Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  On 18 June the first edition of Neuer Vorwärts, a relaunch of the Social Democrats’ traditional party newspaper, was published in the Czech city of Karlovy Vary, containing a sharply worded declaration of war on the Hitler regime by the leadership of the SPD in exile. That provided Interior Minister Frick with a welcome pretext to prohibit, in a decree to local state governments on 21 June, the SPD from engaging in any political activity as a “party hostile to the state and people.”177 A wave of arrests of SPD functionaries and Reichstag and Landtag deputies followed. During the “Köpenick Blood Week” in late July 1933, a rolling SA commando attacked the largely Social Democratic Berlin district, arresting more than 500 men and torturing them so brutally that 91 of them died. Among those murdered in this fashion was a member of the SPD executive committee and the former state president of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Johannes Stelling. Exiled Social Democratic circles described his death as follows: “After the worst sort of mistreatment, he was dumped nearly unconscious outside an SA barracks, where he was detained once again by plainclothes SA men. He was thrown in a car, taken into custody and tortured to death. His body, which had been beaten beyond recognition, was later fished out of the Dahme river in a closed, weighted-down sack.”178 This sort of atrocity had already become possible in Germany in the summer of 1933, without anyone from the country’s traditional elites or middle classes—to say nothing of the conservative cabinet ministers—raising a word of protest.

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  “SPD dissolved—Bravo!” crowed Goebbels. “We won’t have long to wait for the total state.”179 And indeed, the centrist middle-class parties could no longer hold on. In late June and early July, the German State Party and the German People’s Party dissolved. After the election of 5 March, these liberal parties had lost so much support that hardly anyone noticed when they disappeared.180 The situation was different with the conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP), which, after all, still sat at meetings as the NSDAP’s coalition partner. In late April, Labour Minister Seldte had announced that he was joining the Nazi Party and passing on the leadership of the Stahlhelm to Hitler. This association of First World War veterans was gradually Nazified, and most of its members assigned to the SA.181 In early May, the DNVP changed its name to the German National Front as a way of demonstrating that it was just as opposed to parliamentary democracy as the NSDAP. But the name change did nothing to prevent more and more of its members from defecting to the Nazi Party. In addition, party centres were increasingly subject to attacks by the SA and SS. On 17 May 1933, Alfred Hugenberg and the deputy leader of the German National Front, Friedrich von Winterfeld, complained to the president about attempts throughout Germany “to concentrate power entirely in National Socialist hands and push aside all other men of nationalist sentiment.” Hindenburg answered that he was convinced the Reich chancellor had only the best intentions at heart and was “working in the interest of the fatherland and justice with a clear conscience.” Unfortunately, Hitler’s subordinates “pushed things too far,” Hindenburg conceded, but that problem would diminish over time. He appealed to both Hugenberg and Winterfeld to “maintain the unity that we concluded and sealed with our hearts’ blood on 30 January so that what has since been achieved never falls apart.”182

  DNVP Chairman Hugenberg himself contributed to the inexorable downfall of this formerly so self-confident and power-orientated conservative party. At the International Economic Conference in London in mid-June, without consulting with the other members of the German delegation, Hugenberg presented a memorandum demanding the return of Germany’s former colonies in Africa as well as land in eastern Europe for new settlements for his “people without space.” The latter in fact reflected Hitler’s plans for the future, but no one was supposed to raise the issue in public, least of all at an international conference. Hitler could now cannily portray Hugenberg as an incorrigible representative of the Wilhelmine thirst for world power and himself as a relative moderate. Hugenberg’s position within the cabinet became untenable and even his conservative colleagues refused to intervene on his behalf. On 27 June, Hitler informed his ministers that Hugenberg had offered to resign. He personally regretted this step, claimed the Führer, barely able to conceal his delight at marginalising his rival, but “the best thing would be for the German National People’s Party to disappear.”183 The party announced its dissolution that very day. A “friendship agreement” with the NSDAP promised to protect former DNVP members against “all forms of humiliation and disadvantage.”

  With no further ado, the “economic dictator,” who had believed that together with Papen he could restrain Hitler, departed the political stage. “They’ve got their just deserts for their contemptible betrayal of the German people,” commented Harry Kessler. “Papen will have his turn too.”184 In September Hugenberg was craven enough to communicate in a letter to his “most esteemed Herr Hitler” his immutable “life’s wish” that the work they had jointly begun on 30 January be carried out to its “happy conclusion.” When Hitler subsequently declared himself “pleasantly moved” that Hugenberg had maintained his “comradely sentiments” despite his departure from the cabinet, Hugenberg did not neglect to solemnly assure Hitler on the first anniversary of his “seizure of power” that he stuck by “all the ideas and goals that initially brought us together.”185 As Hugenberg’s successor at the head of the Economics Ministry, Hindenburg named Kurt Schmitt, the head of the Allianz insurance company and a Nazi Party member. Richard Walter Darré was made minister of food and agriculture. Hitler also succeeded in allowing Rudolf Hess, in his function as “deputy of the Führer,” to attend all future cabinet meetings.186 With that the Nazi Party had a cabinet majority. “The worst is behind us,” noted Goebbels. “The revolution is taking its course.” Goebbels personally profited from Hugenberg’s resignation, inheriting his governmental apartment.187

  The end of the Catholic parties was hardly any less disgraceful. By June, mass resignations of party members combined with state repression had diminished the Centre Party’s will to continue. The party’s position became completely impossible when the Vatican, in its negotiations over a concordat with the Nazi regime, agreed that priests would be prohibited in future from engaging in any party-political activity. That was effectively the full capitulation of political Catholicism. The National Socialists rebuffed attempts by the Centre Party to liquidate itself under the same terms as the DNVP,188 and on 5 July the party decided to dissolve. The previous day, its Bavarian sister, the BVP, had also disbanded after being given promises that its members who had been taken into custody would be released.189 On 14 July, the Reich government issued the Law Prohibiting the Reconstitution of the Parties. It proclaimed the NSDAP to be the “only political party in Germany” and made the attempt to preserve or found any other party a prosecutable offence.190 The one-party state became a reality. National Socialist domination of Germany, reported the Swiss chargé d’affaires in Berlin, was “a fact that will have to be reckoned for a considerable time.”191

  Hitler had needed only five months to consolidate power. “Everything that existed in Germany outside the Nazi Party,” wrote François-Poncet in early July, “has been destroyed, dispelled, dissolved, co-opted or sucked in.” Considering the political situation he found on 1 February and the conditions under which he became German chancellor, the French ambassador concluded, Hitler had “successfully performed a lightning-quick manoeuvre.”192 Indeed, the changes in political conditions proceeded so rapidly that many contemporaries could hardly keep up with them. “It is a turbulent time that brings something new every day,” Theodor Heuss wrote in late June.193 Looking back at the summer of 1933, Sebastian Haffner described the situation of non-Nazi Germans as “one of the most difficult a human being could find himself in…a state of being completely and hopelessly overwhelmed as well as suffering from the after effects of the shock of being bowled over.” Haffner concluded: “The Nazis had us completely at their mercy. All bastions had fal
len, and any form of collective resistance had become impossible.”194 Victor Klemperer saw things much the same. On 9 July 1933, he noted in his diary: “And now this monstrous internal tyranny, the break-up of all the parties, the daily emphasis on the idea that ‘We National Socialists alone have power. It is our revolution.’ Hitler is the absolute master.”195

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  Is it appropriate to call what happened in Germany between February and July 1933 a revolution? The National Socialist leadership, above all Hitler and Goebbels, were not the only ones to use this term as a matter of course. The Nazis’ conservative coalition partners also employed it. In late March, Papen told the German-American Chamber of Commerce in New York that the “national revolution,” whose goal was “to liberate Germany from grave Communist danger and to cleanse the governmental administration of inferior elements,” had been carried out with “impressive orderliness.”196 In April, a close relative of Hindenburg, Lieutenant General Karl von Fabeck, proclaimed: “We are still in the middle of the national revolution, but it is victorious across the board.”197 Even critics and sceptics saw the overwhelming dynamics of change as revolutionary. “Only now…has the revolution truly begun,” noted the writer Erich Ebermayer on 28 February, the day after the Reichstag fire.198 Count Harry Kessler in turn characterised the situation in March as a “counter-revolution.”199

  Compared with contemporaries, historians have been more reticent about using the term “revolution” in conjunction with the Nazi consolidation of power. There are good reasons for this. The word usually implies not only a radical political shake-up, but a fundamental remaking of society, for example the replacement of one set of social elites with another. By contrast, the Nazi consolidation of power in 1933 was characterised by an alliance between traditional elites in the military, major industry, large-scale agriculture and governmental bureaucracy, on the one hand, and the Nazi mass movement and its Führer on the other. Moreover, since the American and French Revolutions, the term usually has the positive connotation of an increase in liberty, justice and humanity. That was anything but the case under the Hitler regime. Despite its insistence on the pretence of “legality,” the first months of the new government left no doubt as to its radically inhumane character, which was hostile towards all principles of democracy, the rule of law and morality. “This revolution boasts of its bloodlessness,” Thomas Mann wrote on 20 April 1933, Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday, “but it is the most hateful and murderous revolution that has ever been.”200 Sebastian Haffner also recognised early on that this six-month period in 1933 represented a break with civilisation, which drew its social energies from the Nazis’ will to subject the entire German people to their power and reform it in line with Hitler’s far-reaching racist and ideological programme.201 In light of the regime’s goal of totally dominating all aspects of life, the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler proposed the term “totalitarian revolution,” depicting a new type of political and social upheaval. This concept still seems best suited for comprehending the specific character of the systematic transformation Germany underwent in 1933.202

  After monopolising political power, Hitler redefined certain key ideas. Revolution, he announced to his Reich governors on 6 July, could not be allowed to become a “constant state of affairs.” The revolutionary “current,” he proclaimed, had to be “redirected into the secure riverbed of evolution.” Now that the goal of “external power” had been achieved, emphasis would switch to “people’s education.”203 Goebbels repeated this idea in a radio address in the city of Königsberg: “We will only be satisfied when we know that the entire people understands us and recognises us as its highest advocate.” The goal, Goebbels stated with utter frankness, was that “there should be only one opinion, one party and one faith in Germany.”204

  This meant that all sectors of cultural life were to be brought into line with Nazi ideas. In the first six months of Nazi rule, Goebbels oversaw a comprehensive change in personnel in German radio, the most important medium of political and ideological indoctrination. In so far as they were not simply banned, newspapers were softened up by economic pressure and subjected to government monitoring. Some of the larger liberal newspapers like the Frankfurter Zeitung were granted a measure of freedom, but even this was constrained by daily governmental press instructions and editorial self-censorship. In the realms of music, film, theatre, the visual arts and literature, the process of Nazification ran parallel to the removal of Jews from these areas of cultural life: they were seen to personify the modernism so hated by the Nazis, and Hitler had constantly defamed them as advocates of “cultural Bolshevism” prior to 1933. It was particularly easy for the National Socialists to “cleanse” Germany’s universities since German academics were conspicuously willing to bring themselves into line with the regime. The most repulsive manifestation of this attitude was the action “Contrary to the Ungerman Spirit”—the book burnings carried out by students, with the support of university administrations, on Berlin’s Opernplatz and in most other German university towns on 10 May. As a result the very first year of the Nazi regime saw a mass exodus of artists, writers, scientists and journalists from which German intellectual and cultural life has never fully recovered.205 The establishment of the Reich Cultural Chamber, which was inaugurated with Hitler in attendance at the Berlin Philharmonic Concert Hall in November 1933, completed the reshaping of the entire arena of German culture.206 Anyone who wanted to work in film, music, theatre, journalism, radio, literature or the visual arts was required to be a member of one of the seven individual chambers that comprised this institution.

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  As total as the process of bringing society into line was, the success or failure of the regime depended on its ability to keep its promise to combat mass unemployment. In his very first radio address on 1 February, Hitler announced a “massive, blanket attack on unemployment” that was to overcome the problem “once and for all” within four years.207 On 6 July as well, he told his regional representatives that creating jobs was decisive: “History will only measure us on how we tackle this task.”208 Multiple factors played into the hands of Hitler and his regime. By the time he came to power, economic recovery was already under way. The government also profited from job-creation measures taken under Papen and Schleicher that were only just beginning to bear fruit.209 In terms of announcing employment initiatives of his own, Hitler was conspicuously low-key in the weeks leading up to the Reichstag election. He enumerated the reasons for this in a cabinet meeting on 8 February: “The Reich government has to get 18–19 million voters behind it. There is no economic programme in the whole wide world capable of attracting the approval of such a large mass of voters.”210

  It was not until late May 1933 that the cabinet agreed on the Law for the Reduction of Unemployment. Known as the “First Reinhardt Programme” after Finance Ministry State Secretary Fritz Reinhardt, it allocated 1 billion reichsmarks for the creation of additional jobs. That sum was augmented by 500 million reichsmarks in the “Second Reinhardt Programme of September 1933,” which particularly concerned restoration and renovation projects and sought to boost the construction industry.211 The regime took other measures to ease the situation in the job market. The First Reinhardt Programme introduced interest-free “marriage loans” of up to 1,000 reichsmarks, which were contingent on newly-wed women leaving the workforce on the day of their wedding. Simultaneously the regime launched a campaign against the “double-earner syndrome” aimed at forcing women out of the labour market. The government subsidised emergency works projects and assigned jobless people to work in agriculture. It also expanded the Volunteer Labour Service, a state employment programme that had been introduced in the final years of the Weimar Republic. All these measures led to a great reduction in the numbers of people officially registered as unemployed. Between January 1933 and January 1934, the official number of jobless declined from 6 to 3.8 million people, although these figures were by no means completely reliable.212 In any
case, the regime seemed to be keeping its promise and tackling the unemployment problem head-on, and this impression no doubt played a major role in increasing the aura surrounding the man at the top.

  Hitler was no expert on questions of economic policy, but he had enough of an understanding of the subject to know that populist rhetoric alone would be insufficient. Incentives were needed to stimulate a self-perpetuating economic recovery. However, among the measures designed to jump-start the economy and create new jobs, the role played by the construction of the autobahn was less important than later myths about the Nazi “economic miracle” would have it. In his opening speech at the International Motor Show on 11 February 1933, Hitler had announced “the commencement and completion of a large-scale roadworks plan.” He proclaimed: “Just as horse-drawn traffic created paths and the railway system built the tracks it needed, motor-vehicle transport has to get the motorway it requires.”213 The idea was not fundamentally new. In the mid-1920s, an “Association for the Preparation of the Motorway Hanseatic Cities–Frankfurt–Basle” (Hafraba) had drawn up plans for an autobahn. Hitler had probably also read a pamphlet written by the Munich engineer Fritz Todt in late 1932 entitled “Road Construction and Management,” in which the author had stressed the “strategic” importance of motorway construction and calculated that Germany needed 5,000 to 6,000 kilometres of high-speed roads.214 In late March and early April, Hafraba’s commercial director gave two talks about the planned project in the Reich Chancellery. The motoring fan Hitler seized upon the idea “with great enthusiasm” but insisted on aiming for a national motorway network instead of a single stretch of road: “It would be a great achievement if we succeeded in realising the network under our regime.”215 At a conference with leading industrialists on 29 May, Hitler reiterated his intention to support the construction of the autobahn with all the means at his disposal. Tackling “the problem in its entirety” was the main task, Hitler proclaimed, adding: “Traffic in the years to come will take place on the largest of streets.”216