Formal charges were rarely filed; few records kept; prisoners were tortured, beaten to death, hanged, or shot, their battered bodies dumped in vacant lots, alleyways, forest paths, or left floating in ponds and canals. Some “committed suicide” by leaping from a high window; others were “shot while trying to escape.” There was no public outcry. “No one dares to say anything more,” Viktor Klemperer wrote in his diary, “everyone is afraid. . . . It is shocking how day after day naked acts of violence, breaches of the law, barbaric opinions appear quite undisguised as official decree. . . . I can no longer get rid of the feeling of disgust and shame. And no one stirs; everyone trembles, keeps out of sight.”
* * *
Attention was now focused on the March 5 election. The Communist press was suppressed indefinitely and Social Democratic newspapers were prohibited for two weeks—until after the election. Neither party held campaign rallies or other public events. Many of their leaders and functionaries were arrested by the police—the entire KPD Reichstag delegation was in jail—or held in makeshift SA prisons. Some had gone underground; others escaped abroad. Gangs of Brown Shirts roamed the cities, pounding on doors, “getting out the vote”; truckloads of Storm Troopers cruised through the streets, whipping up enthusiasm—and fear. On election day voters faced widespread intimidation. In some smaller towns the Nazis themselves manned the polling places; in others the secret ballot was discarded altogether, and, with SA men looking on, voters were “encouraged” to cast their ballots publicly. Many people felt so threatened, so afraid that the Nazis were listening to their phone calls, reading their mail, and opening their ballots that they complied without complaint.
The election of March 1933 was not the last free election of the Weimar era; it was the first sham election of the Third Reich. Under the circumstances, the Nazis were expected to prevail, and it came as no surprise that the party rebounded from its dismal November performance, its vote jumping from 11,737,821 to 17,200,000. Goebbels hailed the outcome as an overwhelming victory, a crowning achievement to his years of work. “We are the masters of the Reich and in Prussia. Everything else shrinks to insignificance.” Yet despite all the intimidation, coercion, and outright violence, the Nazis were still unable to attain the majority they sought. Prevented from mounting anything like a full-fledged campaign, the Social Democrats still drew a remarkable 7,100,000 votes, the Communists 4,800,000, the Catholic Zentrum and its Bavarian sister party, 5,400,000. The Conservatives, despite being Hitler’s coalition partners, insisted on running an independent campaign and captured another 3,100,000 votes. Altogether these parties received roughly 56 percent of the vote, leading journalist Konrad Heiden to observe that “a majority did not want Hitler, but it wanted nothing else. There was no united will to confront the united will of the National Socialists.” The Nazis had captured 43.9 percent of the vote, and with the 8 percent garnered by their Conservative partners polled, the Government of National Concentration now held a majority of seats in the new Reichstag. Hitler felt it something of a disappointment that he would still be dependent on the Conservatives and ultimately on Hindenburg, but he acted immediately to take advantage of the situation.
The first priority of the new regime was to sweep away all organized opposition and to assume control of the civil administration at every level of government. The Nazis referred to this policy as “Gleichschaltung,” a term derived from electrical usage, meaning all switches were put onto the same circuit so that all could be activated by throwing a single master switch. The term is usually translated as “coordination,” but is more aptly rendered as “bringing onto line.” Initially it referred to bringing all governmental departments and agencies under Nazi control, dismissing unreliable personnel, especially Jews, Social Democrats, and other political “undesirables,” and installing Nazis in their positions. Göring had begun the process in Prussia in February, and within a week of the March 5 election the Nazis seized control of all the German states. Between March 5 and March 9, Hitler dispatched Reich commissars—Nazi governors—to all the German states not already headed by National Socialists. Their ostensible mission was to curb unrest and restore order, although the only civil unrest being stirred up in Germany was the work of Storm Troopers and other Nazi militants. The initial impetus came from Berlin, but the Nazi seizure of power was to a surprising extent an exercise in grassroots politics, as fanatical local Nazis, acting without explicit orders from above, took matters into their own hands. Everywhere they bullied local authorities into submission, pushing aside city councils and state governments. In fact, Hitler appointed the Reich commissars not so much to deal with threats from the left, recalcitrant clergy, or other enemies of the regime but to ride herd on party radicals whose violent excesses and calls for a “revolution from below” were a growing source of concern.
Bavaria, which had historically resisted every threat to its independence, was the last state government to succumb to Nazi pressure. Munich’s possible resistance had worried the party leadership, but on March 9 the Bavarian government meekly ceded power to Hitler’s appointee, General Ritter von Epp, who appeared in Munich backed by a phalanx of armed Storm Troopers. Epp was well known and respected in Bavaria. He had commanded Bavarian troops in the Great War and had led the Free Corps’s bloody suppression of the Bavarian Communist Republic in 1919. Foremost among the many Nazi stalwarts who assumed powerful positions in the new Bavarian government were SA commander Ernst Röhm as minister without portfolio and SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who assumed leadership of the Munich police. Himmler quickly appointed his SS deputy Reinhard Heydrich to take charge of the Bavarian Political Police. Since 1930 Heydrich had led the party’s Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD), gathering intelligence on the NSDAP’s enemies, real and imagined. Although it had hardly seemed so at the time, these appointments proved to be the first stepping-stone to ultimate power for Himmler, Heydrich, and the SS.
The dispatch of the Reich commissars, however, did little to restrain the SA. Storm Troopers attacked German citizens on the streets for failing to give the Hitler salute to passing SA formations or join in the singing of the Nazi Party anthem; they roughed up—sometimes severely—foreign businessmen, tourists, and even diplomats and their families. Formal complaints from foreign governments flooded into the Foreign Office, and on March 10 Hitler made an effort to bring the SA under control. Disingenuously claiming that these excesses were mostly the work of Communist spies who had infiltrated the SA, he nonetheless made an appeal to the Storm Troopers and other radicals to show restraint. “Unprincipled characters . . . are attempting to compromise the Party with individual actions (Einzelaktionen) which are not in any way related to the great task of the national uprising and can only damage and belittle the accomplishments of our Movement. . . . Men of the SA and SS! You must apprehend such creatures yourselves . . . and call them to account for their actions; you must turn them over to the police without delay, regardless of who they may be.” He reminded them that “as of today, the National Government has the executive power in Germany in its hands” and reassured them that “the national uprising will continue to be carried out methodically,” but “under control from above. . . . From this moment on all individual actions must cease. From now on, whoever attempts to disrupt our administrative and social life through Einzelaktionen, is acting consciously against the national regime.” These admonitions were largely ignored at the grass roots, where beatings, murder, and unauthorized arrests continued. The response of SA leaders was “That’s what the Führer must say for foreign consumption. We know he wants the opposite.” Some of the more egregious excesses subsided, but despite Hitler’s order, few practical steps were taken to rein in the SA. The radicals had read him correctly.
Insubordination by radical SA troops bent on exacting revenge against all opponents, real and imagined, was a potential problem but one Hitler was willing to tolerate in the first critical months of the regime. He needed them as enforcers, as threats to pote
ntial opponents. At this point, the most disturbing threat to the Nazi consolidation of power was the Reich President, and behind him the army. What would happen, Nazi leaders worried, if Hindenburg awoke one morning and decided that the “national revolution” had gone too far? Might he push the recently installed Hitler government aside and install a military dictatorship as a prelude to a restoration of the monarchy?
In a bow to the traditional fixtures of the old right, the Nazis decided to use the occasion of the opening session of the new Reichstag to stage an extravagant display of reverence for the venerable field marshal and the Prussian military tradition. The time and place for the ceremony were intended to project a compelling symbolic meaning. It was to be held in Potsdam, the historic residence of the Hohenzollern monarchy, in the storied Potsdam Garrison Church, which held the tombs of Frederick William I, “the Soldier King,” and his son, Frederick the Great. It was hallowed ground, steeped in Prussian dynastic and military history, and the date, March 21, was the anniversary of Bismarck’s convening of the first Reichstag in the newly united Germany in 1871.
The day began with religious services at the St. Nicholai Church for the Protestant dignitaries and in St. Peter and Paul for Catholics. Hitler and Goebbels chose not to attend either and instead visited the graves of fallen Nazi “martyrs” in a Berlin cemetery before motoring to Potsdam. It was a telling choice. On March 21, the streets of Potsdam were draped in the black, white, and red of the Empire, interspersed with brilliant swastika banners. Reichswehr troops in their steel helmets and field gray uniforms lined the route. Hitler, incongruously sporting a top hat and cutaway, and Hindenburg, in the uniform of an Imperial field marshal, spiked helmet, and the grand cordon of the Black Eagle, arrived together, cheered along their way by a multitude of enthusiastic well-wishers. Prominent among the guests of honor were generals of the Reichswehr, the crown prince in his army regalia, and military notables from past wars, all resplendent in their antediluvian dress uniforms—this, the setting proclaimed, was Potsdam, not Weimar.
Assembled in the crowded interior of the church were the Imperial family, foreign dignitaries, ambassadors, the ministers of the Hitler cabinet, and the newly elected Reichstag deputies. The Communists, of course, were nowhere to be seen—they were locked away in jail—and the Social Democrats refused to attend such a shameless paean to Hitler and the faded grandees of the old order. All rose when Hindenburg, accompanied by a respectful Hitler, entered. “Hitler,” French ambassador François-Poncet observed, “looked like a timid newcomer being introduced by an important protector into a company to which he does not belong. Who could have believed that this wan man with such vulgar features, dressed in an ill-fitting coat and in appearance so respectful and so modest, was the more powerful of the two personages.” An awed hush fell upon the guests as Hindenburg turned to the gallery where was seated the Imperial family and raised his field marshal’s baton in a solemn salute to the empty chair of his exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II.
In his brief opening address, Hindenburg praised the new legally elected majority cabinet and exhorted it to be guided, in its exuberant youth, by the virtues and values of old Prussia—honor, duty, loyalty, and hard work. Hitler then took his position at the ornate rostrum, and, facing Hindenburg seated just a few feet away, gave an abbreviated recapitulation of his standard stump speech—Weimar’s failures, the ignominy of Versailles, the calumny of the Allies in assigning guilt for the war to the German state and its people, all well-worn themes. Notably absent, however, was the usual stormy rhetoric, the angry bombast. On this occasion a solemn Hitler reached for the inspirational, summoning the nation to join with him in his struggle to restore Germany’s prosperity, patriotism, and standing in a peaceful world.
After the shameful end to the Great War, he declared, “while the German people and the German Reich . . . became mired in internal political conflict and discord and the economy drifted into ruin, a new group of Germans gathered, Germans who with faithful trust in their own people, wished to form it into a new community. It was to this young Germany that you, Herr Generalfeldmarschall, entrusted the leadership of the Reich.” On March 5, the people had given the new government a majority and in so doing had “restored the national honor within a few short weeks and, thanks to your understanding, Herr Reich President, consummated the marriage between the symbols of old glory and young strength.” At the conclusion of these two sober declarations, Hindenburg rose and stepped stiffly down into the crypt, where, head bowed, he communed in silence with the two long dead Prussian kings.
The festivities inside over, the party adjourned to the steps of the church where they reviewed marching columns of Storm Troopers, SS men, Stahlhelm, and Reichswehr troops. Cannons fired in salute; military bands played. During the military review Hitler was content to remain in the background, yielding center stage to Hindenburg, who must have thought himself transported back to the glories of the old empire. In such a scene it was easy to imagine that Hitler was preparing the ground for a restoration of the monarchy. For weeks he had hinted to conservatives that he was at least open to such a move. Certainly the crown prince seemed to think so, watching the passing troops as if they were marching in review for him. The most compelling image of the day came when Hitler, in a studied display of deference, bowed low and offered his hand to the field marshal who towered above him like a stone pillar. It was, in today’s political idiom, a staged photo op, and that image, captured in a photograph, appeared on postcards and in newspapers throughout the country. It was the message of the day, and it proved wildly popular. That night, torchlight parades were held in cities around the country, each with this same theme of fusion between the glories of the old and the revivifying energies of the new. The Day of Potsdam had been a triumph.
That same day, some three hundred miles away in a small Bavarian village, another side of the “national revolution” was on display. While national radio gave minute-by-minute coverage of the events in Potsdam, Heinrich Himmler, in his capacity as police president of Munich, announced the opening of “a concentration camp for political prisoners” at Dachau. This new institution, he explained, would hold some five thousand prisoners, primarily Communists, who were too dangerous to be released from the already clogged jails. Contrary to the widely circulating rumors, he reassured the public that the prisoners would be well treated and would be held only as long as necessary for their “reeducation.” Press releases, some with accompanying photographs, emphasized that the camp, and others that were being built around the country, were necessary to preserve law and order, to keep hardened “enemies of the Reich” under lock and key, and to relieve overcrowding in the prisons.
The first of these installations, called concentration camps, was located at the edge of the village of Dachau, about fifteen miles from Munich. It was hardly a secret. The camp was given extensive publicity in the press, always emphasizing the humane treatment of prisoners, always stressing that the inmates were primarily Communist subversives who were being reeducated so that they could rejoin society as loyal, productive “people’s comrades.” The prisoners would learn the virtues of honest labor and discipline while enjoying the fresh air of a clean rural environment. This motif ran through news stories about all the camps (Oranienburg near Berlin, the Emsland camps in Baden) established in the early days of the regime. At first, the city fathers of Dachau were excited about the prospect of much needed business coming to the town; some even speculated that it would be something of a tourist attraction, though the locals were warned to keep their distance from the camp. Local boosters were soon calling it “the most famous town in the Fatherland.” This benevolent glow vanished soon enough. Within a year, Dachau would become an internationally reviled synonym for suffering, sadism, and oppression, a name that produced revulsion and dread in all who heard it.
A day after the camp at Dachau opened, the first working session of the Reichstag got under way in the Kroll Opera House, close by the ruined Reichstag buil
ding. SA and SS troops cordoned off the building, and inside the main chamber Nazi deputies in their brown party uniforms took their places, and armed SA and SS men loitered ominously in the corridors. Behind the speaker’s podium loomed a gigantic swastika banner. Hitler had already announced that he would demand the passage of an “enabling act,” which would amend the constitution to allow the Reich government to rule without legislative or presidential interference for a period of four years. The passage of such a measure, however, would require a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag. The Communists were not a worry—the KPD’s elected representatives were either dead, in jail, or in hiding—but the Social Democrats had already proclaimed their opposition to such a measure. Crucial to attaining the necessary two-thirds majority was the Zentrum, and its leader, Prelate Ludwig Kaas, insisted on assurances that the rights and institutions of the Church would be unaffected by the act. Hitler eagerly provided such guarantees, but Kaas demanded that his promise be put in writing. Hitler agreed but then evaded producing such a document. To the surprise of no one, perhaps even Kaas, the written document never materialized. Fearing that the Nazis would simply outlaw the party if it defied the regime, the Zentrum dropped its opposition to the proposal, leaving the Social Democrats alone to resist the “Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich.”
The Third Reich Page 32
