Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

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  “Attack on Marxism” was the chief slogan Hitler chose for the approaching election.21 “This time it’s a matter of cut and thrust,” noted Goebbels, who went through all aspects of the campaign with Hitler on 3 February.22 From the very beginning, the vote did not take place under fair circumstances. On 4 February, Hindenburg issued a Decree for the Protection of the German People that allowed the government to curtail the right to free speech and free assembly and subjected the two left-wing parties, the SPD and the KPD, to massive restrictions.23 Moreover, unlike before 1933, the NSDAP now had direct access to the airwaves. Goebbels and Hitler agreed on a division of labour: “Hitler will speak on all radio stations, and I’ll do the accompanying reports.”24

  On 10 February the National Socialists kicked off the campaign with an event in Berlin’s Sportpalast. “Entirely alone, serious and measured, cordially greeting people, the Führer, Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, the leader of young Germany, is striding through the masses!” Goebbels announced at the start of his radio report. “One month ago, he spoke here in the Sportpalast as the head of a scorned, defamed and ridiculed opposition party. Now we can say: what a turnabout in Divine Providence.”25 The next day Goebbels noted with satisfaction in his diary that his twenty-minute report had gone swimmingly, and that he had not felt any stage fright at all.26 As was his wont, Hitler began his speech at a markedly leisurely, almost hesitant pace, only to whip himself into an oratorical frenzy. His words about his government policies were astonishingly general. Hitler repeated his attacks on the “political parties of disintegration,” which had brought Germany to its knees in the preceding fourteen years, confirmed his intention to “root out Marxism and related phenomena in Germany,” promised to replace “lazy democracy” with “the virtue of personality and the creative power of the individual” and asked for “four years” to bring about the “renewal of the nation.” He closed with an echo of the Lord’s Prayer: “I unwaveringly maintain the conviction that the hour will come in which the millions who now hate us will stand behind us and greet the German Reich of greatness, majesty and justice that we will jointly create, tenaciously deserve and obtain through great sacrifice. Amen.”27

  Goebbels gushed: “Lots of pathos at the end. ‘Amen!” That’s really powerful. It works. All of Germany will be beside itself.”28 Not only Hitler’s admirers were impressed. Even a critical mind like the Leipzig writer Erich Ebermayer, son of Chief Reich Prosecutor Ludwig Ebermayer, noted after listening to the speech on the radio: “The man is obviously growing into the job. What an instrument radio is for mass propaganda! And how few of Hitler’s rivals know how to use it at all! Did radio not exist before 30 January? Incomprehensible!”29

  The National Socialists did not only use radio. They also sought to co-opt Hindenburg’s aura for their own propaganda. One of their campaign posters showed Hitler, the anonymous First World War soldier, and the former field marshal standing shoulder to shoulder. The caption read: “The marshal and the private fight with us for peace and equal treatment.” Another poster featuring Hitler’s and Hindenburg’s heads appealed to voters: “Never will the Reich be destroyed if you stick together and stay true.”30 The DNVP concluded an electoral alliance with the Stahlhelm and other conservative-nationalist groups called the “Battle Front Black, White and Red.” At Hugenberg’s request, Papen ran as their lead candidate in order to, as he wrote, “serve the common cause and to call, side by side with the National Socialists, for participation from all forces who want to renew our German fatherland under the leadership of Field Marshal von Hindenburg in faith, justice and unity.”31 The “Battle Front” too sought to exploit Hindenburg’s mythic status by playing up Papen’s connection to the Reich president. “If Hindenburg trusts him, so can Germany,” read one campaign poster featuring images of both men. “Vote for his close associate, Vice-Chancellor von Papen.”32

  But Hitler and the NSDAP profited more than their conservative coalition partners from popular regard for the former field marshal, and they raked in election donations. At the beginning of the campaign, Goebbels had complained about empty party coffers. That changed on 20 February, when Göring hosted a reception for twenty-seven leading industrialists, including the president of the Reich Association of German Industry, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, United Steelworks General Director Albert Vögler, IG Farben board member Georg von Schnitzler and Hoesch chairman of the board Fritz Springorum. Hitler, who spoke for an hour and a half, once again reaffirmed his belief in private property, denied rumours that he was planning any wild economic experiments and stressed that “only the NSDAP offers salvation from the Communist danger.” Fresh elections had been called, Hitler declared, to “allow the people to be heard once more.” And with rare frankness, he revealed the hollowness of his insistence upon remaining within the boundaries of the law. “He was no friend of illegal measures,” one of the industrialists recorded Hitler saying. “But he would not allow himself to be forced from power even if he could not reach his goal of an absolute majority.” Once Hitler had left, Göring declared without further ado that the “coffers of the party, the SS and the SA were empty” and that the business sector would have to bear the costs of the election, “which would be the last one for the foreseeable future.” After Göring, too, had withdrawn from the meeting, Hjalmar Schacht spoke up to present those in attendance with a bill for the campaign: 3 million reichsmarks were to be raised, of which three quarters would go to the NSDAP and one quarter to the “Battle Front Black, White and Red.”33 A satisfied Goebbels noted on 21 February: “Göring just brought the news that the 3 million for the election are there. Great stuff! I alerted the entire propaganda division, and one hour later the machines were rattling away. Our campaign is on.”34

  In his capacity as acting Prussian interior minister, Göring had already begun to “cleanse” the Prussian police and administration of the few remaining democrats who had survived Papen’s coup of 20 July 1932. Fourteen police presidents in Prussian cities as well as numerous other senior municipal officers were sent into retirement in February 1933 alone. “Göring is cleaning house,” Goebbels declared on 16 February. “We are gradually enmeshing ourselves in governmental administration.”35 The following day, Prussian police departments were instructed to “support the national propaganda with all their might, combat the activities of organisations hostile to the state with the most severe means and, if necessary, to have no qualms about using firearms.” To be perfectly clear, Göring added: “Police officers who use their weapons in the performance of their duties will be covered by me regardless of the consequences. Conversely, those who hesitate to do their duty will suffer disciplinary action.”36 This “fire-at-will decree” was in effect a licence to kill, as Count Harry Kessler recognised: “From now on all of us who do not stand on the so-called ‘national’ ground, i.e. who are not Nazis, can be killed with impunity.”37

  On 22 February, Göring also ordered the creation of an auxiliary police force consisting of members of the “national associations”—the SS, the SA and the Stahlhelm—ostensibly for the purpose of combating “increasing unrest from radical left-wing and especially Communist quarters.”38 With that the Brownshirts were finally given the opportunity they had long coveted to settle the score with their hated left-wing adversaries. The following weeks were marked by attacks on election events, arbitrary detentions, physical abuse and murders. The police did nothing to prevent the SA from terrorising people. Social Democrats were mistreated, but Communists got the worst of it. As of early February, it became practically impossible for them to assemble in public, and almost without exception, Communist newspapers were banned. On 23 February, police carried out a large-scale raid on Karl Liebknecht House, the KPD’s headquarters, confiscating, as was extensively reported in the papers and on radio the following day, many tons of “highly seditious material” allegedly calling for the government to be overthrown.39 Fears of an imminent armed KPD uprising were encoura
ged. In democratic, left-wing circles, rumours circulated that the Nazis were planning a “bloodbath” by faking an assassination attempt on Hitler as a pretext for taking revenge. “It is said that lists have been drawn up of those to be systematically murdered,” Kessler wrote.40 In the midst of this ominous atmosphere, news broke in the evening of 27 February that the Reichstag was on fire.

  The question of who was responsible for the burning of the Reichstag has prompted a decades-long debate that has never been resolved. Because the event was so useful to the National Socialists, suspicions arose immediately that the Nazis themselves had started the fire. Conversely, the Nazi leadership did not waste any time at all in blaming the KPD, although not a shred of evidence was presented. The most likely explanation is the one first advanced by Fritz Tobias in the early 1960s that the Dutch Communist revolutionary Marinus van der Lubbe, who was arrested at the scene, acted on his own, without anyone pulling the strings behind him.41 But there is no way of being certain, and there probably never will be. In any case, more important than continuing debates about whether van der Lubbe was the sole arsonist is what sort of advantages the National Socialists derived from the Reichstag fire.

  The initial reactions of the top NSDAP leaders on the evening of 27 February suggest that they, too, were surprised. Hitler was with the Goebbelses, as was his habit, when Hanfstaengl called around 10 p.m. and told them that the Reichstag was in flames. At first they thought it was a bad joke,42 but the news was soon confirmed. Hitler and Goebbels hurried to the scene, where they met Göring. He greeted all those who arrived with a tirade about who was to blame, although the origins of the blaze had yet to be investigated. “This is the beginning of the Communist uprising,” Göring raged. “Now they will strike. We have not a minute to lose!”43 Goebbels accepted this version of events without question, noting: “Arson in 30 spots. Committed by the Communists. Göring a whirlwind of action. Hitler is enraged.”44 Indeed, at the scene of the fire, Hitler worked himself up into a state of extreme agitation. After the war, Rudolf Diels, whom Göring named head of the Gestapo, the Secret State Police, in April 1933, recalled:

  He yelled, completely out of control, in a way I had never seen before, as if he was about to burst. “Now there’ll be no more mercy. Anyone who gets in our way will be cut down…Every Communist functionary will be shot on the spot. The Communist deputies must be hanged from the gallows this very evening. Everybody connected with the Communists is to be arrested. There’s no more taking it easy on the Social Democrats and the Reich Banner either.”

  Hitler would not hear of it when Diels said he thought the man arrested, Marinus van der Lubbe, was a lunatic. “This is a very clever, carefully planned matter,” Hitler raged. “The criminals thought this through very thoroughly. But comrades, they’ve miscalculated, haven’t they?”45

  Nor did Hitler restrain himself in the company of Franz von Papen, who had hurried to the Reichstag from the Gentlemen’s Club, where he had been dining with Hindenburg. “This is a sign from God, Herr Vice-Chancellor!” Hitler told him. “If this fire is, as I believe, the work of Communists, we will have to crush this deadly pestilence with an iron fist!”46 It is difficult to say whether Hitler and his paladins became victims of their own propaganda and truly believed that the Communists were behind the act of arson. But it is beyond doubt that the Nazis were not at all unhappy about the Reichstag fire. On the contrary, it was a welcome excuse to strike a decisive blow against the KPD. Later that evening, when the Nazi leadership assembled in the Hotel Kaiserhof, the mood was positively relaxed. “Everyone was beaming,” Goebbels noted. “This was just what we needed. Now we’re completely in the clear.”47 The Nazis’ conservative coalition partners reacted in similar fashion. When Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk, who was having dinner at the French embassy, received word of the fire, he exclaimed, much to the bewilderment of the other guests, “Thank God!”48

  By the night of 27–28 February, the KPD’s leading functionaries and almost all of the party’s Reichstag deputies had been arrested. Party offices were closed, and all Communist newspapers were banned until further notice. The arrests continued in the days that followed. On 3 March, KPD Chairman Ernst Thälmann was located and detained. By mid-March more than 10,000 political opponents of Nazism found themselves in “protective custody” in Prussia alone. Among them were left-wing intellectuals like Carl von Ossietzky, Erich Mühsam and Egon Erwin Kisch.49

  The meeting of Hitler’s cabinet on the morning of 28 February was naturally dominated by the events of the previous evening. Hitler asserted that the “psychologically correct moment” had arrived for “a ruthless reckoning with the KPD.” He said: “It would be senseless to wait any longer. The KPD is determined in the extreme. The battle against them cannot be made dependent on legal considerations.” Göring reiterated the statement that the Nazi leadership had agreed upon the previous evening: it was “impossible that one person alone could have performed this act of arson.” On the contrary, the Communists had “initiated this attack.” The material confiscated in the Karl Liebknecht House suggested that the Communists intended to form “terrorist groups,” set public buildings on fire, poison the food served in public kitchens and take “the wives and children of ministers and other high-ranking personalities hostage.”50 Although it was easy to see that this nightmare scenario was a crass invention, none of the conservative ministers objected. That very afternoon, the cabinet approved the draft of a Decree for the Protection of the People and the State submitted in the morning by Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. The first paragraph “suspended until further notice” fundamental civil rights including personal liberty, freedom of speech and the press, the right to assemble, the privacy of letters and telephone conversations and the inviolability of house and home. The second paragraph enabled the government to “temporarily take over” the responsibilities of the upper administration of Germany’s states “in order to restore public security and order.”51 That opened the door not only for the Nazis to persecute anyone who disagreed with them but also to bring Germany’s often resistant states into line.

  The decree of 28 February was, in the words of one German historian, “the emergency law upon which the National Socialist dictatorship based its rule until it itself collapsed,”52 and as early as 1941 the political scientist Ernst Fraenkel characterised it as the “constitutional document” of the Third Reich.53 Hindenburg had no qualms about signing the emergency decree, which was sold to him as a “special ordinance to fight Communist violence.” Unwittingly or not, he helped transfer political authority from the office of the Reich president to the Reich government.54 In a speech in Frankfurt am Main on 3 March, Göring made it abundantly clear what he intended to do with the new powers he had been granted. The measures he ordered, Göring promised, would not be diluted by any legal considerations: “In this regard, I am not required to establish justice. In this regard, I am required to eradicate and eliminate and nothing more!”55 This sort of language and the violent measures that accompanied Göring’s words must have horrified anyone who maintained any vestige of faith in the rule of law. Papen was not among them. When François-Poncet drew his attention to foreign diplomats’ concern at the National Socialists’ growing terror campaigns, Papen brushed aside any worries: “It’s no big deal. When they’ve scraped the velvet from their horns, everything will be fine.”56

  Nor did the SA’s brutal persecution of Communists draw any condemnation from the middle classes. On the contrary, the bête noire of a “Communist threat,” reinforced by years of propaganda, led many people to see draconian measures as justified. “Finally, an iron broom over Prussia!” gushed Luise Solmitz.57 Elisabeth Gebensleben, the wife of the deputy mayor of Braunschweig, did not have any scruples either: “The ruthless intervention of the national government may be somewhat alienating for many people, but there needs to be a thorough cleansing and clearing up. The anti-national forces must be rendered harmless. Otherwise no recovery will be p
ossible.”58 If appearances do not deceive, the suppression of the political Left in Germany, and especially the Communists, did nothing to dampen Hitler’s popularity. On the contrary, it increased his approval among the general populace. If Hitler stayed his course, one report from Catholic Upper Bavaria read, he would surely “have the trust of the great proportion of the German people” in the upcoming Reichstag election.59

  The U.S. ambassador, Frederick Sackett, termed the elections on 5 March a “farce,” since the left-wing parties “were completely denied their constitutional right to address their supporters during the final and most important week of the campaign.”60 Discrimination was also all too apparent on election day itself. “In front of the polling station only Nazi and Black, White and Red posters, nothing from the State Party, the SPD or the KPD,” wrote Kessler.61 Bearing that in mind, the result of the vote was all the more astonishing. Despite the extraordinarily high voter turnout of 88.8 per cent, the NSDAP came up clearly short of their stated goal of an absolute majority. The Nazis took 43.9 per cent of the vote—an increase of 10.8 per cent over the November 1932 election. To secure their majority, they needed the support of the Battle Front Black, White and Red, which only received 8 per cent of the vote, less than the DNVP had got the preceding November. The SPD took 18.3 per cent of the vote (down 2.1 per cent), and despite everything, the KPD still polled 12.3 per cent (down 4.6 per cent). Notwithstanding all the obstacles placed in their way, the two left-wing parties still managed to capture almost a third of the vote. The Centre Party (11.2 per cent) and the BVP (2.7 per cent) maintained their support while the State Party (0.9 per cent) and the DVP (1.1 per cent), which had basically become fringe parties, continued their respective declines.62 “The splendid German people!” the writer Erich Ebermayer commented. “Despite everything, the working classes still solidly stand behind their leadership. The Catholics still solidly stand by their Church. There are still upstanding democrats! 48.2 per cent of the electorate had the courage to vote against Hitler or stay at home. I see this day as a victory and a reassurance.”63