Within forty-eight hours more than one hundred people had been killed. Some estimates run as high as double that number. Some died as a result of mistaken identity, and many victims who had no connection with Röhm or Papen were killed to settle old scores. Gustav Ritter von Kahr, former premier of Bavaria, who had thwarted Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch, was seized by the SS, taken out into a nearby swamp, and hacked to death with axes. His badly mutilated body was discovered days later in a muddy ditch near Dachau. For all the vicious brutality of “The Night of Long Knives,” as the purge came to be called, the violence took place out of public view. For the citizens of Berlin and Munich, life on June 30 and the following day went on as if nothing had happened. Press coverage was minimal, reports vague. When the Nazi press broke the news of Röhm’s alleged plot, its stories trumpeted Hitler’s heroic action in crushing the SA traitors and their co-conspirators in Berlin and elsewhere. A purge of the Brown Shirt leadership was for many Germans a welcome relief. With its swaggering, drunken excesses, violent disrespect for the law, bullying intimidation, and incessant agitation for a second revolution, the SA had few friends by the summer of 1934.
The murders of June 30–July 2 represented only the first act. On July 3, Hitler appeared before the cabinet and offered an extensive report on the events of the previous days. Still enraged, he fulminated against Röhm’s treachery and defended his drastic action by comparing himself to a captain at sea confronted with a mutiny. Under the circumstances, immediate action to crush the mutiny was imperative; a formal trial impossible. He had saved the government and provided would-be troublemakers with a stark example of the kind of swift justice they would receive. This was an emergency act of state, and there would be no subsequent trials. An official communiqué summarizing the cabinet meeting announced that the ministers had granted unanimous approval for a law governing measures for the self-defense of the state. The law, the title of which was virtually as long as the text, consisted of a single article—actually a single sentence. The Law for the Emergency Defense of the State stated simply: “The measures taken to crush the treasonous attacks against the internal and external security of the State on June 30 and July 1 and 2, 1934, are deemed justified and as self-defense of the state.” The brutal murder of defenseless men by the German head of state had been made retroactively legal.
Ten days passed before Hitler made a public appearance. Addressing a nervous Reichstag, twelve of whose members had been murdered, he took full responsibility for all that had occurred, even for measures he had not specifically ordered. He made reference to overwhelming evidence—meetings, plans, contacts, and conversations that pointed to conspiracy, without, however, providing any details or proof. That would have been difficult, because there was no hard evidence of a Putsch, no proof that Röhm or Strasser or Schleicher and the dozens of other victims had been conspiring to overthrow the Nazi state. None was ever forthcoming. Hitler praised the SS for its loyalty and resolute action and went on to reassert his devotion to the SA, which, he said, “has upheld its inner loyalty to me in these days which have been so difficult for both it and myself.” The SA would rebound from this betrayal by its leaders and “will once again dominate German streets and clearly demonstrate to everyone that the life of National Socialist Germany has become all the stronger for having to overcome a difficult crisis.”
While striking a pose of moral rectitude, he boldly confessed responsibility for the bloodbath that had just occurred. Earlier reports had set the number of deaths at seven; now Hitler admitted to seventy-seven. “I gave the order to shoot those . . . mainly responsible for this treason, and I also gave the order to burn out the tumors of our domestic poisoning . . . down to the raw flesh.” Responding to critics, especially from abroad, he stated defiantly that “if anyone reproaches me and asks why we did not call upon the regular courts for sentencing, my only answer is this: in that hour, I was responsible for the fate of the German nation, and was thus the supreme judge of the German people!” And he promised more of the same. “Every person should know for all time that if he raises his hand to strike out at the state, certain death will be his lot. . . . Any nation which does not find the strength to exterminate such pests makes itself guilty.” In the summer of 1934 Hitler had become the prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, roles he would never relinquish. German jurists contorted themselves into knots attempting to justify Hitler’s actions, but there was one fact that could not be obscured: Hitler’s will had become law. The highly respected legal theorist Carl Schmitt pronounced Hitler’s actions the very essence of justice, since “the true Führer is always also the judge. The status of judge flows from the status of the Führer. . . . The Führer’s deed was, in truth, the genuine exercise of justice. It is not subordinate to justice, but rather it is itself supreme justice.”
While international opinion condemned the state-sanctioned murders, labeling Hitler a common thug, a gangster among gangsters, in Germany popular sentiment was clearly with him. The general public celebrated him as a savior, liberating them from the plague of SA viciousness. There was, Viktor Klemperer noted with dismay, “no sympathy at all for the vanquished, only delight.” There were some faint murmurings of dissent. Police reported that among Catholics, news of the death of Catholic leader Klausner had met with an “extremely unfavorable response,” but most were so absorbed with their immediate economic difficulties that no unrest was expected.
Hindenburg received news of the purge with relief, though he could not bring himself to believe that the Schleichers had been killed while “resisting arrest” and ordered an investigation. After a hurried Hitler visit to Neudeck, Hindenburg sent him a telegram on July 2, commending him for “your own determined action and your brave personal intervention. You have rescued the German Volk from a serious threat. For this may I extend to you my deeply felt gratitude and my sincere appreciation.” A similar telegram went to Göring. The army leadership was also delighted with the elimination of Röhm and chose to overlook the murders of Generals Schleicher and Bredow, issuing a statement to the troops pledging the army’s unstinting support for the Führer. The killings were still under way when Blomberg on July 1 praised Hitler for his “soldierly determination and exemplary courage” in smashing the treasonous plot of “the traitors and mutineers.” Hitler, for a change, had been true to his word; he had eliminated the threat of the SA and solidified the army’s power position in the Third Reich.
Along with the army, business leaders were also pleased that Hitler had struck down the social revolutionaries in the party, but the big winner of the Night of Long Knives was the SS. On July 20 Hitler ended its formal subordination to the much larger SA and elevated the SS to a position of independence, responsible only to him. Overnight Himmler’s black-uniformed SS stepped from the shadow of the Storm Troopers to become the dominant force in the dictatorship. The team of Himmler and Heydrich was now in charge of virtually all police power in the state, and that power would only grow. In the following years the SS emerged as the regime’s all-powerful instrument of terror and repression; it would also develop into the party’s ideological elite, becoming a key player in the articulation and realization of Nazi ideology.
As for the SA, its power was broken. The organization that had played such a crucial role in the Nazi drive to power before 1933 and in the establishment of the Hitler dictatorship would no longer constitute a major power factor in the Third Reich. Twenty percent of its leadership was purged in the aftermath of the “Röhm Putsch,” many lower-level commanders were dismissed, and by year’s end the SA had lost 40 percent of its troops. It still played a highly visible role in Nazi ceremonial events—the endless parades, the anniversary celebrations of the 1923 Putsch, the Führer’s birthday, the Nuremberg party rallies—wherever an imposing mass presence was required for a display of Nazi power. It also continued to play a very active role in the regime’s relentless persecution of the Jews, harassing, threatening, bullying, and beating Jews in indepen
dent local actions that required no authorization from above. But after June 1934 its influence as an instrument of Nazi policy steadily dwindled.
While the country was still absorbing the news of Hitler’s ruthless purge of the SA, Hindenburg’s condition continued to deteriorate, and on August 2 he died quietly at his estate in East Prussia. On the day before, with the old field marshal lying on his deathbed, Hitler introduced a new law stipulating that on the death of Hindenburg, the offices of Reich President and chancellor would be merged, a move that was in clear violation of the Enabling Act, a technicality of interest at this point to virtually no one. Hitler’s assumption of the position of Reich President also made him commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Without consulting him, General Blomberg and General Walter von Reichenau, like Blomberg a Nazi sympathizer, drafted an oath of unconditional loyalty not to the office of the president or to the constitution or to the German nation but to the person of Adolf Hitler. On August 2, in ceremonies held on all military installations, members of the armed forces swore their fealty to the Führer: “I swear by God this sacred oath to render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and Volk, Adolf Hitler, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and to be willing at all times to risk my life as a brave soldier for this oath.”
Hindenburg was laid to rest in a state funeral at the imposing Tannenberg Memorial in East Prussia, site of the field marshal’s greatest victory of the World War. And with his burial, the basic structure of the Third Reich fell firmly into place, its domestic position secure.
Within a stunningly short period of time a dysfunctional democratic state had been dismantled, sources of organized opposition crushed or neutralized, and a dictatorial regime with totalitarian aspirations erected. But the Nazis were not content to monopolize the instruments of state power. Theirs was a far more ambitious goal.
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THE PEOPLE’S COMMUNITY
While the systematic Gleichschaltung of the nation’s political institutions was unfolding, another process, simultaneous and sinister, was under way in the everyday life of the Third Reich. The regime’s goal, stated openly and acted upon with unflagging zeal, was nothing less than a complete transformation of German politics, culture, and society, coordinating not only governmental institutions but the media, the churches, schools, social clubs, youth organizations, athletic leagues, and cultural institutions of all sorts. The regime sought to mobilize all elements of society, creating National Socialist organizations for women, girls, boys, teachers, students, lawyers, physicians, craftsmen, workers, each with its own uniform, flag, party badges, and slogans (“Barbers, too, Face Great Tasks!”). No one in the “people’s community” was overlooked, and no one could stand outside. Everyone was called on not simply to obey but to believe, to participate.
Hitler had offered a preview of his vision for the Third Reich in his Reichstag speech on March 23, 1933. In pressing for the passage of the Enabling Act, he explained that along with the “political purification of our public life, the Reich Government intends to undertake a thorough moral purging of the body of the people [Volkskörper]. The entire system of education, the theater, the cinema, literature, the press, and radio—they will be used as a means to this end and valued accordingly. They must all work to preserve the eternal values residing in the essential character of our people.” Art, in all its forms, was of crucial importance in this endeavor. Art “will always remain the expression and mirror of the yearning and the reality of an era. The cosmopolitan contemplative attitude is rapidly disappearing. Heroism is arising passionately as the future shaper and leader of political destinies. The task of art is to give expression to this determining spirit of the age. Blood and Race will once more become the source of artistic intuition.”
Many found it striking that in making a speech that would establish the legal foundation of the Third Reich Hitler chose to address the role of art, but over the next six years of peace Hitler repeatedly emphasized art’s crucial mission in constructing a new National Socialist society. In fact, no other government in the interwar years was more obsessed with art and culture than the Nazi regime. In an “Address on Art and Politics” delivered at the 1935 Nuremberg party rally, Hitler remarked proudly that “at some future date people will be astonished to find that at the very time when National Socialism and its leaders were fighting to finish a heroic struggle for existence—a life and death struggle—the first impulses were given towards a revival and resurrection of German art.” For the Nazis, art was power; it defined the National Socialist vision of the future, and the Nazis were determined to extract the maximum value from it.
The vibrant, edgy cultural flourishing of the Weimar era, the Nazis were convinced, was a force to be reckoned with. For Hitler and the Nazis, everything that emerged in German cultural life after the revolution of 1918—experimental art, jazz and atonal music, literary and architectural modernism, avant-garde theater, and Expressionist film, most of which had their origins in the prewar Empire—was corrupt, degenerate, and foreign. The Nazis reviled it as “cultural Bolshevism,” a creation of leftists and Jews that had saturated the country with a spirit fundamentally alien to the German people. The eruption of artistic innovation that had made Berlin an exciting international center of postwar culture was responsible not only for degenerate art but for the collapse of all notions of traditional morality and taste. Everywhere they turned the Nazis found ample evidence of the nation’s slide into decadence and decay—rampant sexual promiscuity and perversion—on the stage, in film, in countless nightclubs and cabarets, in prostitution, homosexuality, and the open flouting of traditional mores.
The purification commenced immediately. In the spring of 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service led to the immediate dismissal of all “non-Aryans” from state-subsidized theaters, orchestras, museums, schools, and research institutions. Jews, at whom the law was aimed, were immediately purged, but even those artists and teachers not directly affected by the Civil Service Law felt the prevailing chill. Many cultural institutions did not wait for the regime to institute changes; they rushed to “coordinate” themselves, voluntarily expelling anyone the Nazis might consider politically undesirable. Newspaper chiefs and magazine editors, reporters, illustrators, musicians, actors, critics, even librarians were sacked. Ufa, the largest studio in the German motion picture industry, dismissed Jews and other politically undesirable actors, directors, film editors, cameramen, screenwriters, stage managers, and others. Innovative stage directors Erwin Piscator and Max Reinhardt, filmmakers Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder, all emigrated. Wilder was Jewish, and Lang, whose films both Hitler and Goebbels admired, had a Jewish mother. He had to go.
The paintings of modernist artists Otto Dix, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Gerhard Marcks, Oscar Kokoschka, Käthe Kollwitz, and dozens of others gradually disappeared from galleries. The works of Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Arnold Zweig, Franz Werfel, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and many others tainted with “alien Jewish views” vanished from bookshops and library shelves, and publishers quickly dropped them from their lists. By the close of 1934, some four thousand works had been banned in that year alone. The modernist music of composers Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, and Arnold Schönberg disappeared from the repertoires of the country’s orchestras; and famed Jewish conductors Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Erich Kleiber were dismissed from their positions and fled the country. The music of Jewish classical composers Mendelssohn, Mahler, Meyerbeer, and Offenbach was no longer performed, and works with Jewish associations such as Handel’s Old Testament oratorios underwent title changes. The Nazis even insisted that Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Le Nozze di Figaro, and Cosi fan tutte be translated into German because Mozart’s Italian librettist was of Jewish origin.
An exodus of actors, authors, musicians, and painters, most of them Jewish, began and gathered mom
entum. The Prussian Academy of Letters purged novelist Heinrich Mann (a well-known anti-Nazi), and his brother Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, Germany’s most distinguished literary figure, resigned and emigrated, as did playwrights Georg Kaiser, Carl Zuckmayer, and Bertolt Brecht. After the absorption of Austria in 1938, they were joined, among others, by Jewish novelists Hermann Broch, Joseph Roth, and Arnold Zweig.
Most artists and writers, however, chose to stay; they adapted and continued their careers. Popular novelists Hans Fallada and Erich Kästner continued to write, but produced innocuous, politically safe work. Ernst Barlach went on sculpting but was prohibited from exhibiting his work. Some who stayed were forbidden to write or paint at all. Others flourished. The aged Nobel laureate Gerhart Hauptmann, musicians Wilhelm Furtwängler and Richard Strauss, popular actors Emil Jannings, Werner Kraus, and actress/filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, to name only a few, easily adjusted to the new regime. Even leading lights of the modern dance movement such as Rudolf von Laban accommodated themselves to the new rulers. “Dance,” as Fritz Böhme, Germany’s most influential dance critic, put it, “is a racial question. There is no international, trans-racial form of dance.”
Inspired by the Nazis, some gallery directors began mounting special exhibitions of “degenerate art” under such titles as “Chamber of Art Horrors” and “Images of Cultural Bolshevism” or “The Spirit of November: Art in the Service of Decay.” By the mid-1930s, exhibitions of this type had been mounted in sixteen different cities. In 1936 Goebbels received Hitler’s backing to confiscate examples of forbidden art from German museums and galleries, which he intended to display in a show of “German Degenerate Art Since 1910.” He dispatched a small team headed by the artist Adolf Ziegler, a Nazi favorite, to scour the museums for representative artworks from the Weimar period. By fall 1937 more than five thousand paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures had been seized. The confiscations would continue into 1939, by which time the team had seized seventeen thousand pieces of forbidden art.
The Third Reich Page 37
