The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  The Zentrum, with its deep reservations about National Socialism, had long been a source of trouble for the Nazis, but by the summer of 1933 it was under mounting pressure to reach an accommodation with the “national revolution.” The pressure came not only from the regime, which had vividly demonstrated the unhappy fate of opposition parties, but from the Church hierarchy as well. Since January the Nazis had been attempting to find a modus vivendi with the Catholic Church, which was the spiritual home of roughly one third of the population. For its part, the Church wanted to secure a safe position within the new order and pressed Hitler for formal guarantees that Catholic institutions, organizations, and practices would be left intact. Momentum for an understanding had accelerated since Hitler’s Enabling Act speech on March 23, in which he had made a point of promising that the Church would remain unmolested. In response, the Catholic hierarchy in Germany reversed course, reluctantly dropping its previous opposition to the Nazis and calling for loyalty to the new regime, actions that went a long way toward alleviating the fears of ordinary Catholics who had for years been told at mass that they could not support National Socialism and remain in good standing with the Church.

  While the Nazis were wary of organized Catholicism, they anticipated little trouble from the Protestant churches, of which there were twenty-eight. The Protestant churches had a strong nationalist tradition and a history of respect for the authority of the state, and they had not displayed the same hostility toward National Socialism as had the Catholic Church. One particularly vocal minority, the German Christians, was formed in 1932 and had gone beyond a generally supportive view of National Socialism, becoming open advocates for Hitler and his movement. Some pastors among the German Christians proclaimed their desire to be “the storm troopers of Jesus Christ.” They espoused what they called “positive Christianity” and hoped to establish a unified national Protestant church under the slogan “One Volk, One Reich, One Church”—an echo of the Nazi slogan “One Volk, One Reich, One Führer.”

  Hitler liked the idea of a united national church, and with the enthusiastic support of the German Christians, a Nazi-controlled Reich Church was established in the spring of 1933. Hitler appointed Ludwig Müller, a former naval chaplain and an ardent Nazi, to the new post of Reich bishop. Backed by the vigorous support of the Propaganda Ministry, the German Christians, numbering perhaps 600,000 adherents, prevailed in the church elections of July 1933 and assumed control of church offices.

  Protestants were generally positive about the new regime, and by summer 1933 the regime seemed to have cemented their support. Since the new Reich Church was technically a government entity, Müller insisted that it was subject to the Civil Service Law, with its Aryan Paragraph. Pressure from German Christian pastors to dismiss all Jews employed by the Church mounted. Among the more radical pastors there was even a move to push Jesus aside and elevate Hitler to the role of national savior who would return Germany to the true, un-Judaized Christianity of the traditional evangelical church. They rejected the Old Testament as a Jewish book and demanded that it be deleted from the German Bible; they argued that the Cross was a Jewish symbol and should be replaced, presumably by the swastika, though that remained unspoken. The Reich Church, in short, was to be a Nazi church.

  Meanwhile, negotiations with the Vatican began in earnest in late March following the passage of the Enabling Act, with Papen serving as the lead negotiator for the Reich. Reflecting the high priority Hitler placed on an agreement, Göring, too, was dispatched to Rome for an audience with the pope. After a series of highly publicized talks, the Reich announced on July 8 that a Concordat had been signed with the Vatican. In it, the Nazis pledged to respect the rights of the Church and its lay organizations, while the Church promised to halt its relentless assaults on “heathen” National Socialism and to withdraw from politics. The Zentrum, which was little more than a bystander to the talks, found its position undermined by the Church hierarchy, and on July 6 voted itself out of existence. The BVP disbanded on the following day, prodded no doubt by Himmler’s arrest of some two thousand of its functionaries. The Concordat and the disappearance of the Zentrum/BVP marked the end of political Catholicism in Germany and slammed the final nail into the coffin of Germany’s moribund party system. Two weeks later, with a malicious sense of historical irony, a new edict formally outlawed all political parties and organizations, except for the NSDAP. It was July 14, Bastille Day.

  Having successfully seized the state apparatus, smashed the labor movement, abolished the parties, neutralized the churches, seduced the army, and intimidated the business community, the Nazis had been successful beyond their wildest dreams. The Nazi revolution, as Hitler had often told the impatient Storm Troopers, had come after the assumption of power, not before it, and it had achieved its astonishing victory with a rapidity that was little short of breathtaking. Perhaps most surprising to the Nazi leadership, they had managed it without plunging the country into chaos or civil war. All across the board, Germany was falling into line. The time had come for consolidation.

  9

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  CONSOLIDATION OF POWER

  While Hitler believed that the time had come to consolidate Nazi achievements—achievements that had come with stunning ease—consolidation was not what SA leader Ernst Röhm wanted to hear. Writing in the June 1933 issue of the influential party journal, the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, he acknowledged that “a mighty victory has been won, but not the victory.” The ultimate goal of creating a new Germany, infused with the National Socialist spirit of revolutionary struggle, had not yet been achieved, and as long as that goal was not attained, “the bitter, passionate struggle of the SA and SS will not cease.” He lashed out against timidity in the political leadership and squeamish moderation that would drain the Nazi revolution of its fanatical zeal. Invoking Prussian General Gebhard von Blücher, the German hero of Waterloo, he cautioned that “the politicians should not spoil what the soldier has won with his blood.” The SA and SS, he warned, “would not tolerate [a situation in which] the German revolution goes to sleep or is betrayed by ‘non-fighters’ content to go only ‘half way.’ ” Now with four million members, the SA was not going away; it would be a major power factor in the coming National Socialist state, a third pillar of the regime, alongside the army and the police. It would have “special tasks” and, he not so subtly implied, would not be content merely “to take orders.” Röhm closed his article with a direct challenge to the “bourgeois souls” in the party: “Whether it suits them or not, we will continue our fight. With them, if they finally grasp what it is all about. Without them, if they don’t want it. And against them, if it must be!”

  Throughout the spring Röhm and other senior SA leaders continued to call for “a second revolution” that would realize the party’s long-standing social revolutionary promises. The Storm Troopers, Röhm declared, were “the incorruptible guarantors of the fulfillment of the German revolution.” The relationship between the party and the SA had always been prickly, and by summer 1933 the gap between the party’s political leadership and the SA was widening into a chasm. From the earliest days of the party, the SA had seen itself as a military organization, its members the soldiers that fought for the National Socialist revolution—and won it. Their contempt for what they considered the bourgeois restraint of the political leadership was never far from the surface and had exploded into open conflict at intervals over the years.

  Differences over ideology and strategy aside, many Brown Shirts were bitterly disappointed by the failure of the new regime to find positions for them, either in the party or state administrations. Many were still surviving on the dole, eating in SA soup kitchens, living in SA barracks, desperately in need of a job. It was their due, their just reward for fighting the party’s hard battles in “the time of struggle,” while others sat safely ensconced in their offices or strutted about in their un-bloodied party uniforms. Many had come to feel that Hitler’s loyal “old
fighters” were being passed over for opportunists who had rushed to join the party or the SA after the Enabling Act. March violets, they were derisively called. Almost 80 percent of the party’s membership had joined since the March 5 election.

  Although the Nazis were firmly entrenched in power, widespread SA hooliganism remained a problem, and an increasingly embarrassing one, for the regime. Despite urgent calls for a stabilization of the situation by the Justice and Interior ministries, SA leaders tenaciously resisted any interference in their affairs. In the spring and summer violent incidents involving the SA occurred throughout the Reich, but the most explosive outburst came in late June, in the Köpenick section of Berlin. There, on June 21, a young Social Democrat fought off an assault by a gang of Brown Shirts, shooting dead two of his assailants. Hundreds of Storm Troopers soon descended on the scene, and from June 21 to June 26 rampaged through the neighborhood, beating and arresting over five hundred “enemies of the state.” Most were dragged off to makeshift SA prisons where they were so sadistically tortured that ninety-one of them died. These days of appalling savagery came to be known as the “blood week of Köpenick.” The authorities looked the other way.

  This state of affairs could not continue. The SA’s unbridled thuggery, so crucial in establishing the dictatorship during the first six months of the regime, was becoming a political liability. If this unruly behavior continued unchecked, Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht warned, it could prove a serious deterrent to German economic recovery, frightening away much-needed foreign investment. The Justice and Interior Ministries both complained about the ongoing arbitrary arrests, extralegal internment, and the notorious SA bestiality. The SA even claimed the right to try its own men accused of crimes, asserting its immunity from the ordinary process of criminal justice. By late spring, the state authorities—all dedicated Nazis—were demanding that the SA be brought to heel and made subject to the law.

  Rumors and reports of ghastly SA brutality in their unauthorized prisons came regularly to Diels and other police officials. Gradually the police, working under the aegis of the Interior Ministry, and with Göring’s blessing, began a campaign to close the SA prisons. It did not go smoothly. Even when confronted with written authorization from Göring, some SA commanders resisted, demanding instead an order from their leader, Ernst Röhm. In some cases SA leaders simply refused to cooperate, resulting in armed standoffs as police officials attempted to close their unauthorized concentration camps. It became, as Diels described it, “a small war.”

  In one instance, Diels led a group of police into one such chamber of horrors in Berlin. A seasoned police official, even he was shocked by what he saw. The dark, dismal rooms were bare, the furniture removed, the floors covered in straw, soiled with blood and urine. The prisoners were little more than skeletons, starved, dehydrated, their heads lolling around on their shoulders “like a doll’s.” They had been forced to stand for days in cramped cabinets without food or water, their time in these vertical coffins being interrupted only for the relentless torture sessions. A dozen or so SA brutes worked in rotating shifts, so that the beatings with iron rods, rubber truncheons, and leather whips continued around the clock. Many of the prisoners were laid out in rows on the festering straw, their bones broken, teeth shattered, their eyes swollen shut. Runnels of crusted blood trailed from their nostrils. “There were none whose bodies were not covered from head to toe with blue, yellow and green bruises.” As he walked through the rooms Diels heard no groaning or sobbing, only stony, deathlike silence, as prisoners stared glassy-eyed, waiting for the end or a new round of interrogation. “Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel,” Diels reflected, “had never witnessed such horror.”

  Although Hitler was sympathetic to the radicals, he, too, desired to shift power away from the SA to the Nazi-controlled state apparatus. Unrestrained SA violence not only endangered Germany’s economic recovery, it ran the risk of alienating those members of the public who had initially viewed National Socialism as a force for the restoration of law and order. Speaking to a group of SA leaders on July 6, 1933, Hitler finally declared “The revolution is over.” Revolution, he said, “is not a permanent condition” and “must not be allowed to develop into one. . . . One must guide the liberated stream of revolution into a secure bed of evolution. The education of people is therefore the most important consideration. The current state of affairs must be improved and the people . . . must be educated in the National Socialist conception of the state.” The time had come for indoctrination, not terror in the streets, and that task was the provenance of Goebbels’s new Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. A second revolution to sweep away bourgeois capitalism, as some radicals in the party were demanding, was not possible at this critical juncture. Such social revolutionary impulses had to be tempered by realism and the exigencies of rebuilding a shattered economy. “We must not dismiss a businessman if he is a good businessman,” Hitler insisted, “but not yet a National Socialist; especially not if the National Socialist that we put in his place understands nothing about business.”

  Even a firebrand like Goebbels hewed to the new party line, explaining that “revolutions that drive toward anarchy don’t deserve the name [of revolution]. . . . The regime is keeping a watchful eye on any covert Bolshevist elements who speak of a second revolution.” In an article directed at SA and SS leaders, Rudolf Hess warned against “spies and provocateurs who try to encourage the men to mistreatment of opponents which only leads to more atrocity lies in the foreign press.” Göring also followed the script. Working with Diels, he began a systematic effort to rein in the Prussian SA, disbanding the auxiliary police he had called into being there, and the other states were quick to follow his lead. He also began closing the SA’s prisons and camps, transferring the inmates to formal concentration camps. He was eager to see Röhm’s influence in Prussia sharply reduced.

  The level of public violence did drop in the months following Hitler’s July declaration, and yet the unrest continued. Even in late 1933 when Interior Minister Frick won Hitler’s approval for an edict that made the SA and SS subject to the law, Röhm, Himmler, and the regional party chiefs simply ignored it. In fact, many party officials at the regional level sometimes chose to disregard direct orders, arguing that the Führer had to take certain public stands but that they understood his real intentions. As one regional chief made clear, “we old Nazis don’t give a damn about the remarks of some Nazi bigwig. As far as we are concerned, all we have to do is fulfill the program as the Führer wishes.”

  And Hitler, after his forceful intervention in the conflict in July, again withdrew to the sidelines, leaving his party and state officials to sort out matters. So the internecine struggles for power continued, with different state agencies and party formations jealously fighting to hold and extend their authority. The regime operated in a state of “organized chaos”; its guiding imperative “institutional Darwinism.” In Prussia, for example, the Interior Ministry (Göring) and the Gestapo (Diels) were successful in closing the SA prisons throughout the fall and even pressed charges against SA goons for egregious mistreatment of prisoners. But in Bavaria efforts by the Nazi state authorities to investigate charges of torture in Dachau were thwarted by the SS and SD (Himmler, Heydrich) and the SA (Röhm), who maintained that charges of abuse and torture were fairy tales and, anyway, what right did the Bavarian Interior Ministry have to be snooping around for atrocity stories? Hitler, as usual, did nothing.

  Exacerbating this state of affairs was the fact that no real table of organization or clear chain of command existed, even in key areas such as the economy or the police. At the top, the Third Reich resembled a medieval court, with loyal vassals jostling for Hitler’s favor but acting with surprising independence. Party and state agencies competed to interpret and implement the will of the Führer. Hitler rarely interceded and never committed himself to paper; orders were verbal, notoriously vague, and not infrequently contradictory. At every level of the st
ate and party apparatus officials sought “to work toward the Führer,” but essentially operated on their own. In the general free-for-all for power and influence, personal jealousies were endemic, conflicts of interest ubiquitous, and offices with no clear lines of responsibility multiplied. The result was a highly inefficient polyocracy with multiple centers of power animated by a crude “institutional Darwinism,” where the strongest, most forceful, and most persistent prevailed.

  Nowhere was this dynamic more striking than in the emergence of the SS as the nation’s most powerful political police organization and its transformation into one of the essential pillars of Nazi rule. In the months after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Himmler, chief of both the SS and the Bavarian state police, undertook a systematic campaign to expand his power by seizing control of the political police in one German state after another. He was a trusted member of Hitler’s inner circle, and cowed local officials assumed that he was acting on the Führer’s orders. He was not. Only in Prussia did his ambitions encounter a roadblock, because there another powerful vassal of the Führer, Hermann Göring, was in charge of the police and was not so easily brushed aside. Adding a symptomatic twist to these events, Göring, who had created the Gestapo in Prussia, proceeded to open Gestapo branches in all the German states—a move for which he possessed no legal authority and which lacked Hitler’s explicit authorization. These Gestapo offices were responsible not to Himmler and the SS or to the local police authorities but to Göring alone, and, just as typically Hitler did nothing to clarify the situation. He soared above such problems, leaving contrails of confusion streaming behind him.