to the regional leadership in October expressed concern about flagging energy in the midst of an important political campaign and urged district leaders to press on with the expected vigor. The RPL complained that “the entire movement must display more activity. . . . From now on the National Socialist press must concentrate entirely on the election. . . . Every article and essay must close with conclusion that Adolf Hitler is the only salvation and that one must therefore vote NSDAP.”

  Hitler once again undertook a Deutschlandflug—his fourth of the year—but the novelty had clearly faded. Crowds were smaller, empty seats sprinkled the once-packed auditoriums even as his schedule, as before, was frantic. Although Hitler tried to focus the public’s attention on the failures of Papen, “a chancellor without a people,” and his government—the controversy surrounding his August 13 decision not to join the government simply would not go away. It hounded him throughout the campaign. In cities large and small, in hamlets and country villages, he was repeatedly forced to address the issue. His basic stump speech, which by November his audience could repeat almost verbatim, offered up the same explanation. “What you want to hear from me,” he began, typically, at a campaign stop in Breslau, “is the answer to a single question, the question that has been directed at me in past weeks from countless newspapers, countless politicians, elected representatives, and speakers: ‘Why,’ say these bourgeois politicians and their newspapers, ‘Herr Hitler, did you not climb aboard the train? It was your big chance; why did you say no and reject the offer?’ ”

  The answer was, of course, always the same. “Why would I climb aboard when I knew full well that I would soon have to get off, since I could not support the actions of the reactionaries who drove the train.” Anyway, it was better to besiege the castle from the outside, than to be a prisoner inside. He was not a bourgeois politician, who joins first this coalition and then that, bargaining for ministerial posts here and there. He could not compromise his principles or weaken his unshakable commitment to the “Idea”; he could not play the parliamentary game. National Socialism was a Weltanschauung, a movement of ideological conviction, not ready to abandon its fundamental values, its mission, for momentary advantage. He was not afraid of assuming government responsibility, as Papen and the reactionaries had charged. He was ready and able to take the reins of power in hand. And, he invariably concluded, “If we do one day achieve power, we will hold on to it, so help us God. We will not allow them to take it away from us again.” By election day, Hitler had delivered a variant of this speech no fewer than forty-five times.

  The Nazi press hailed Hitler’s campaign swing through the country as a victory tour with huge crowds shouting their support, straining for a view of the Führer. But behind these blustering headlines, party leaders were anxious. From the very outset of the campaign there were disquieting signs that the party’s propaganda machine, after months of operating at full throttle, was at last beginning to sputter. Reports from all across the country made clear that the party’s regional and local organizations were deeply in debt from the year’s campaigns and that even loyal party activists were distressed at the prospect of yet another major effort. Goebbels’s orders to regional propaganda leaders were punctuated by increasingly insistent demands for greater energy and enthusiasm. Implicitly acknowledging a morale problem within the ranks, the RPL’s directives during the final weeks of the campaign repeatedly emphasized the need to convince voters that “public opinion has undergone a powerful shift in favor of the NSDAP,” and that after an admittedly sluggish start, the party’s campaign was at last gathering “the old momentum.”

  For all the brave talk about renewed energy in the last days of the campaign, the party leadership was privately preparing itself for a setback. Both Hitler and Goebbels thought the party would almost certainly lose some votes, but Strasser was far more pessimistic. He feared that Hitler’s “all or nothing” strategy had led the party into a dead end, and that Hitler’s refusal to enter the government in August was a missed opportunity that would come back to haunt the party. “It will not be too serious a matter even if we do lose a few million votes,” Goebbels gamely rationalized in his diary, “for what actually counts is not the outcome of this or that particular contest, but which party has the last battalion to throw into the fray.” Three days later, with the election at hand, the possibility of a disappointing outcome was still on his mind.

  On election night, Goebbels listened to the returns with a mounting sense of foreboding. “The results are not as bad as the pessimists had feared,” he wrote in the whistling-past-the-graveyard tone that characterized his last diary entries before November 6, “but it still leaves a disgusting taste in one’s mouth to hear it over the radio. Every new announcement brings word of another defeat.” The results were, in fact, every bit as bad as Strasser and the pessimists had predicted. Less than four months after the party’s greatest triumph, the Nazis suffered a stunning defeat, losing more than two million votes and seeing their share of the national total tumble to 33 percent. The NSDAP would still be the largest party in the new Reichstag, if that body ever convened, but for the first time since the
party had begun its astounding ascent in the fall of 1929, it had absorbed a serious setback, puncturing its aura of invincibility and casting doubt on its promises of an inevitable—and imminent—seizure of power. There was no way around it: “We have suffered a blow,” Goebbels conceded forlornly.

  Goebbels’s first reaction was to blame the party’s failure to enter the government on Hitler’s August 13 decision and to claim that voters, especially middle-class voters, simply had not understood the party’s support for the Berlin strike. If only there had been more time to make the party’s position clear. Hitler’s refusal to enter the government in August was also a major contributing factor to the party’s decline. “August 13 accounts for it,” he decided. “The masses . . . have as yet not quite grasped the significance of the events of that day.” But that, as Goebbels realized, was hardly a sufficient explanation for the debacle. He wanted to hear from the party’s grassroots organizations, and he turned immediately to his national propaganda network for answers. Local propaganda leaders throughout the country were called upon to submit reports to their regional chiefs, who would evaluate their views and send a summary report to the RPL. There the regional reports were carefully analyzed and their important findings presented in a top secret document, a morale report, which was completed later in November and circulated among only the very highest leadership of the NSDAP. So sensitive was that document that only Hitler, Strasser, Hess, party treasurer Franz Xavier Schwarz, and party business manager Philipp Bouhler received a copy. Though struggling to accentuate the positive, the report was profoundly unsettling.