Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  The Enabling Act concluded the first phase of the Nazi consolidation of power, and the next step was pre-programmed. In shutting down parliament as a state legislative organ, the political parties sacrificed their raison d’être. But Hitler’s government had not just made itself independent of the Reichstag, which henceforth would merely rubber-stamp and celebrate the regime’s decisions. It had also got rid of the president’s authority to issue emergency decrees.138 This marked the definitive end of the idea of “taming Hitler,” which depended on the ability to call upon the powers of the president’s office. Hitler was no longer constrained in any way by his conservative coalition partners, even though he kept them in his cabinet for the time being to maintain appearances. “So now we are the masters,” declared Goebbels, who sat with Hitler in the Chancellery on the evening of 23 March to listen to a rebroadcast of the Führer’s reply to Wels on the radio.139 Although the Enabling Act, which took effect the following day, was limited to four years, it was extended three times and remained the basis of National Socialist rule until the demise of the regime.

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  A mere week later, on 1 April, the Hitler government launched its next offensive, calling for the first boycott of Jewish businesses, lawyers and doctors. Since Hitler had taken power on 30 January, anti-Semitic agitation had risen noticeably. Physical attacks on Jews and Jewish businesses had become part of everyday life in many cities and areas. Usually they were organised by local SA and party activists.140 The day after the 5 March election, gangs of SA thugs went after Jewish pedestrians on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. “In several parts of Berlin a large number of people, most of whom appeared to be Jews, were openly attacked in the streets and knocked down,” the Berlin correspondent of the Manchester Guardian wrote. “Some of them were seriously injured. The police could do no more than pick up the injured and take them off to hospital.”141 Reports like this in foreign newspapers caused outrage. On 26 March, some 250,000 people in New York and more than a million across the United States protested against the Hitler regime’s anti-Jewish discrimination and persecution.142

  Both Nazi propaganda and reports by German diplomats described international criticism as a Jewish “atrocity propaganda” against which the Third Reich had to defend itself.143 The Nazi-organised national boycott of Jewish businesses, doctors and lawyers was intended to punish German Jews for foreign criticism and to channel the “wild” activities of the SA towards a common end. Goebbels and Hitler likely decided to stage the boycott when they had met on the Obersalzberg on 26 March. “I am writing a call for an anti-Jewish boycott,” Goebbels noted after the meeting. “That will put an end to the agitation abroad.”144 A “Central Committee for Defence against Jewish Atrocity and Boycott Agitation” planned and organised the initiative. It was chaired by the Nuremberg Gauleiter, Julius Streicher, the publisher of the viciously anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer. The NSDAP leadership’s appeal was published on 28 March in the Völkischer Beobachter. It called on all Nazi Party groups to form immediate action committees so that the boycott could commence “abruptly” on 1 April and be carried out everywhere “down to the smallest village.” The boycott slogan was: “No good German still buys from a Jew and lets himself be talked into purchases by a Jew or his backers.”145

  On 29 March, Hitler informed his cabinet about the planned initiative, leaving no doubt that he had ordered the boycott and stood behind it personally. “He was convinced that a boycott of 2–3 days would convince Jews that their atrocious anti-German agitation was hurting themselves the most,” read a protocol of the cabinet meeting.146 Two days later, some of his ministers voiced concerns. Finance Minister von Krosigk feared “massive losses in sales tax revenues,” while Transport Minister Eltz-Rübenach was concerned the initiative would hurt the German economy, citing the fact that all foreign passages aboard the ships MS Europa and MS Bremen had been cancelled. Hitler appeared to be flexible, saying that he would be willing to postpone the boycott until 4 April if the governments of Britain and the United States issued immediate statements condemning foreign criticism of Nazi Germany. Otherwise, Hitler threatened, the boycott would go ahead as planned for Saturday 1 April, although there would be a two-day pause between then and 4 April.147 In fact, both foreign governments agreed to the statement demanded on the evening of 31 March, but that was deemed too late. The mobilised party grass roots were itching for action, and Hitler would have lost face, even had he wanted to call off the boycott. “I don’t know whether my name will be held in honour in Germany in 200 or 300 years,” Hitler told the Italian ambassador, Vittorio Cerruti, on the eve of the boycott. “But I’m absolutely certain that in 500 or 600 years the name Hitler will be universally glorified as the name of the man who once and for all eradicated the global pestilence that is Jewry.”148

  On the morning of 1 April, SA men took up positions with placards in front of Jewish businesses, doctors’ offices and legal firms all over Germany and tried to get people to participate in the boycott. “The Jewish businesses—and there were a lot of them in the streets in the east—were open, and SA men planted themselves, their feet spread wide apart, before their front doors,” recalled Sebastian Haffner, who witnessed the boycott in Berlin.149 Reports differed about how the public reacted. “A murmur of disapproval, suppressed but still audible,” went through the country,” wrote Haffner in retrospect.150 The British ambassador also concluded that the boycott had not been popular but that neither had public opinion swung around in Jews’ favour.151 There were plenty of contemporary stories about customers who deliberately visited Jewish businesses, doctors and lawyers on 1 April. But these people were no doubt a courageous minority. The majority seem to have followed the wishes of the regime. They withheld their patronage, stood by and looked on.152

  Many German Jews were deeply shocked by the first government-organised national anti-Semitic initiative. “I always felt German,” Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary. “And I always thought the twentieth century and central Europe were different than the fourteenth century and Romania. A mistake.”153 Klemperer was not alone among patriotic German Jews in feeling that in one fell swoop all guarantees against a return to medieval barbarism had been swept away. The boycott was also greeted with shame and horror by Gentile Germans critical of the regime. Count Kessler, who had resided in Paris since deciding not to return to Germany, remarked on 1 April: “This contemptible boycott of Jews in the Reich. This criminal act of insanity has destroyed all the trust and respect Germany had regained in the past fourteen years.”154

  Although the boycott was not resumed on 4 April, local SA and party groups staged repeated actions against Jewish businesses in the weeks and months that followed,155 and the Hitler government began using less conspicuous methods of forcing Jews from German society. On 7 April, the regime issued the Law Concerning the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service, which not only allowed the government to dismiss state employees considered politically unreliable, but also mandated that civil servants from “non-Aryan backgrounds” be sent into early retirement. Jewish state employees who had fought at the front in the First World War, or whose fathers or sons had fallen, were exempt from the law.156 In a letter to Hitler, Hindenburg had urged him to adopt these exceptions. “If they were good enough to fight and shed their blood for Germany,” Hindenburg wrote, “they should be considered worthy enough to serve their fatherland in their jobs.”157 This did not mean that Hindenburg was generally unhappy about the discriminatory measures. In late April, when Sweden’s Prince Carl, the head of the Swedish Red Cross, tried to intervene on behalf of German Jews, the Reich president rejected those attempts by saying that a peaceful and orderly national revolution was taking place—a development all the more remarkable because “the now-victorious National Socialist movement has been the victim of serious injustice from Jewish and Jewish–Marxist quarters.”158 Hindenburg’s intervention on behalf of Jewish war veterans was thus not a rejection of the regime’s anti-Semitic poli
cies but rather an expression of his loyalty towards those who had fought in the First World War.

  It is telling how Hitler reacted to Hindenburg’s letter. On the one hand, he justified his policies by arguing that the German people had to defend themselves against “Jews swamping certain professions,” and that Jews had remained “an alien element that had never merged with the German people.” On the other, he lavished praise upon the Reich president for intervening on behalf of Jewish veterans “in such generous human fashion,” and he promised to “be true to this noble sentiment as broadly as possible.” The next sentence he wrote epitomised Hitler as a master of dissimulation: “I understand your internal rationale, and by the way, I myself often suffer under the difficult fate of being forced to make decisions that as a human being I would prefer one thousandfold to avoid.”159 Hitler still could not afford to alienate Hindenburg, so he slipped into a role that he knew would please the Reich president: that of the polite, modest, adaptable politician who was selflessly doing his burdensome duty and who was forced to act harshly towards Jews and “Marxists” in the interest of the German people and not because that was what he himself wanted.

  The Civil Service Law of 7 April was a watershed, marking the first time that the German government curtailed the legal equality of German Jews. It was the first step in a gradual process of reversing the legal emancipation of German Jews completed in 1871. Further discriminatory laws—including the Law on the Licensing of Lawyers and the Law to Combat Overcrowding of Universities—were also issued in April.160 Still, only a small minority of German Jews could imagine at this point that the course being taken, in line with Hitler’s lunatic ideological fixations, would end in their complete “removal” from the German “ethnic-popular community.” One of the few who did was Georg Solmssen, spokesman for the board of directors of Deutsche Bank. On 9 April, he wrote to the chairman of the bank’s supervisory board: “I fear that we stand at the beginning of a development that is consciously directed towards economically and morally eradicating all members of the Jewish race [sic] living in Germany according to careful plans.”161

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  If there was a social force capable of halting the National Socialists’ takeover of German institutions in the April of 1933, it might have been the free trade unions which together made up the Confederation of German Trade Unions (ADGB). But in fact the unions had been destroyed by the beginning of May without having put up any serious resistance—an unprecedented phenomenon that marked the nadir of the German labour movement.162 In his first two months in power, Hitler was uncertain about how to deal with the unions. His initial hesitation was a measure of his respect for such organisations, whose four million members had considerable potential for putting up a fight. But the unions’ surprising vacillation between passivity and ingratiation soon convinced Hitler that they would offer no opposition.

  In late February, the confederation had begun to distance itself from the SPD, with which it had been allied for decades, and to move towards the National Socialists. On 21 March, Confederation Chairman Theodor Leipart directly approached Hitler with a request for a meeting. The letter was sycophantic in tone—Leipart signed off with the phrase “With the deepest respect and subservience”—and amounted to a declaration of principles concerning future union activity by the confederation’s leaders. It contained an astonishing concession: “The social tasks of unions must be fulfilled regardless of the nature of the political regime.”163 On 9 April, the confederation’s leadership officially offered to place union organisations “at the service of the state” and suggested the appointment of a “Reich commissioner for unions.”164 But Hitler did not deem either this offer or Leipart’s letter of 21 March worthy of an answer.

  Typically, the Nazi leadership requited the unions’ attempts to cosy up to the regime with a carrot-and-stick approach to the working classes. Union buildings were targeted for violent attacks by the SA, and union functionaries in various places were arrested and physically abused. In vain, Leipart turned to Hindenburg as “the shepherd and guarantor of the civil rights anchored in the constitution,” asking him to “put an end to the legal uncertainty that threatens the lives and property of German workers in numerous German cities.”165 Leipart’s protests were futile. The fundamental constitutional rights he cited had long been abrogated by Hitler and his coalition—with Hindenburg’s consent.

  At the same time, the Hitler regime stepped up its efforts to prise the working classes away from traditional labour organisations and win them over to the “national uprising.” In late March, Goebbels suggested to the cabinet that 1 May, historically a day of activism for the workers’ movement in Germany, be declared a “holiday of national labour” along the lines of the recent ceremonies in Potsdam.166 Whereas the Day of Potsdam had served to celebrate the symbolic unification of Prussia and National Socialism, 1 May was conceived as a way of cementing Nazism’s connection to the German working classes. Ideological appropriation and violence against opponents were two sides of the same coin. In early April, an “Action Committee for the Protection of German Labour,” chaired by NSDAP Reich Organisational Director Robert Ley, was tasked with drawing up a plan to disempower the trade unions. Hitler gave it the green light from the Obersalzberg on 17 April. Goebbels was once more at the centre of the decision-making process. May the 1st will be celebrated in a “major way,” he noted, and then: “The union headquarters will be occupied on 2 May. ‘Brought into line.’ A couple of days of uproar, and then they will be ours.”167 On 21 April, Ley informed the Gauleiter about these plans: “On Tuesday, 2 May 1933, at 10 a.m., we will start to bring the independent labour unions into line.” The goal, Ley announced, was “to give workers the feeling that this action is not directed against them, but against an outmoded system no longer in the interests of the German nation.”168

  The ADGB’s executive committee was still under the illusion it could come to some sort of arrangement with the regime. In mid-April it welcomed the decision to declare 1 May a holiday and expressed support for the new significance given to the occasion: “In keeping with his status, the German worker should take to the streets on 1 May and show that he is a full member of the German ethnic-popular community.”169 On 1 May 1933, union members and Nazis marched together under swastika banners. The main event took place on Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld, formerly a parade ground for the Imperial military. Goebbels had taken charge of organising the spectacle, which he hoped would be his second propaganda masterpiece.170 More than 1 million people took up formation in twelve blocks in front of a gigantic grandstand amidst a sea of flags and banners brightly illuminated by spotlights. In his speech, which was again broadcast on all German radio stations, Hitler appropriated the traditional symbolism of 1 May for the German labour movement, attempting to conflate it with the idea of the “ethnic-popular community.” He adroitly drew parallels between the rhetoric of social reconciliation and the ideas of “workers of the mind and the fist”—a phrase that suggested equality and that no doubt impressed many previously sceptical members of the working classes, as did the event as a whole.171 “Fantastic flush of enthusiasm,” noted Goebbels, who was awe-struck by the spectacle he had staged. Even a critical observer like André François-Poncet was unable to resist the lure of mass suggestion. The effect of Hitler’s “sometimes hoarse, and then once more cutting and wild” voice, he wrote, was augmented by the “theatrical props,” the interplay of light and shadow, the banners and uniforms and insistent rhythms of the music, so that even the French ambassador thought he could sense a “hint of reconciliation and unity.”172

  But those illusions were dispelled the very next day. Storm troopers occupied union headquarters and took labour leaders, including Leipart, into “protective custody.” Goebbels was pleased, noting, “Everything is running like clockwork.”173 Leipart’s attempt to save his organisation with what bordered on self-annihilating conformity had failed. A few days later, the German Labour Front was founded under
Robert Ley. This was a mammoth umbrella organisation of Nazified workers’ organisations and proved to be a most effective tool for integrating the working classes into the Nazi state.174 German labourers no longer had a body independent of the government to represent their interests. On 19 May the Law on the Administrators of Labour replaced negotiated wage and labour agreements with binding state decrees. A major principle of the socially equitable Weimar Constitution thereby disappeared with the stroke of a pen.175

  In a diary entry on 3 June, Goebbels announced with brutal directness what was to follow the dissolution of the unions: “All parties will have to be destroyed. We alone will remain.”176 The KPD had already been suppressed; the SPD was next in line. The regime took immediate repressive action in response to the Social Democratic parliamentary faction’s refusal to support the Enabling Act. Disappointment and resignation spread among SPD members and increasing numbers quit the party. After witnessing the Nazis’ move against the unions, the SPD feared that it could be banned, and those worries were fuelled when Göring confiscated the party’s assets on 10 May. Earlier that month, several members of the Social Democratic leadership had travelled to the Saarland, which was still under the administration of the League of Nations, to prepare for potential emigration. But they disagreed amongst themselves. Was it better to move the party abroad and organise the fight against the regime in exile or to use the legal means that remained to salvage within Germany what could be salvaged? Adherents of the latter point of view were behind the majority of the SPD Reichstag delegates who opted to endorse Hitler’s “peace speech” on 17 May—which we will examine in detail in the next chapter. This not only improved Hitler’s political standing abroad, but also overshadowed the party’s rejection of the Enabling Act. The result was a schism in the party leadership. On 21 May in Saarbrücken, several top party leaders, including Otto Wels, decided to move to Prague and pursue illegal resistance from outside Germany. Those Social Democrats who stayed behind in Berlin under the leadership of Paul Löbe, however, claimed to speak for the party in its entirety. Their hopes that Hitler would become more conciliatory if they compromised were soon dashed.