The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  These were still minority strands of thought before 1914; nor did anyone weld them together into any kind of effective synthesis. Antisemitism was widespread in German society, but overt violence against Jews was still rare. What changed this situation was the First World War. In August 1914 cheering crowds greeted the outbreak of war on Germany’s main town squares, as they did in other countries too. The Kaiser declared that he recognized no parties any more, only Germans. The spirit of 1914 became a mythical symbol of national unity, just as the image of Bismarck conjured up a mythical nostalgia for a strong and decisive political leader. The military stalemate reached by 1916 led to the German war effort being put in the hands of two generals who had won major victories on the Eastern Front, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. But despite their tight organization of the war effort, Germany was unable to withstand the might of the Americans when they entered the war in 1917, and by early November 1918 the war was lost.

  Defeat in the First World War had a disastrous effect on Germany. The peace terms, though no harsher than those which Germany planned to impose on other countries in the event of victory, were bitterly resented by almost all Germans. They included the demand for massive financial reparations for the damage caused by the German occupation of Belgium and northern France, the destruction of the German navy and air force, the restriction of the German army to 100,000 men and the banning of modern weapons like tanks, the loss of territory to France and above all to Poland. The war also destroyed the international economy, which did not recover for another thirty years. Not only were there huge costs to pay, but the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the creation of new independent states in Eastern Europe fuelled national economic egotism and made international economic co-operation impossible. Germany in particular had paid for the war by printing money in the hope of backing it by annexing industrial areas of France and Belgium. The German economy could not meet the reparations bill without raising taxes, and no German government was willing to do this because it would have meant its opponents would have been able to accuse it of taxing the Germans to pay the French. Inflation was the result. In 1913 the dollar had been worth 4 paper marks; by the end of 1919 it was worth 47; by July 1922, 493, by December 1922, 7,000. Reparations had to be paid in gold and in goods, and at this rate of inflation the Germans were neither willing nor able to manage it. In January 1923 the French and Belgians occupied the Ruhr and began to seize industrial assets and products. The German government announced a policy of non-cooperation. This sparked a decline of the mark’s value against the dollar that was unprecedented in scale. An American dollar cost 353,000 marks in July 1923; in August four and a half million; in October 25,260 million; in December four million million, or four followed by twelve noughts. Economic collapse stared Germany in the face.

  Eventually the inflation was halted. A new currency was introduced; passive resistance to the Franco-Belgian occupation ended; the foreign troops withdrew; reparations payments resumed. The inflation fragmented the middle classes, by pitting one interest group against another, so that no political party was able to unite them. The post-inflation stabilization, retrenchment and rationalization meant massive job losses, both in industry and in the civil service. From 1924 onwards there were millions of unemployed. Business resented the failure of government to help it in this deflationary situation and began to look for alternatives. For the middle classes in general, the inflation meant a moral and cultural disorientation that was only worsened for many by what they saw as the excesses of modern culture in the 1920s, from jazz and cabaret in Berlin to abstract art, atonal music and experimental literature such as the concrete poetry of the Dadaists. This sense of disorientation was present in politics too, as defeat in war had brought about the collapse of the Reich, the flight of the Kaiser into exile, and the creation of the Weimar Republic in the revolution of November 1918. The Weimar Republic had a modern constitution, with female suffrage and proportional representation, but these were not instrumental in its downfall. The real problem of the constitution was the independently elected President, who had wide-ranging emergency powers under article 48 of the constitution to rule by decree. This was already used extensively by the Republic’s first President, the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert. When he died in 1925, his elected successor was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, a staunch monarchist who had no deep commitment to the constitution. In his hands, article 48 would prove fatal to the Republic’s survival.

  The final legacy of the First World War was a cult of violence, not just in the hands of veterans such as the radical right-wing Steel Helmets, but more particularly in the younger generation of men who had not been old enough to fight, and now tried to match the heroic deeds of their elders by fighting on the home front. The war polarized politics, with Communist revolutionaries on the left and various radical groups emerging on the right. The most notorious of these were the Free Corps, armed bands who were used by the government to put down Communist and far-left revolutionary uprisings in Berlin and Munich in the winter of 1918-19. The Free Corps attempted a violent coup d’état in Berlin in the early spring of 1920, which led to an armed left-wing uprising in the Ruhr, while there were further left- and right-wing uprisings in 1923. Even in the relatively stable years from 1924 to 1929, at least 170 members of various political paramilitary squads were killed in street fighting; in the early 1930s the deaths and injuries escalated dramatically, with 300 killed in street and meeting-room clashes in the year from March 1930 to March 1931 alone. Political tolerance had given way to violent extremism. The parties of the liberal centre and moderate left suffered dramatic electoral losses in the mid-1920s, as the spectre of Communist revolution retreated and the middle classes voted for parties further to the right. Those parties that actively supported the Weimar Republic never had a parliamentary majority after 1920. Finally, the Republic’s legitimacy was further undermined by the bias of the judiciary in favour of right-wing assassins and insurgents who claimed patriotism as their motive, and by the neutral stance taken by the army, which became steadily more resentful at the Republic’s failure to persuade the international community to lift the restrictions placed on its numbers and equipment by the Treaty of Versailles. German democracy, hastily improvised in the aftermath of military defeat, was by no means doomed to failure from the start, but the events of the 1920s meant that it never had much of a chance to establish itself on a stable footing.

  II

  There was a huge variety of extremist, antisemitic groups on the far right in 1919, especially in Munich, but by 1923 one of them stood out above the rest: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, led by Adolf Hitler. So much has been written about the power and impact of Hitler and the Nazis that it is important to point out that his party was out on the far margins of politics until the very end of the 1920s. Hitler, in other words, was not a political genius who raised mass support for himself and his party single-handedly. Born in Austria in 1889, he was a failed artist with a Bohemian lifestyle who possessed one great gift: the ability to move crowds with his rhetoric. His party, founded in 1919, was more dynamic, more ruthless and more violent than other extreme-right-wing fringe groups. In 1923 it felt confident enough to try a violent coup d’état in Munich as a prelude to a march on Berlin along the lines of Mussolini’s successful ‘march on Rome’ the previous year. But it failed to win over the army or the forces of political conservatism in Bavaria, and the coup was dissipated in a hail of gunfire. Hitler was convicted and put into Landsberg prison, where he dictated his autobiographical political tract, My Struggle, to his dogsbody Rudolf Hess: not a blueprint for the future, to be sure, but a compendium of Hitler’s ideas, above all antisemitism and the idea of a racial conquest of Eastern Europe, for all who cared to read it.

  By the time he came out of prison, Hitler had assembled the ideology of Nazism from disparate elements of antisemitism, pan-Germanism, eugenics and so-called racial hygiene, geopolitical expansionism, hostility to dem
ocracy, and hostility to cultural modernism, which had been floating around for some time but had not so far been integrated into a coherent whole. He gathered around him a team of immediate subordinates - the talented propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the decisive man of action Hermann Goring and others - who built up his image as leader and reinforced his sense of destiny. But despite all this, and despite the violent activism of his brownshirt paramilitaries on the streets, he got nowhere politically until the very end of the 1920s. In May 1928 the Nazis only won 2.6 per cent of the vote, and a ‘Grand Coalition’ of centrist and leftist parties led by the Social Democrats took office in Berlin. In October 1929, however, the Wall Street crash brought the German economy tumbling down with it. American banks withdrew the loans on which German economic recovery had been financed since 1924. German banks had to call in their loans to German businesses in response, and businesses had no option but to lay off workers or go bankrupt, which indeed many of them did. Within little more than two years more than one German worker in three was unemployed, and millions more were on short-term work or reduced wages. The unemployment insurance system broke down completely, leaving increasing numbers destitute. Agriculture, already under strain because of a fall in world demand, collapsed as well.

  The political effects of the Depression were calamitous. The Grand Coalition broke up in disarray; so deep were the divisions between the parties over how to deal with the crisis that a parliamentary majority could no longer be found for any kind of decisive action. Reich President Hindenburg appointed a cabinet of experts under the Catholic politician Heinrich Brüning, an avowed monarchist. It proceeded to impose savagely deflationary cutbacks, only making the situation worse still. And it did so by using the Presidential power of rule by decree under article 48 of the constitution, bypassing the Reichstag altogether. Political power was diverted from parliament upwards, to the circle around Hindenburg, who could use his power of ruling by decree, and downwards, onto the streets, where violence escalated exponentially, pushed on by Hitler’s brownshirted stormtroopers, now numbering hundreds of thousands. For the thousands of young men who joined the brownshirts, violence quickly became a way of life, almost a drug, as they launched against the Communists and the Social Democrats the fury their elders had vented on the enemy in 1914-18.

  Many brownshirts were without a job in the early 1930s. It was not unemployment, however, that drove people to support the Nazis. The unemployed flocked above all to the Communists, whose vote rose steadily until it reached 17 per cent, giving the party 100 seats in the Reichstag, in November 1932. The Communists’ violent revolutionary rhetoric, promising the destruction of capitalism and the creation of a Soviet Germany, terrified the country’s middle classes, who knew only too well what had happened to their counterparts in Russia after 1918. Appalled at the failure of the government to solve the crisis, and frightened into desperation by the rise of the Communists, they began to leave the squabbling little factions of the conventional political right and gravitate towards the Nazis instead. Other groups followed, including many Protestant small farmers, and manual workers from areas where the culture and traditions of the Social Democrats were weak. While all the middle-class parties collapsed completely, the Social Democrats and the Centre Party managed to restrict their losses. But by 1932 they were all that was left of the moderate centre, squashed helplessly between 100 uniformed Communist and 196 brownshirted deputies in the Reichstag. The polarization of politics could hardly be more dramatic.

  The Nazis, then, as the elections of September 1930 and July 1932 showed, were a catch-all party of social protest with particularly strong middle-class support and relatively weak, though still very significant, working-class backing at the polls. They had broken out of their core constituency of the Protestant lower middle classes and farming community. Other parties, appalled at their losses, tried to beat them at their own game. This had nothing to do with specific policies, much more with the image of dynamism that the Nazis projected. The hated, calamitous Weimar Republic had to be got rid of, and the people united once more in a national community that knew no parties or classes, just as it had been in 1914; Germany had to reassert itself on the international scene and become a leading power again: that was more or less what the Nazis’ programme amounted to. They modified their specific policies according to their audience, playing down their antisemitism where it met with no response, for example, which is to say in most parts of the electorate after 1928. Besides the Nazis and the Communists battling it out on the streets, and the intriguers around President Hindenburg vying for the old man’s ear, a third major player now entered the political game: the army. Increasingly alarmed by the rise of Communism and the growing mayhem on the streets, the army also saw the new political situation as an opportunity to get rid of Weimar democracy and impose an authoritarian, military dictatorship that would repudiate the Treaty of Versailles and rearm the country in preparation for a war of reconquest of Germany’s lost territories, and perhaps more besides.

  The army’s power lay in the fact that it was the only force that could effectively restore order in the shattered country. When President Hindenburg’s re-election in 1932 was achieved only with the help of the Social Democrats, who backed him as a less unacceptable choice than his main rival, Hitler, Chancellor Brüning’s days were numbered. He had failed in almost everything he had undertaken, from solving the economic crisis to restoring order to Germany’s towns and cities, and he had now offended Hindenburg by failing to secure his re-election unopposed and by proposing the break-up of the kind of landed estate Hindenburg himself owned in Eastern Germany to help the destitute peasantry. The army was anxious to get rid of Brüning because his deflationary policies were preventing rearmament. Like many conservative groups it hoped to enlist the Nazis, now the largest political party, as legitimation and support for the destruction of Weimar democracy. In May 1932 Brüning was forced to resign and replaced by the Catholic landed aristocrat Franz von Papen, a personal friend of Hindenburg’s.

  Papen’s advent to power sounded the death-knell of Weimar democracy. He used the army to depose the Social Democratic state government in Prussia and prepared to reform the Weimar constitution by restricting voting rights and drastically curtailing the legislative powers of the Reichstag. He began to ban critical issues of daily newspapers and to restrict civil freedoms. But the elections he called in July 1932 only registered a further increase in the Nazi vote, which now reached 37.4 per cent of the poll. Papen’s attempt to enlist Hitler and the Nazis in support of his government failed when Hitler insisted that he and not Papen had to head the government. Lacking almost any support in the country, Papen was forced to resign when the army lost patience with him and put its own man into office. The new head of government, General Kurt von Schleicher, did no better at restoring order or co-opting the Nazis to give the semblance of popular backing to his policy of creating an authoritarian state. After the Nazis had lost two million votes in the Reichstag elections of November 1932, their evident decline and their obvious lack of funds created a serious division in the Party’s ranks. The Party’s organizer and effective second man after Hitler, Gregor Strasser, resigned from the Party in frustration at Hitler’s refusal to negotiate with Hindenburg and Papen. The moment seemed right to take advantage of the Nazis’ weakness. On 30 January 1933, with the agreement of the army, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as head of a new government in which all the other posts bar two were held by conservatives, with Papen as deputy Chancellor at their head.

  III

  In reality, 30 January 1933 marked the beginning of the Nazi seizure of power, not of a conservative counter-revolution. Hitler had avoided the mistakes he had made ten years previously: he had achieved office without formally destroying the constitution, and with the support of the conservative establishment and the army. The question now was how to convert his position in yet another Weimar coalition cabinet into a dictatorship in a one-party state. First, all he could think of do
ing was to intensify the violence on the streets. He persuaded Papen to appoint Hermann Goring as Prussian Minister of the Interior, and in this capacity Goring promptly enrolled the brownshirts as auxiliary police. They went on the rampage, smashing trade union offices, beating up Communists, and breaking up Social Democratic meetings. On 28 February chance came to the Nazis’ aid: a lone Dutch anarcho-syndicalist, Marinus van der Lubbe, burned down the Reichstag building in protest against the injustices of unemployment. Hitler and Goring persuaded a willing cabinet effectively to suppress the Communist Party. Four thousand Communists including virtually the entire party leadership were immediately arrested, beaten up, tortured and thrown into newly created concentration camps. There was no let-up in the campaign of violence and brutality in the weeks that followed. By the end of March the Prussian police reported that 20,000 Communists were in prison. By the summer over 100,000 Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists and others had been arrested, with even official estimates putting the number of deaths in custody at 600. All of this was sanctioned by an emergency decree signed by Hindenburg the night after the fire suspending civil liberties and allowing the cabinet to take any necessary measures to protect public safety. Van der Lubbe’s lone act was portrayed by Joseph Goebbels, soon to become Reich Propaganda Minister, as the result of a Communist conspiracy to stage an armed uprising. This convinced many middle-class voters that the decree was right.