During his prepared remarks, Hitler’s demeanor was moderate; his message, restrained. He reiterated Germany’s deep desire for peace and equality in international affairs, affirmed the government’s regard for “Christianity as the unshakeable foundation of the ethics and morality of the people,” and stated his determination to establish friendly relations with the Vatican. He also pledged that the government would make use of “this authorization” only if it was necessary “for the implementation of vital measures.” It would “always be the first and foremost task of the Government to bring about inner consensus with its aims.” Neither the Reichstag nor the Reichsrat (where the individual states were represented) was endangered. The position of the Reich President would remain inviolate. The states would not be abolished; “the rights of the Churches” would “not be curtailed and their position vis-à-vis the State will not be altered.” Furthermore, he assured his audience that “the number of cases in which there is an internal necessity for taking refuge in such a law is, in and of itself, limited.”
The Enabling Act tightened the Nazi grip on the state, and its passage also removed the few remaining restraints on the SA, whose brutal “excesses” went far beyond all that had come before. The extent of the violence was stunning. The primary targets continued to be Communists and Social Democrats, from the top leaders to midlevel functionaries to the rank and file, but the Storm Troopers and party militants also conducted an escalating campaign of harassment against the Jews. Although the regime occasionally admonished the radicals, these uncoordinated “independent actions” (Einzelaktionen) continued to be tolerated and even encouraged by the regime. Since January 30 and with mounting intensity, Jews were daily being subjected to beatings, arrests, public humiliations, ransacked shops and homes, and, occasionally, murder. But with the passage of the Enabling Act, the floodgates of persecution burst wide open. On March 9, SA squads moved into a Jewish neighborhood in Berlin, rounded up dozens of Eastern European Jews, and packed them off to a concentration camp; four days later Brown Shirts in Mannheim invaded Jewish businesses, roughed up their owners, and shut down the shops; later that same day in a small Hessian town, Storm Troopers, “in search of weapons,” forced their way into the homes of local Jews, ransacked the rooms, and brutalized the terrified inhabitants; in Breslau, SA men stormed brazenly into a courtroom, attacked Jewish lawyers and judges, and drove them out of the building. Such “independent actions” were not authorized or directed from above, and they were not coordinated as part of an organized campaign, but in the spring of 1933 such outrageous breaches of the law were occurring throughout the Reich on an almost daily basis.
The unprecedented scope of the violence drew international attention. While domestic criticism of the regime had been effectively stifled, the foreign press, especially in the United States, condemned Nazi outrages against the Jews. In the early spring Jewish organizations in the United States and Western Europe began an intense media campaign to raise public awareness of Nazi atrocities against Germany’s Jews, and on March 27 the American Jewish Congress issued a call for an international boycott of German goods. The Nazis reacted with predictable fury. They threatened to initiate a boycott of their own against Jewish businesses in the Reich. In a bow to party radicals, Hitler appointed Julius Streicher, the party’s most notorious anti-Semite, to organize a nationwide boycott. The tentative start date was set for April 1 and was intended to go on indefinitely.
As preparation for the boycott proceeded, Hitler came under pressure from within his own government, especially from Foreign Minister Constantin von Neurath, Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, and even Hindenburg, who feared that a boycott would seriously damage the weak German economy and undermine the country’s reputation in the international community. Caught between the pragmatists and the extremists, Hitler found himself in a familiar dilemma. He was not inclined to retreat, especially since he was under pressure from party radicals to live up to his own anti-Semitic rhetoric, but he also understood the pragmatists’ plea for restraint. In private he heartily embraced the boycott, even encouraged it, but in public he posed as the sensible man of moderation, trying to restrain the justifiable outrage of the German people at the vile calumny of international Jewry.
On the morning of April 1, the boycott went forward as planned. Storm Troopers stationed themselves in front of Jewish shops, department stores, and professional offices, menacing anyone who wanted to go inside. They carried anti-Semitic placards and scrawled slogans on Jewish shop windows: “Germans, defend yourselves. Don’t buy from Jews.” Goebbels, an enthusiastic promoter of the boycott, launched a propaganda barrage aimed at “enlightening” the public about world Jewry’s “declaration of economic warfare” against Germany.
“The boycott against the world atrocity propaganda has broken out in full force in Berlin and across the entire Reich,” Goebbels enthused in his diary notes. To see for himself, he drove down Tauentzienstrasse, a fashionable street with many Jewish businesses. “All the Jewish shops are closed,” he beamed. “SA guards stand before the entries. Everywhere the public has declared its solidarity [with us]. Exemplary discipline dominates.” All in all, it was “an impressive play.” Yet, for all the furious bluster, the boycott did not produce the enthusiastic burst of public support that Goebbels desired. Some Jewish businesses simply stayed closed on that Saturday morning, and many customers ignored the boycott, brushing past the SA pickets to shop at Jewish businesses and department stores. Germans still visited their Jewish doctors and lawyers. The Völkischer Beobachter of April 3 reported that in Hanover some shoppers had even tried to enter a Jewish business by force, while in Munich customers had been feverishly stocking up on merchandise from Jewish shops for days prior to the boycott. Exasperated, the Völkischer Beobachter condemned “the lack of sense among that part of the population which forced its hard-earned money into the hands of enemies of the people and cunning slanderers.” Some store windows were smashed and some proprietors and even a few customers were roughed up, but instances of outright violence were surprisingly rare. The boycott had been orderly, and the day passed in relative calm. After twenty-four hours, the Nazis, declaring victory, suspended the boycott. It would never be revived.
The April boycott was only the beginning, an ominous prelude. To pacify the disappointed radicals and to assert the state’s control of Jewish policy, the regime initiated a series of anti-Jewish measures in the weeks that followed. On April 7, a hastily drafted Law for the Protection of a Professional Civil Service was enacted. Drafted by Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, the law allowed the government to dismiss tenured civil servants who were known to be “politically unreliable”—leftists, liberals, and others “whose previous political activities afford no assurance that they will at all times give their fullest support to the national state.” Beyond that, the law also contained an “Aryan Paragraph,” as it came to be called, ordering that all “non Aryans” be dismissed immediately from the national, state, and municipal civil service. Jews were no longer allowed to serve as schoolteachers, university professors, judges, or in any other government post. For the law’s purposes, anyone with one Jewish grandparent was classified a Jew. Shortly thereafter (April 11) an ordinance, also emanating from the Ministry of the Interior, denied Jews admission to the bar, and another edict later in the month banned Jews from practicing medicine through the state-run insurance programs where most Germans received their health care. Both measures encountered opposition from an unexpected source. The Reich President was distressed by the law as originally written and pressured Hitler to grant some exceptions, which he did. The law’s restrictions were not to apply to combat veterans of the Great War, civil servants who had served continuously since August 1914, and those whose father or son had been killed in the war.
Draconian as these laws and ordinances were, their initial impact was not as extensive as the regime intended. With the exceptions granted, 3,167 of the country’s 4,585 Jewish l
awyers were allowed to continue their work; of the 717 Jewish judges and state prosecutors, 336 remained in place. Even fewer Jewish physicians, who made up 11 percent of all doctors in Germany, were affected by the laws. Here the regime trod carefully, not willing at this early stage to insert itself between those Jewish physicians and their thousands of patients. Later in the year additional edicts placed further restrictions on Jewish life in Germany—regulating, among other measures, the number of Jewish students in schools (Law to Prevent the Overcrowding of German Schools, April 29) and forbidding Jews from acquiring agricultural property (The Hereditary Farm Law, September 1933). The ideological message in these early measures was chillingly clear, sending an ominous signal about Nazi intentions regarding Germany’s increasingly beleaguered Jewish community.
Hitler was coming under mounting international criticism for the violence of the SA, and on April 6 he spoke to the foreign press, defending the course of the revolution under way in Germany. During his speech introducing the Enabling Law, he had claimed that “hardly ever has a revolution on such a large scale been carried out in so disciplined and bloodless a fashion as this renaissance of the German people.” Addressing the foreign journalists, he returned to that theme. In contrast to “the intolerable terrorization” of the National Socialists by the Weimar parties, “the victorious revolution” was carried out with “unheard of discipline and incomparable self-control. . . . Not only did the retaliation bear no relation to the sufferings which had been endured [by the Nazis] but even where there was retaliation it was always given rein only through the necessity to break the opposition of the November system.”
The politically unreliable and racially unacceptable were driven from state offices, but the Gleichschaltung was far from complete. Two other groups from outside the formal power structure remained: workers and Catholics, two elements of the population that had proven most resistant to the Nazis before 1933. The Communist threat had been squashed, but millions of workers, with their traditional alliance to the parties of the left, were hostile or at least highly suspicious of the new regime. In an attempt to woo them, the Nazis, with their usual fanfare, declared May 1 “The Day of German Labor.” If the Day of Potsdam was a reassuring bow to the reactionary right, May Day would be a national celebration of the German worker. The Nazis declared it a national holiday, something even the Social Democratic governments of Weimar had been unable to accomplish, and Goebbels organized a massive day-long demonstration in Berlin that would show the new regime’s determination to integrate the working class into the new national community. It would be staged on the “grandest scale” and would “for the first time draw the entire Volk together,” Goebbels noted in his diary, but “from that point onward, the final showdown with the unions will begin. We will never rest easy until they are completely in our hands.”
The day began with nationwide celebrations and speeches lauding the German worker. At nine in the morning Hitler and Hindenburg addressed a mammoth youth rally at the Lustgarten in central Berlin; in the early afternoon Hitler received a delegation of workers from around the country in the Chancellery, and then, as an acknowledgment of their elevated status in the new national community, introduced them to the Reich President himself. Despite all the repression and brutality, some labor leaders clung to a desperate hope that a show of cooperation with the new regime might secure their continued existence. In what struck many disillusioned Social Democrats as sheer cowardice, the labor unions joined in the parades on May Day, some even marching behind swastika banners and offering speeches pledging cooperation with the new government. Not all was voluntary. Some factory owners required their workers to participate in the festivities; Storm Troopers, going house to house, bullied others into the streets, handing out small swastika pendants to all. The climax of the festivities came in the evening when a crowd of more than a million gathered on the vast field adjacent to the Tempelhof aerodrome. Searchlights raked the sky and swept across the assembled masses, until at last, as the drama built, only one glaring white spotlight cut the darkness, directed to the platform where Hitler made his appearance.
Speaking beneath billowing swastika banners, his voice carried nationwide over the radio, Hitler briefly reiterated his determination to end unemployment in Germany and announced the introduction of compulsory labor service to put the jobless back to work. But the theme for the evening was not policy but unity. Overcoming generations of class warfare would be a struggle, but the National Socialists had “the resolution to lead the German people back together, and, if necessary,” Hitler added menacingly, “to force them back together.” The meaning of May Day was to break down class barriers and to “honor the work, and respect the worker.” The German people are strong when they are united, Hitler declared, when “you banish from your heart the spirit of class conflict and . . . discord.” He summoned the people to join with the regime in this struggle, “to go forth into the cities to proclaim . . . the importance of the German peasant and go out into the country and to our thinkers and teach them the significance of the German working class.
“The fact that the world is so against us is all the more reason why we must become a unified whole,” he continued. The world must be shown that it could “never break us, never force us to submit to any yoke.” One day, when the work of the National Socialist regime was completed, the German people would “be able to face the Almighty and say ‘You can see that we have changed. The German people is no longer a Volk of infamy, shame, self-degradation, faintheartedness, and faithlessness. No, Lord, the German Volk is once again strong in its will, strong in its persistence, strong in bearing any sacrifice. Lord, we will not give you up! Now bless our fight for our freedom and thus our German Volk und Vaterland.” The spectacle ended with the surprisingly enthusiastic multitude singing the German national anthem and the “Horst Wessel Song” while a dazzling display of fireworks burst over the scene. Celebrations continued on into the night.
At just after nine the next morning, SA men appeared at union halls all across the country. They arrested union functionaries, plundered union offices, confiscated records, office equipment, and even furniture; they shut down union newspapers, closed union banks, and seized their assets. They encountered no resistance. Since the working men of Germany were now integrated into the National Socialist people’s community, unions, the Nazis declared, were no longer necessary. They were, in fact, impediments to the national unity proclaimed by the Führer. German workers would now be represented, along with management, in a National Socialist Labor Front headed by Nazi organization leader Robert Ley. The action had been planned well in advance of the May Day celebrations. As Goebbels recorded in his diary on April 17, Hitler had discussed the operation with him, and they agreed on its essentials. First the celebration, then the seizure of the union halls. “There may be a few days of trouble, but then they will belong to us. One can’t show any scruples or have any reservations.” After all, the regime was only doing the worker a service by “liberating him from the parasitic [union] leadership, which has only turned his life sour. If the unions are in our hands, then the other parties and organizations won’t be able to hold out for long.”
And just like that they were gone. The most highly organized, well-established, and powerful socialist organization in Europe was brushed aside with hardly a whimper of resistance. No strikes, no demonstrations, no protests. Even the Nazis were surprised. Within a few weeks’ time, the labor movement had been rendered leaderless; many functionaries were behind bars, while others were keeping their head down, intimidated into silence. Tens of thousands of Social Democratic and Communist operatives were locked away in jails and in unauthorized SA prisons, and more would come. Already by the end of March, the Prussian police reported that roughly twenty thousand Communists had been arrested and thrown in jail; in Bavaria, ten thousand Communists and Social Democrats were arrested in March and April; by June the number had doubled.
Nor were party activists the
only targets. In the Ruhr, almost half the entire Communist membership was taken into custody. By the end of the year the total number of political arrests in Germany ran to more than 100,000 and the number of deaths while in custody reached nearly six hundred. These numbers were almost certainly understated, for many arrests and murders simply went unrecorded, as victims seized by the SA disappeared into their makeshift prisons, never to be heard from again. With their organizations demolished, their newspapers banned, their leaders imprisoned or in exile, many of the rank and file were demoralized. They were dismayed by the party leadership, disgusted with its supine surrender to the Nazis. But what were their options? Under the circumstances, some were reluctantly resigned to an uneasy coexistence with the Nazis. Few thought the Nazi regime would last longer than a few months, and the labor movement had survived Bismarck’s suppression from 1878 to 1890 and emerged even stronger. Social democracy and organized labor would survive Hitler and the Nazis as well. The inevitable coup de grâce came on June 22, when the regime formally outlawed the already ravaged SPD. A Social Democratic underground would develop, dodging the Gestapo, smuggling reports on life in the Third Reich out to the SPD’s Prague headquarters in exile, but labor’s organized resistance in German political life was effectively over.
Disbanding the SPD was merely the first rumble of an avalanche that would soon bury the remaining parties. On June 26, Alfred Hugenberg, once thought to be the real power in the new government, was forced out of the cabinet, ostensibly for his aggressive, undiplomatic behavior at the World Economic Conference in London, where without consultation with the Foreign Office or the cabinet he had belligerently demanded, among other things, the return of Germany’s colonies. With his departure, the conservative coalition that he led chose to disband itself. Its members were given the option of joining the NSDAP, and Stahlhelm troopers were offered a spot in the SA. Papen remained in the cabinet but was isolated and without influence. On June 28 and 29, the two liberal parties, long reduced to irrelevance, caved in and voluntarily dissolved themselves. For their followers there was no offer of membership in the NSDAP. By the end of June, only the Catholic Zentrum and its partner the BVP remained.
The Third Reich Page 33
