The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  Wilhelm Keppler, one of Hitler’s economic advisers, brought in a number of South German industrialists and also formed a peculiar society of businessmen devoted to the S.S. chief, Himmler, called the Circle of Friends of the Economy (Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft), which later became known as the Circle of Friends of the Reichsfuehrer S.S., who was Himmler, and which raised millions of marks for this particular gangster to pursue his “researches” into Aryan origins. From the very beginning of his political career Hitler had been helped financially—and socially—by Hugo Bruckman, the wealthy Munich publisher, and by Carl Bechstein, the piano manufacturer, both of whose wives developed a touching fondness for the rising young Nazi leader. It was in the Bechstein mansion in Berlin that Hitler first met many of the business and Army leaders and it was there that some of the decisive secret meetings took place which led him finally to the chancellorship.

  Not all German businessmen jumped on the Hitler bandwagon after the Nazi election showing in 1930. Funk mentions that the big electric corporations Siemens and A.E.G. stood aloof, as did the king of the munition makers, Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. Fritz Thyssen in his confessions declares that Krupp was a “violent opponent” of Hitler and that as late as the day before Hindenburg appointed him Chancellor Krupp urgently warned the old Field Marshal against such a folly. However, Krupp soon saw the light and quickly became, in the words of the repentant Thyssen, “a super Nazi.”15

  It is obvious, then, that in his final drive for power Hitler had considerable financial backing from a fairly large chunk of the German business world. How much the bankers and businessmen actually contributed to the Nazi Party in those last three years before January 1933 has never been established. Funk says it probably amounted to no more than “a couple of million marks.” Thyssen estimates it at two millions a year; he says he himself personally gave one million marks. But judged by the large sums which the party had at its disposal in those days, though Goebbels complained it was never enough, the total gifts from business were certainly larger than these estimates by many times. What good they eventually did these politically childish men of the business world will be seen later in this narrative. One of the most enthusiastic of them at this time—as he was one of the most bitterly disillusioned of them afterward—was Dr. Schacht, who resigned his presidency of the Reichsbank in 1930 because of his opposition to the Young Plan, met Goering in that year and Hitler in 1931 and for the next two years devoted all of his considerable abilities to bringing the Fuehrer closer to his banker and industrialist friends and ever closer to the great goal of the Chancellor’s seat. By 1932 this economic wizard, whose responsibility for the coming of the Third Reich and for its early successes proved to be so immeasurably great, was writing Hitler: “I have no doubt that the present development of things can only lead to your becoming Chancellor … Your movement is carried internally by so strong a truth and necessity that victory cannot elude you long … No matter where my work may take me in the near future, even if someday you should see me imprisoned in a fortress, you can always count on me as your loyal supporter.” One of the two letters from which these words are taken was signed: “With a vigorous ‘Heil.’”16

  One “so strong a truth” of the Nazi movement, which Hitler had never made any secret of, was that if the party ever took over Germany it would stamp out a German’s personal freedom, including that of Dr. Schacht and his business friends. It would be some time before the genial Reichsbank president, as he would again become under Hitler, and his associates in industry and finance would wake up to this. And since this history, like all history, is full of sublime irony, it would not be too long a time before Dr. Schacht proved himself to be a good prophet not only about Hitler’s chancellorship but about the Fuehrer’s seeing him imprisoned, if not in a fortress then in a concentration camp, which was worse, and not as Hitler’s “loyal supporter”—here he was wrong—but in an opposite capacity.

  Hitler had now, by the start of 1931, gathered around him in the party the little band of fanatical, ruthless men who would help him in his final drive to power and who, with one exception, would be at his side to help him sustain that power during the years of the Third Reich, though another of them, who was closest of all to him and perhaps the ablest and most brutish of the lot, would not survive, even with his life, the second year of Nazi government. There were five who stood above the other followers at this time. These were Gregor Strasser, Roehm, Goering, Goebbels and Frick.

  Goering had returned to Germany at the end of 1927, following a general political amnesty which the. Communists had helped the parties of the Right put through the Reichstag. In Sweden, where he had spent most of his exile since the 1923 putsch, he had been cured of addiction to narcotics at the Langbro Asylum and when he was well had earned his living with a Swedish aircraft company. The dashing, handsome World War ace had now grown corpulent but had lost none of his energy or his zest for life. He settled down in a small but luxurious bachelor’s flat in the Badischestrasse in Berlin (his epileptic wife, whom he deeply loved, had contracted tuberculosis and remained, an invalid, in Sweden), earned his living as adviser to aircraft companies and the German airline, Lufthansa, and cultivated his social contacts. These contacts were considerable and ranged from the former Crown Prince and Prince Philip of Hesse, who had married Princess Mafalda, the daughter of the King of Italy, to Fritz Thyssen and other barons of the business world, as well as to a number of prominent officers of the Army.

  These were the very connections which Hitler lacked but needed, and Goering soon became active in introducing the Nazi leader to his friends and in counteracting in upper-class circles the bad odor which some of the Brownshirt ruffians exuded. In 1928 Hitler chose Goering as one of the twelve Nazi deputies to represent the party in the Reichstag, of which he became President when the Nazis became the largest party in 1932. It was in the official residence of the Reichstag President that many of the meetings were held and intrigues hatched which led to the party’s ultimate triumph, and it was here—to jump ahead in time a little—that a plan was connived that helped Hitler to stay in power after he became Chancellor: to set the Reichstag on fire.

  Emst Roehm had broken with Hitler in 1925 and not long afterward gone off to join the Bolivian Army as a lieutenant colonel. Toward the end of 1930 Hitler appealed to him to return and take over again the leadership of the S.A., which was getting out of hand. Its members, even its leaders, apparently believed in a coming Nazi revolution by violence, and with increasing frequency they were taking to the streets to molest and murder their political opponents. No election, national, provincial or municipal, took place without savage battles in the gutters.

  Passing notice must here be taken of one of these encounters, for it provided National Socialism with its greatest martyr. One of the neighborhood leaders of the S.A. in Berlin was Horst Wessel, son of a Protestant chaplain, who had forsaken his family and his studies and gone to live in a slum with a former prostitute and devote his life to fighting for Nazism. Many anti-Nazis always held that the youth earned his living as a pimp, though this charge may have been exaggerated. Certainly he consorted with pimps and prostitutes. He was murdered by some Communists in February 1930 and would have passed into oblivion along with hundreds of other victims of both sides in the street wars had it not been for the fact that he left behind a song whose words and tune he had composed. This was the Horst Wessel song, which soon became the official song of the Nazi party and later the second official anthem—after “Deutschland ueber Alles”—of the Third Reich. Horst Wessel himself, thanks to Dr. Goebbels’ skillful propaganda, became one of the great hero legends of the movement, hailed as a pure idealist who had given his life for the cause.

  At the time Roehm took over the S.A., Gregor Strasser was undoubtedly the Number Two man in the Nazi Party. A forceful speaker and a brilliant organizer, he was the head of the party’s most important office, the Political Organization, a post which gave him great influence among the pr
ovincial and local leaders whose labors he supervised. With his genial Bavarian nature, he was the most popular leader in the party next to Hitler, and, unlike the Fuehrer he enjoyed the personal trust and even liking of most of his political opponents. There were a good many at that time, within and without the party, who believed that Strasser might well supplant the moody, incalculable Austrian leader. This view was especially strong in the Reichswehr and in the President’s Palace.

  Otto, Gregor Strasser’s brother, had fallen by the wayside. Unfortunately for him, he had taken seriously not only the word “socialist” but the word “workers” in the party’s official name of National Socialist German Workers’ Party. He had supported certain strikes of the socialist trade unions and demanded that the party come out for nationalization of industry. This of course was heresy to Hitler, who accused Otto Strasser of professing the cardinal sins of “democracy and liberalism.” On May 21 and 22, 1930, the Fuehrer had a showdown with his rebellious subordinate and demanded complete submission. When Otto refused, he was booted out of the party. He tried to form a truly national “socialist” movement, the Union of Revolutionary National Socialists, which became known only as the Black Front, but in the September elections it failed completely to win any sizable number of Nazi votes away from Hitler.

  Goebbels, the fourth member of the Big Five around Hitler, had remained an enemy and rival of Gregor Strasser ever since their break in 1926. Two years after that he had succeeded Strasser as propaganda chief of the party when the latter was moved up to head the Political Organization. He had remained as Gauleiter of Berlin, and his achievements in reorganizing the party there as well as his talents for propaganda had favorably impressed the Fuehrer. His glib but biting tongue and his nimble mind had not endeared him to Hitler’s other chief lieutenants, who distrusted him. But the Nazi leader was quite content to see strife among his principal subordinates, if only because it was a safeguard against their conspiring together against his leadership. He never fully trusted Strasser, but in the loyalty of Goebbels he had complete confidence; moreover, the lame little fanatic was bubbling with ideas which were useful to him. Finally, Goebbels’ talents as a rowdy journalist—he now had a Berlin newspaper of his own, Der Angriff, to spout off in—and as a rabble-rousing orator were invaluable to the party.

  Wilhelm Frick, the fifth and last member of the group, was the only colorless personality in it. He was a typical German civil servant. As a young police officer in Munich before 1923 he had served as one of Hitler’s spies at police headquarters, and the Fuehrer always felt grateful to him. Often he had taken on the thankless tasks. On Hitler’s instigation he had become the first Nazi to hold provincial office—in Thuringia—and later he became the leader of the Nazi Party in the Reichstag. He was doggedly loyal, efficient and, because of the façade of his retiring nature and suave manners, useful in contacts with wavering officials in the republican government.

  Some of the lesser men in the party in the early Thirties would subsequently gain notoriety and frightening personal power in the Third Reich. Heinrich Himmler, the poultry farmer, who, with his pince-nez, might be mistaken for a mild, mediocre schoolmaster—he had a degree in agronomy from the Munich Technische Hochschule—was gradually building up Hitler’s praetorian guard, the black-coated S.S. But he worked under the shadow of Roehm, who was commander of both the S.A. and the S.S., and he was little known, even in party circles, outside his native Bavaria. There was Dr. Robert Ley, a chemist by profession and a habitual drunkard, who was the Gauleiter of Cologne, and Hans Frank, the bright young lawyer and leader of the party’s legal division. There was Walther Darré, born in 1895 in the Argentine, an able agronomist who was won over to National Socialism by Hess and whose book The Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race brought him to Hitler’s attention and to a job as head of the Agricultural Department of the party. Rudolf Hess himself, personally unambitious and doggedly loyal to the Leader, held only the title of private secretary to the Fuehrer. The second private secretary was one Martin Bormann, a molelike man who preferred to burrow in the dark recesses of party life to further his intrigues and who once had served a year in prison for complicity in a political murder. The Reich Youth Leader was Baldur von Schirach, a romantically minded young man and an energetic organizer, whose mother was an American and whose great-grandfather, a Union officer, had lost a leg at Bull Run; he told his American jailers at Nuremberg that he had become an anti-Semite at the age of seventeen after reading a book called Eternal Jew, by Henry Ford.

  There was also Alfred Rosenberg, the ponderous, dim-witted Baltic pseudo philosopher who, as we have seen, was one of Hitler’s earliest mentors and who since the putsch of 1923 had poured out a stream of books and pamphlets of the most muddled content and style, culminating in a 700-page work entitled The Myth of the Twentieth Century. This was a ludicrous concoction of his half-baked ideas on Nordic supremity palmed off as the fruit of what passed for erudition in Nazi circles—a book which Hitler often said jokingly he had tried unsuccessfully to read and which prompted Schirach, who fancied himself as a writer, to remark once that Rosenberg was “a man who sold more copies of a book no one ever read than any other author,” for in the first ten years after its publication in 1930 it sold more than half a million copies. From the beginning to the end Hitler always had a warm spot in his heart for this dull, stupid, fumbling man, rewarding him with various party jobs such as editor of the Voelkischer Beobachter and other Nazi publications and naming him as one of the party’s deputies in the Reichstag in 1930, where he represented the movement in the Foreign Affairs Committee.

  Such was the conglomeration of men around the leader of the National Socialists. In a normal society they surely would have stood out as a grotesque assortment of misfits. But in the last chaotic days of the Republic they began to appear to millions of befuddled Germans as saviors. And they had two advantages over their opponents: They were led by a man who knew exactly what he wanted and they were ruthless enough, and opportunist enough, to go to any lengths to help him get it.

  As the year of 1931 ran its uneasy course, with five million wage earners out of work, the middle classes facing ruin, the farmers unable to meet their mortgage payments, the Parliament paralyzed, the government floundering, the eighty-four-year-old President fast sinking into the befuddlement of senility, a confidence mounted in the breasts of the Nazi chieftains that they would not have long to wait. As Gregor Strasser publicly boasted, “All that serves to precipitate the catastrophe … is good, very good for us and our German revolution.”

  * Michael was finally published in 1929, after Goebbels had become nationally known as a Nazi leader. The Wanderer reached the stage after Goebbels became Propaganda Minister and the boss of the German theater. It had a short run.

  * These early diaries, unearthed by Allied intelligence agents after the war, are a rich source of information for this period of Goebbels life.

  * Later he bought it and, after becoming Chancellor, rebuilt it on a vast and lavish scale, changing the name from Haus Wachenfeld to Berghof.

  * Painted after her death by Adolf Ziegler, Hitler’s favorite painter.

  * The italics in this declaration are Hitler’s.

  * Both of whom would end their lives on the gallows, Sack for his part in the conspiracy against Hitler on July 20, 1944, and Frank for what he did on behalf of Hitler in Poland.

  * Lieutenant Scheringer, embittered by what he considered Hitler’s betrayal, renounced the Nazi Party while in prison and became a fanatical Communist. He was marked—as were so many who crossed Hitler—for liquidation in the June 30, 1934, purge, but somehow escaped and lived to see the end of Hitler. Lieutenant Ludin remained an enthusiastic Nazi, was elected to the Reichstag in 1932, became a high officer in the S.A. and the S.S., and served as German minister to the puppet state of Slovakia, where he was arrested at the time of the liberation and executed by the Czechoslovaks.

  6

  THE LAST DAYS OF T
HE REPUBLIC: 1931–33

  OUT OF THE TURMOIL and chaos of German life there now emerged a curious and devious figure who, more than any other single individual, was destined to dig the grave of the Republic—one who would serve briefly as its last Chancellor and, ironically, in one of the final twists of his astonishing career desperately try to save it, when it was too late. This was Kurt von Schleicher, whose name in German means “intriguer” or “sneak.”

  In 1931 he was a lieutenant general in the Army.* Born in 1882, he had entered military service at eighteen as a subaltern in Hindenburg’s old regiment, the 3rd Foot Guards, where he became a close friend of Oskar von Hindenburg, the son of the Field Marshal and President. His second friendship proved almost as valuable. This was with General Groener, who was impressed by his brilliance as a student at the War Academy, and who, when he replaced Ludendorff at Supreme Headquarters in 1918, brought along the young officer as his adjutant. Primarily a “desk officer”—he had seen but a short period of service on the Russian front—Schleicher remained thereafter close to the sources of power in the Army and in the Weimar Republic, where his nimble mind, affable manners and flair for politics impressed both the generals and the politicians. Under General von Seeckt he played an increasingly important role in helping to organize the illegal free corps and the equally illegal and highly secret “Black Reichswehr,” and he was a key figure in the confidential negotiations with Moscow which led to the camouflaged training of German tank and air officers in Soviet Russia and in the establishment of German-run arms factories there. A gifted manipulator, with a passion for intrigue, Schleicher worked best under cover in the dark. Until the beginning of the Thirties his name was unknown to the general public, but for some time previously it had been attracting increasing notice in the Bendlerstrasse, where the War Ministry was, and in the Wilhelmstrasse, where the government ministries were situated.