Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  35. Ibid., 296.

  36. Ibid., 296-97.

  37. John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, enl. ed. prepared by Stephen Kotkin (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), 282-83.

  38. Pohl, Stalinist Penal System, 59.

  39. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 133.

  40. Pohl, Stalinist Penal System, 61, table 31; for slightly lower “minimum” numbers, see Stephen G. Wheatcroft, “The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings,” EAS (1996), 1340, table 7.

  41. See Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 459 n. 131, for the four different kinds of ITK.

  42. Scott, Behind the Urals, 86.

  43. Ibid., 285.

  44. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 134.

  45. Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System,” 1019-20.

  46. Cited in Khlevniuk, “Economy of the Gulag,” 128.

  47. Colton, Moscow, 334, 851 n. 168.

  48. Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag, 328.

  49. Ibid., 329.

  50. See, for example, Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec, eds., Rapports secrets soviétiques, 1921–1991 (Paris, 1994), 224-28.

  51. Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s-1990s (Cambridge, U.K., 1998), 251–53; Nicolas Werth, “A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union,” in Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 214.

  52. Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas, 253.

  53. Ibid., 255-56.

  54. Werth, “State Against Its People,” 214.

  55. Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution (Chicago, 1958), 92-94.

  56. See Werth and Moullec, Rapports secrets soviétiques, 229.

  57. Dmitri Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediya. Politichesky portret J. V. Stalina (Moscow, 1989), vol. 2, part 2, 77.

  CHAPTER 17: “CLEANSING” THE SOVIET ELITE

  1. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 44, 124.

  2. For convenient tables on Party membership, with social and ethnic composition, see Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 212-39.

  3. Cited in J. Arch Getty, The Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 67-68.

  4. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, eds., The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, Conn., 1999), 198. See also doc. 54, table 2, 202.

  5. See doc. 73, in ibid., 250–55.

  6. See, for example, ibid., 261–63.

  7. R. W. Davies et al., eds., The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–1936 (New Haven, Conn., 2003), 324.

  8. See Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky (New York, 1990), 80–81.

  9. See Vadim Z. Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror (Oak Park, Mich., 1998), 103.

  10. Cited in Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 277.

  11. Davies et al., Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 322-38.

  12. Cited in Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York, 2004), 192.

  13. Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer (New York, 1980), 308-14.

  14. Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever (New York, 1977), 19.

  15. Doc. 94, in Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 304-8; for other speeches, see docs. 95-101, in ibid., 309-22.

  16. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), 192.

  17. All cited in Elena Osokina, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927-1941 (New York, 2001), 157.

  18. Vaksberg, Vyshinsky, 95.

  19. Ibid., 96-97.

  20. Cited in Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, 210–11.

  21. Cited in Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York, 1974), 370.

  22. Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, 215.

  23. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, 372.

  24. Cited in Vaksberg, Vyshinsky, 108.

  25. Cited in Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, 380.

  26. Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, 92.

  27. Victor A. Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom (1946; New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), 282.

  28. Rogovin, 1937, 425-47.

  29. Dmitri Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediya. Politichesky portret J. V. Stalina (Moscow, 1989), vol. 1, part 2, 276-77.

  30. Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov (Stanford, Calif., 2002), 70; Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, 225-27.

  31. Cited in Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 78.

  32. Cited in ibid., 84.

  33. For the raion show trials, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (New York, 1994), 310.

  34. March 3 speech, reprinted in McNeal, Stalin sochineniia, vol. 1 (vol. 14), 197, 213-14.

  35. See Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, “Extra-judicial Repression and the Courts: Their Relationship in the 1930s,” in Peter H. Solomon Jr., ed., Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864-1996 (New York, 1997), 214.

  36. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Das Politbüro: Mechanismen der Macht in der Sowjetunion der dreißiger Jahre (Hamburg, 1998), 294-95.

  37. Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, 246-49.

  38. Cited in William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003), 99-100.

  39. See Oleg V. Khlevniuk, “The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937-1938,” David L. Hoffmann, ed., Stalinism: The Essential Readings (Oxford, 2003), 87-104.

  40. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 202-5.

  41. Nicolas Werth, “A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union,” in Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 189.

  42. Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White, The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members, 1917-1991 (Oxford, 2000), 74-76.

  43. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York, 1990), 528.

  44. Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, 176-77.

  45. Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 588, table 5.

  46. Ibid., 592.

  CHAPTER 18: WINNING OVER THE NATION

  1. Cabinet minutes are reprinted in Noakes and Pridham, vol. 1, 127-29; see also Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936; Hubris (London, 1998), 438-39.

  2. See Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer, and Gerhard Schulz, Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung: Studien zur Errichtung des totalitären Herrschaftsystems in Deutschland, 1933-34 (Cologne, 1969), 50–51; Martin Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany (New York, 1987), 149.

  3. Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 1, 191–94.

  4. Ibid., 194-95.

  5. Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power (1944; Boston, 1969), 542.

  6. See Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., “Generalfeldmarschall Werner von Blomberg,” in Gerd R. Ueberschär, ed., Hitlers militärische Elite (Darmstadt, 1998), vol. 1, 28-36; and Bernd Boll, “Generalfeldmarschall Walter von Reichenau,” in ibid., 195-202.

  7. See Hans-Erich Volkmann, “Von Blomberg zu Keitel—Die Wehrmachtführung und die Demontage des Rechtsstaates,” in Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann, eds., Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität (Munich, 1999), 51.

  8. Richard R. Muller, “Werner von Blomberg: Hitlers ‘idealistischer’ Kriegsminister,” in Ronald Smelser and Enrico Syring, eds., Die Militärelite des Dritten Reiches (Berlin, 1995), 53.

  9. Volkmann, “Von Blomberg zu Keitel,” 49.

  10. Cited in IMT, vol. 14, 29-30.

  11. Cited in F. L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics, 1918-193
3 (Berkeley, Calif., 1973), 396.

  12. See Peter Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 1905-1944 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 69.

  13. Klaus-Jürgen Müller, Das Heer und Hitler: Armee und nationalsozialistisches Regime, 1933-1940 (Stuttgart, 1969), 37-46, 63.

  14. Cited in Carsten, Reichswehr and Politics, 394. Full document in Noakes and Pridham, vol. 3, 627-28.

  15. There is a slight variation in the published text of this presentation, recorded in the notes of General Curt Liebmann and the originals, which omits the notion of “continental great power.” The originals are cited in Volkmann, “Von Blomberg zu Keitel,” 52.

  16. Document reprinted in Noakes and Pridham, vol. 3, 628-29. See also Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933-36 (Chicago, 1970), 25-27.

  17. The Hitler speech is reprinted as doc. 203-D, in IMT, vol. 35, 42-48; Krupp’s response is doc. 204-D, in ibid., 48.

  18. Henry Ashby Turner Jr., German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York, 1985), 332.

  19. See Richard Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1994), 132-33.

  20. See Jonathan Petropoulos, Royals and the Reich: The Princes of Hessen in Nazi Germany (New York, 2006), 106; for the list, see 380–89.

  21. Hans Mommsen, Die verspielte Freiheit: Der Weg der Republik von Weimar in den Untergang, 1918 bis 1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 534.

  22. Michael H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1989), 12-15, 59.

  23. Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 1, 208-9.

  24. Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936, 452.

  25. Cited in Bernard P. Bellon, Mercedes in Peace and War: German Automobile Workers, 1903-1945 (New York, 1990), 219.

  26. Overy, War and Economy, 68-89.

  27. Noakes and Pridham, vol. 2, 316-17.

  28. Elke Fröhlich et al., eds., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels (Munich, 1987), vol. 2, 362.

  29. Ibid., 368.

  30. Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers: Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung (Munich, 1969), 91.

  31. RGBL, vol. 1, Feb. 6, 1933, 35-41.

  32. See Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2001), 12.

  33. Michael Schneider, Unterm Hakenkreuz: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung, 1933 bis 1939 (Bonn, 1999), 49, conveys the impression that the “murder” of Socialists and Communists was on the agenda from the outset of the regime but mentions only two instances as of February 5. See Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany, 1925-1934 (New Haven, Conn., 1984), 98, for a case from Breslau on January 31, where the police killed a demonstrator.

  34. Schneider, Unterm Hakenkreuz, 40, 44; Heinrich August Winkler, Weimar, 1918-1933: Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich, 1998), 593-94.

  35. Cited in Mommsen, Verspielte Freiheit, 543.

  36. See, for example, Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen, 1914-1933 (Munich, 2000), 105-6.

  37. Feb. 10, 1933, speech, Berlin, in Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 1, 204-7.

  CHAPTER 19: DICTATORSHIP BY CONSENT

  1. Rudolf Diels, Lucifer ante Portas: …es spricht der erste Chef der Gestapo… (Stuttgart, 1950), 193-94.

  2. RGBL, vol. 1, Feb. 28, 1933, 83.

  3. Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers: Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung (Munich, 1969), 105. See also Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 204-8.

  4. March 6 and 7, 1933, entries, in Elke Fröhlich et al., eds., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels(Munich, 1987), vol. 2, 387-88.

  5. Cited in Broszat, Staat Hitlers, 112.

  6. Cabinet minutes in Noakes and Pridham, vol. 1, 155-56; Franz von Papen, Memoirs (London, 1952), 272-73.

  7. March 20, 1933, entry, in Tagebücher von Goebbels, vol. 2, 395.

  8. Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 1, 229-37.

  9. Ludwig Kaas, cited in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (London, 1998), 467; law reprinted in Noakes and Pridham, vol. 1, 161–62.

  10. Michael Schneider, Unterm Hakenkreuz: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung, 1933 bis 1939 (Bonn, 1999), 72; Papen, Memoirs, 274.

  11. March 24 and April 22, 1933, entries, in Tagebücher von Goebbels, vol. 2, 397, 410.

  12. April 17, 1933, entry, in ibid., 408; see also Schneider, Unterm Hakenkreuz, 74-102.

  13. Noakes and Pridham, vol. 1, 163.

  14. These laws are in RGBL, vol. 1, 479ff.

  15. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1914-1949 vol. 4, (Munich, 2004), 737.

  16. See table 12 in Klaus Drobisch and Günther Wieland, System der NS-Konzentrationslager, 1933-1939 (Berlin, 1993), 73-75.

  17. Martin Broszat, “Nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager,” in Anatomie des SS-Staates, 5th ed. (Munich, 1989), vol. 2, 20. See also Johannes Tuchel, Konzentrationslager: Organizationsgeschichte und Funktion der “Inspektion der Konzentrationslager,” 1934-1938 (Boppard, 1991), 96-103.

  18. See Drobisch and Wieland, System der NS-Konzentrationslager, 71, 100. See also Monika Herzog and Bernhard Strebel, “Das Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück,” in Claus Füllberg-Stolberg et al., eds., Frauen in Konzentrationslagern: Bergen-Belsen Ravensbrück (Bremen, 1994), 13.

  19. Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager (Hamburg, 1999), 25.

  20. Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 1, 364-65.

  21. Tuchel, Konzentrationslager, 308.

  22. Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936, 460.

  23. Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen, 1914-1933 (Munich, 2000), 132-33.

  24. See Michael H. Kater, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 263.

  25. Mathilde Jamin, Zwischen den Klassen: Zur Sozialstruktur der SA-Führerschaft (Wuppertal, 1984), 1–5.

  26. Jill Stephenson, The Nazi Organization of Women (London, 1981), 139, 148.

  27. Adelheid von Saldern, “Victims or Perpetrators? Controversies About the Role of Women in the Nazi State,” in David F. Crew, ed., Nazism and German Society, 1933-1945 (London, 1994), 151. See also Gisela Bock, “Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany: Perpetrators, Victims, Followers, and Bystanders,” in Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven, Conn., 1999), 85-100.

  28. Tim Mason, Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class, ed. Jane Caplan (Cambridge, U.K., 1995), 150.

  29. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, 738.

  30. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich (1941–42), 426.

  31. Richard Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1994), 37-67.

  32. See Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (New York, 2004), 197.

  33. Gabriele Czarnowski, “The Value of Marriage for the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’: Policies Towards Women and Marriage Under National Socialism,” in Richard Bessel, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts (Cambridge, U.K., 1996), 94-112.

  34. Alison Owings, Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993), 119. For the other examples, see 36, 59, 73, 187.

  35. Richard Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932-1938, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, U.K., 1996), 60.

  36. See Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society (Oxford, 1990), 38-39.

  37. Hartmut Mehringer, Widerstand und Emigration: Das NS-Regime und seine Gegner (Munich, 1997), 129-30.

  38. Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann, Nationalsozialismus und Arbeitermilieus: Der nationalsozialistische Angriff auf die proletarischen Wohnquartiere und die Reaktion in den sozialistischen Vereinen (Bonn, 1998), 712. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, 737.

  39. Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebücher, 1933-1941 (Berlin, 1995), 69.

  40. Ute Frevert, Women in German Soc
iety: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (New York, 1989), 168-216.

  41. See Anton Kaes et al., eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), 721–41.

  42. Hans Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart, 1966), 14.

  43. Lothan Gruchmann, Justiz im Dritten Reich, 1933-1940: Anpassung und Unterwerfung in der Ära Gürtner (Munich, 1988), 166.

  44. Ralph Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft, 1919-1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 52.

  45. RGBL, vol. 1, 995-99. Karl-Leo Terhorst, Polizeiliche planmäßige Überwachung und polizeiliche Vorbeugungshaft im Dritten Reich (Heidelberg, 1985), 75ff.

  46. Gruchmann, Justiz im Dritten Reich, 719-21.

  47. RGBL, vol. 1, 995-99.

  48. They fell to 1, 464, in 1935; 946, in 1936; and 765, in 1937; thereafter there was an increase, to 964, in 1938; 1, 827, in 1939; 1, 916, in 1940; and 1, 651, in 1941. See Christian Müller, Das Gewohnheitsverbrechergesetz vom 24. November 1933: Kriminalpolitik als Rassenpolitik (Baden-Baden, 1997), 54.

  49. Between 1934 and 1939, the courts sent 5,142 people to state hospitals; 885 alcoholics to rehabilitation institutes; 7,503 individuals to workhouses; and 1,808 people to be sterilized. Ibid., 53.

  50. Heinz Boberach, ed., Richterbriefe: Dokumente zur Beeinflussung der deutschen Rechtsprechung, 1942-1944 (Boppard, 1975), xi; Hans Peter Bleuel, Sex and Society in Nazi Germany (Philadelphia, 1973), 211.

  51. Hans-Jürgen Eitner, Hitlers Deutsche: Das Ende eines Tabus (Gernsback, 1990), 179.

  52. Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, vol. 1, 286-87.

  53. Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936, 504.

  54. Papen, Memoirs, 309.

  55. For the above, see Peter Longerich, Die braunen Bataillone: Geschichte der SA (Munich, 1989), 206-19; Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936, 505-17.

  56. July 14, 1934, entry, in Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten, 121.

  57. Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany, 1925-1934 (New Haven, Conn., 1984), 139-40; Longerich, Die braunen Bataillone, 227-30; Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Verführung und Gewalt: Deutschland, 1933-1945, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1986), 333.

  58. Sopade (1934), 197.

  59. Sopade (1934), 249-50. For official reports of July, Aug. 2, and Aug. 10, 1934, see Gerd Steinwascher, ed., Gestapo Osnabrück meldet… (Osnabrück, 1995), 77, 80. See, for example, Aug. 8, 1934, in Klaus Mlynek, ed., Gestapo Hannover meldet… (Hildesheim, 1986), 198.