Lucie tended to be more overtly nationalistic, Erwin not so much. (Soldiers as a rule tend to shy away from nationalism as opposed to patriotism.) Unquestionably, she found Hitler, personally, far more interesting than did Erwin—she was certainly less critical of the new Reichskanzler than was her husband. There was a touch of something close to hero-worship in her attitude toward Hitler. She seemed considerably less impressed with the Nazis overall, however—it can be fairly said that she merely tolerated them.
The most significant event in Rommel’s life during 1933 was not the accession of Hitler to the chancellorship, or the National Socialists’ take-over of the Reichstag. It was his promotion to major on October 1 and the accompanying transfer out of the Infantry School at Dresden and into the 17th Infantry Regiment in Goslar, in the Harz Mountains. There he would take command of III Battalion—the regiment’s Jäger battalion. Once again the round peg was slipped effortlessly into the round hole: his years as an instructor in Dresden taken together with his wartime experience bid fair to combine into a particularly dynamic battalion commander.
There was no Alpenkorps, there were no mountain battalions, in the Reichswehr: the drill and parade-ground traditions of such units were carried on by a handful of Jäger (“Hunter” or “Stalker”) battalions. But aside from a few distinctions in uniform and insignia, the Jäger battalions were, in fact, ordinary line units; they lacked any specialized training, and had no higher physical standards than did the Reichswehr’s other infantry battalions. That was an unsatisfactory state of affairs to Major Rommel: if his battalion was going to call itself a Jäger battalion, it would be a Jäger battalion, and no sooner had he arrived in Goslar than he set about making it one.
In a small, closed professional community such as was the Reichswehr, everyone knew everyone else by reputation, if not by name or even personally. Rommel, then, was not exactly an unknown quantity coming to the 17th Infantry: he had already acquired something of a reputation for his dynamic classes and lectures at the Infantry School; then there was his well-known ego, which would hardly have been a secret among his new colleagues at Goslar. Despite the Pour le Mérite and the Iron Cross First Class that he wore, his officers, likely believing that he had gone soft in four years as a classroom instructor and was no longer up to the rigors of commanding a combat unit, thought to take him down a peg. Not long after he had reported to his new posting, they invited him to climb to the top of a nearby mountain and then ski to the bottom. Rommel readily agreed, then invited them to repeat the excursion with him—three more times. The officers demurred at the suggestion of a fifth round trip and Rommel had made his point.
Rommel insisted, in the finest Jäger tradition, that all of his officers learn to hunt and shoot. He was firmly convinced that developing such skills improved junior officers’ tactical skills, by giving them a better, more practical appreciation of terrain and cover. He also insisted on a higher level of marksmanship for the other ranks, and made physical fitness a top priority for everyone. And he led by example, becoming a familiar sight every morning, jogging along the side of the road, his arms held up against his chest, his breathing deep and rhythmic, putting in his requisite 2 miles. And while he was strict, he was no martinet: he encouraged his men to seek him out when they encountered problems that could not be resolved through regular procedures and channels, or ask his counsel on personal issues. It was almost, but not quite, a paternalistic approach to command. He had learned in four years of warfare that young soldiers can readily come to regard their officers, who often were at best just a few years older, as father figures. The half-derisive, half-affectionate appellation “the Old Man” soldiers everywhere have given their commanding officers since the days of Leonidas’ hoplites has always been a many-layered one. Experience had taught Rommel that mutual trust and confidence between officers and men often meant the difference between life and death for both, and that in peacetime or war, maintaining an Olympian detachment from his men was not the way a good officer created such a bond.
Rommel would spend two years in command of III Battalion, and they would be two of the happiest years of his life. Secure in his profession, happy in his home and family, Rommel’s world remained largely insular, with little time for and even less interest in politics. But for all of his focus on his profession, Rommel could no longer ignore Hitler and the Nazis; events would conspire to ensure that he would be unable to remain the fundamentally apolitical officer he had been in the Reichswehr. Whereas it can reasonably be asserted that the Weimar Republic had ever entered his life, the Third Reich would positively intrude on it. In this he was no different than sixty-five million other Germans.
Immediately upon becoming chancellor, Adolf Hitler began to accrue power and alter the nature of the office. Virulent anti-Communism was part of National Socialist dogma, and the claim that Germany was on the brink of a Communist revolution had been one of the cornerstones of Nazi electioneering. When the Reichstag building was destroyed by arson on February 27, Hitler immediately blamed the German Communist Party and used the incident as a pretext for the suspension at will of habeas corpus throughout Germany. A month later, the Reichstag, controlled by Nazi-dominated coalition of extreme right-wing parties, passed the Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich (“Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich”) a blatant enabling act which allowed Hitler, as chancellor, to rule by decree for four years. Paul von Hindenburg, the former field marshal of the old Imperial Army, who had been elected the Republic’s second (and last) president, succeeding Friedrich Ebert, signed it without comment. Eighteen months later, in August 1934, Hindenburg was dead, and the last obstacle between Hitler and absolute personal power was removed; Hitler used the Enabling Act to merge the chancellorship with the presidency to create a new office, “der Führer.”
The summer of 1934 was filled with momentous events in Germany. In May, the soon-to-be-dreaded People’s Court, presided over by Roland Freisler, was established. On June 14, Benito Mussolini, Il Duce of Fascist Italy, and Adolf Hitler met for the first time; two weeks later, a non-aggression pact between Germany and Poland was signed. But one incident that summer would send tremors reverberating across Europe: the Night of the Long Knives, the systematic purge of the Nazi Sturmabteilung—the SA—which, by the time it was done, would bind Adolf Hitler and the German Army together in an insoluble bond of blood.
The SA was the spawn of the Freikorps, the quasi-military reactionary bands of ex-soldiers who fought gun-battles with communists, socialists, and liberals in the streets of German cities in the first years of the Republic, and the Nazi Party. Like the Freikorps, the SA filled its ranks with disillusioned and disgruntled ex-soldiers who despised the Republic, along with a leavening of beer-hall brawlers and street thugs. Known as the Brown-shirts for the distinctive color of their uniform, the SA was the official brute squad of the National Socialist German Workers Party, tasked with silencing dissenters and hecklers at Party rallies and gatherings, usually through the liberal use of fists, boots, brass knuckles and blackjacks. Originally small in number, as the Party grew, so did the SA, led by Captain Ernst Röhm, a one-time officer in the Bavarian Army and later the Reichswehr; he had been dismissed from the latter for his political activities. By the late 1920s, as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartie grew from a regional political curiosity in Bavaria to a nationwide organization, to the point where popular reference to it had been reduced to merely its initials—the NSDAP—or contracted into simply the Nazi Party, the SA grew apace, until by 1930, it numbered a million members. By now it was the Nazis’ “official” militia, its mission to intimidate into impotence by whatever means necessary the Party’s political opposition. In keeping with National Socialist doctrine, communists, socialists, liberals, and Jews were the priority targets of such actions—which included vandalism, arson, assault, and murder. Gun battles in the streets of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, and other major German cities with Communists and their sympathizers, usual
ly the Rotfrontkämpferbund (the Red Soldiers’ Front—a Communist Party-supported counter to the SA) became commonplace. June 1932 saw the worst single month of political violence prior to the Nazi assumption of power: there were more than 400 street battles all across Germany; 82 people were killed, some of them innocent bystanders. The violence served two purposes: one was the suppression of organized political opposition to the Hitler and the Nazis, the other was coercion of the population into supporting the Nazis by persuading the German people that the violence would end when Hitler came to power.
It was not to be. The SA had always been a semi-autonomous organization within the Nazi Party structure, and by January 1933 it was suffering from a severe case of divided loyalties as a consequence. While Adolf Hitler, now Reichskanzler Hitler, was the titular head of the Sturmabteilung, its true leader was Röhm, who was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Hitler and unhappy with what he regarded as the National Socialists’ “unfinished revolution.” With the Nazis’ political opponents all sufficiently cowed, or having been eliminated outright, in the weeks which followed Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Nazis’ requirement for the SA’s strong-arm tactics evaporated; the SA seemed blithely unaware of this fact. Now ordinary German citizens, police officers, or even in some cases, foreign diplomats, became targets of SA violence, as the “Storm Troopers,” as the SA men styled themselves, gave vent to the habits of violence they had followed for the previous decade. Rather than rein in his thugs, Röhm encouraged them, seeing the potential for instability their actions represented as an opportunity to press for a “second revolution,” its objective being the dispossession of the businessmen and industrialists, the same conservative elements of German society which had financed the rise of the Nazi Party, seeing it as a potential bulwark against communism and radical socialism.
There had always been a genuinely “socialist” wing of the Nazi hierarchy, the most prominent among them being the propaganda minister, Joseph Göbbels, Gottfried Feder, one of the founders of the original Deutsche Arbeiterpartie who had pretensions of being an economist, Walther Darré, one of a handful of Nazis possessed of a PhD and who could at least make a claim to being an intellectual, and Röhm. With their generally feeble grasp of economics, these distinctly “socialist” National Socialists spurned capitalism, advocating instead nationalizing most industries, worker control of the means of production, and the confiscation and redistribution of property and wealth of the upper class. The Brownshirts, whose beer-swilling seems to have blinded them to political reality, regarded themselves as the spearhead of the “Nationalsozialistische revolution,” never realizing that the true purpose of the National Socialist movement was solely to elevate Adolf Hitler to power. The Nazis never truly possessed a coherent political or economic doctrine, an awkward fact for Röhm and his cronies, as it rendered any pretensions to a true revolution meaningless. Nevertheless, the self-deception continued, with Röhm publicly declaring to the ranks of the Sturmabteilung that once the Nazis’ grasp on the levers of power was sufficiently firm, even more radical changes would take place in the German political and social landscape, with the SA being the chief beneficiary.
Natürliche, this was alarming to the German industrialists, particularly the firms of Krupp, Thyssen, and I. G. Farben, who had been the key financial backers of Hitler’s rise to power, and they demanded assurances that the “second revolution” rhetoric of Röhm and company was just that—hot air. Hitler, whose position was not yet absolutely secure, and who knew that he needed the continued support of the industrialists, now and in the years immediately ahead as he rearmed Germany in preparation for settling with the Allies once and for all the hash of Versailles, soothed their worried brows. He would act, he reassured them, long before Röhm could begin to bring about his “second revolution.”
By the beginning of 1933, Röhm was exploring ways to expand the power of the SA, if need be at Hitler’s expense, to make that revolutionary dream come true. Having been given a seat on the National Defense Council, he soon began to demand a more expanded role for the SA in the German armed forces, envisioning a day in what he was confident would be the not-too-distant future when his storm troopers, now over three million strong, replaced the Reichswehr as Germany’s national army. In a letter sent to General Walther von Reichenau, the chief of the Reichswehr’s Ministerial Office, the liaison between the army and the Nazi party, on October 2, 1933, Röhm declared: “I regard the Reichswehr now only as a training school for the German people. The conduct of war, and therefore of mobilization as well, in the future is the task of the SA.”46
The army was justifiably alarmed, as it regarded, and with good reason, the SA to be an undisciplined mob, brawlers well-versed in breaking heads in street fights but little else, hardly a combat-trained, let alone combat-ready, army. There were also open allegations of widespread corruption and immorality within the ranks of the SA which the Reichswehr found intolerable. Hitler, who had attained only the rank of gefreiter (corporal) during the Great War, and knew that he would have never risen out of the noncommissioned ranks in the old Imperial Army, privately shared much of Röhm’s animosity toward the army’s traditionalists, with their aristocratic pretensions and preferrences, as the army would one day discover to its cost. But for Hitler, the support of the Reichswehr (and to a lesser extent the Reichsmarine) was vital to his ultimate ambition: the (illegal under the German constitution) succession to the ailing Paul von Hindenburg as Reichspräsident. A compromise of sorts was offered to Röhm, whereby in exchange for his formal acknowledgment that the SA was subordinate to the Reichswehr, it would announced that the SA was now an auxiliary arm of the Reichswehr, transforming Röhm’s private militia into an official arm of the government. Röhm, however, despite what he might say publicly, was far from satisfied with what he regarded as less than half a loaf, and declared to his comrades that he did not feel at all bound to accept orders “from that ridiculous corporal.”47
The deciding moment for Hitler apparently came on April 11, 1934, when he met with the senior officers of the Reichswehr and the Reichsmarine aboard the navy’s new flagship, Deutschland. It was here that he first openly sought the support of the armed forces for his plans to unify the offices of Reichskanzler and Reichspräsident following von Hindenburg’s imminent demise. There would be a price, he knew, but he was confident it would be one he was willing to pay. It was: the assembled generals and admirals required that Hitler pledge to expand the Reichswehr and Reichsmarine; recognize their primacy as Germany’s only land and naval armed forces; emasculate the SA; and marginalize Ernst Röhm. Hitler, seeing that such a pact would leave himself and the offizierkorps mutually indebted, and counting on an opportunity arising in the future by which he could call his half of the debt due, agreed without reservation.
The last day of June was set for the beginning of what would become known as the Night of the Long Knives, and lists of SA members marked for summary execution—along with particularly bothersome opponents of Hitler and the Nazis, as well as a handful of individuals with whom particular Party members had long-standing grudges—were drawn up. At dawn on June 30, Röhm was arrested by Hitler personally at the SA leader’s home in Bad Wiessee; this act was the signal for the rest of the Nazi assassination squads to begin their work. Between June 30 and July 2, 1934, the whole of the SA leadership was purged; at least 85 people were done to death, including General Kurt von Schleicher and his wife—von Schliecher had been Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor; a born intriguer, von Schliecher was a staunch opponent of Hitler, if only because the new chancellor stood in the way of his own ambitions. Gustav Ritter von Kahr, a Bavarian state commissioner who put down Hitler’s abortive 1923 coup—immortalized as the “Beer Hall Putsch”—and Gregor Strasser, a one-time Nazi who had broken with Hitler were also among the victims. When the slaughter was over, the power of the SA was broken forever: although the organization would only cease to exist when the Third Reich itself was extinguish
ed in 1945, it would never again play any meaningful role in German politics.
There was a high irony in purging the SA leadership and marginalizing the SA itself: Hitler had removed from the scene the only force in Germany which could have protected him from the army, should the offizierkorps choose not to follow him. The nascent SS, though numerous, was still too poorly armed and organized to ensure that Hitler would or could remain in power. Yet such was Hitler’s own belief, rightly as it turned out, that he had the measure of both the officer corps and the mass of the German people: in their relief at the removal of the threat of an SA-led revolution, they would rally to him, military and civilians alike binding themselves to Hitler in a horrible parody of a blood oath. His moral ascendency over the army was now all but complete.
In this Hitler was the beneficiary of Germany’s experience with the Freikorps and the Femen: however despised it was, the violence which they had introduced into German politics in the half-decade following the Great War had gradually become an accepted part of the political process in the Weimar Republic. Thus the German people had not merely resigned themselves to the sort of street thuggery the Nazis had carried on in the successive election campaigns leading up to their triumph in January 1933: they had by this time come to accept as natural that this was the way things were done, especially by the myrmidons of the New Order. The Night of the Long Knives would prove to be the cats-paw of the whirlwind that would be reaped by the Third Reich, sown by the wind of the Second. Otto von Bismarck had assured the Germans more than sixty years earlier that “The great issues of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority resolutions, but by iron and blood. . .” but the Iron Chancellor had been speaking of how irreconcilable differences between nations would be settled, not the manner in which the Volk would decide disputes among themselves. Yet his words had set the stage for exactly that, and it was precisely what the Germans had chosen to do: having accepted violence as not merely the ultimate but the preferred arbiter between nations, it was inevitable that they should embrace “eisen und blut” in settling their own affairs.
Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel Page 14
