The Plots Against Hitler

by Danny Orbach

  Few of the many Berliners who witnessed the flames in horror imagined that the new Reich chancellor, Adolf Hitler, would use the fire as an excuse to uproot all opposition networks, organizations, and parties in Germany. The chancellor, appointed only one month earlier, on January 30, destroyed in less than one year political parties of all persuasions, the autonomy of the German states, and the powerful trade unions. Dramatic changes also swept the civil service, the judicial system, schools and universities, and, most importantly, the army. By late 1934, Hitler and his Nazi Party were the sole masters of Germany, unobstructed by any effective form of active or potential opposition.

  The politicians of the new regime were quick to arrive at the burning building. First among them was Hermann Göring, one of Hitler’s paladins and speaker of the Reichstag. The commander of the firefighters gave him a report on the attempts to extinguish the fire, but Göring was more interested in extinguishing something else. “The guilty are the Communist revolutionaries,” he said. “This act is the beginning of the Communist uprising, which must be promptly crushed with an iron fist.” Hitler and his propaganda master, Josef Goebbels, were not far behind. “From this day on,” declared the new chancellor, “anyone standing in our way will be done for. Softness will not be understood by the German people. The Communist deputies have to be hanged tonight.”2

  The Reichstag, one of the last relics of the dying Weimar Republic, was reduced to a blackened shell. Alarm swept the country, fed by sensationalist headlines in the morning papers. “AGAINST MURDERERS, ARSONISTS AND POISONERS THERE CAN ONLY BE RIGOROUS DEFENSE,” read one of them. “AGAINST TERROR, RECKONING THROUGH THE DEATH PENALTY.” Alarm soon became hysteria. “They wanted to send armed gangs to the villages to murder and start fires,” noted Luise Solmitz, a conservative schoolteacher, in her diary.3 “So the Communists had burned down the Reichstag,” wrote Sebastian Haffner, a young jurist and one of the few remaining skeptics.

  That could well be so, it was even to be expected. Funny, though, why they should choose the Reichstag, an empty building, where no one would profit from a fire. Well, perhaps it really had been intended as the “signal” for the uprising, which had been prevented by the “decisive measures” taken by the government. That was what the papers said, and it sounded plausible. Funny also that the Nazis got so worked up about the Reichstag. Up till then they had contemptuously called it a “hot air factory.” Now it was suddenly the holy of holies that had been burned down . . . The main thing is: the danger of a Communist uprising has been averted and we can sleep easy.4

  Neither the government nor the Communists were sleeping easy. On the eve of the Reichstag fire, Hitler had yet to win support from the majority of Germans. The National Socialist Party was still far from a Reichstag majority. The opposition parties from the left, the Social Democrats and the Communists, were still major political powers.5 Now, the Nazis used the red scare to rally large parts of the German public to their cause. Many people, even if cold to Hitler and his radical ideas, began to consider him the lesser evil. Others, especially adherents of the National Conservative right, turned to the Nazi leader as a redeemer. The teacher Luise Solmitz, though married to a converted Jew, was one of them. “The feelings of most Germans are dominated by Hitler,” she confided in her journal. “His fame rises to the stars. He is the savior of a wicked, sad world.”6 The fears of the public were exploited to kick off a half-planned, half-improvised campaign for total political, cultural, and ideological subjugation of Germany. Needless to say, the charged atmosphere made it easier to neutralize all centers of power from which prospective opposition might arise.

  Who really burned the Reichstag? Was it a National Socialist sham, or an act of solitary lunacy committed by van der Lubbe? Scholars have debated this question ever since.7 In any case, the Nazis were the only winners. When they formed the government, they demanded only two portfolios apart from the chancellorship: the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Reich and the corresponding ministry in Prussia, the largest and most important German state. They knew what they were doing. These two ministries gave them total control over the police, the secret police, and internal security apparatus all over the Reich. Using their newly won power, they set out to destroy the opposition root and branch by way of propaganda, temptation of Germans who were not yet convinced Nazis, and terror against remaining members of the opposition.

  Resistance became ever more dangerous. One of the founding fathers of the German resistance movement, Hans Bernd Gisevius, wrote bitterly later, “Was it the Reichstag alone? Was not all Berlin on fire?”8 The campaign to eliminate the opposition and its institutions was a part of a larger process, which was later called Gleichschaltung (bringing into line). Its intention was to take full control of German society by injecting National Socialist ideology into all aspects of life, accompanied by lucrative carrots for collaborators and sharp sticks for anyone who dared to resist.

  On February 28, one day after the Reichstag fire, the constitutional barriers were broken. The new government passed emergency decrees “for the protection of people and state,” allowing it to monitor letters, telegrams, and phone calls, and to restrict the freedom of speech and the press. More importantly, the right of habeas corpus was suspended, so enemies of the regime could not even expect proper redress by law.

  The first victims were the Communists. The Nazis blamed them for the fire and ordered the arrest of their Reichstag section leader. In just a few weeks, the party disintegrated: its newspapers closed, organizations were banned, and all leaders were placed under arrest. The Communist force, deemed a mortal threat by so many Germans, was paralyzed. Its ranks in disarray, it offered almost no resistance. Its swift disappearance surprised its supporters and many ordinary Germans alike; they had once thought of it as an armed and violent revolutionary force. By contrast, no one anticipated anything from the Social Democrats. Haffner wrote,

  A Communist attack was what we expected. The Communists were determined people, with fierce expressions. They raised their fists in salute and had weapons—at least, they used guns often enough in the everyday pub brawls. They boasted continually about the strength of their organization, and they had probably learned how to do “these things” in Russia. The Nazis had left no one in doubt that they wanted to destroy them. It was natural, indeed obvious, that the Communists would retaliate.9

  But they did nothing of the kind.

  Why did the Communist Party go down so quickly in spite of long preparations for violent action against both democracy and fascism? Peter Hoffmann has argued that its leaders were fettered by their own dogmatic ideology.10 They and their patron, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, believed that the rise of the Nazis was nothing but the death rattle of the liberal bourgeoisie, that is, the Weimar Republic. The Communist Party, said a Russian diplomat in Berlin to Friedrich Stampfer, editor of the Social Democratic journal Vorwärts, would surely take the government, but only after Hitler had destroyed democracy to clear the way.11 This false confidence led the Communists to make disastrous decisions, above all their refusal to join the Social Democrats in a united anti-Nazi front. Finally, the Communist Party’s predictions of a popular revolution failed to materialize, and its politicians were surprised by a determined and peremptory rival. As a party, it ceased to exist.

  The Social Democratic Party, known as the main rival of the Nazis and the strongest political mainstay of the Weimar Republic, was paralyzed as well, though for very different reasons. Its leaders were fixated on “legality,” even when their rivals trampled every law in their quest for absolute power. Somehow, the Social Democratic leaders believed, they would be protected: by the police, by the courts, by the state, by someone. They believed this until it was too late.

  The Social Democratic Party had not always been so lethargic. During the stormy year of 1920, in response to a monarchist coup d’état by conservative politician Wolfgang Kapp, the party mobilized the workers for a general strike. The mass protests forced Kap
p and his lieutenants to give up power, and practically restored the Weimar Republic. But in 1933, after the Reichstag fire, the Social Democratic leaders did not call for a general strike, the most effective weapon they had. Instead, they opted to comply, in order not to give the government “excuses” to ban them, as if the Nazis needed any.

  The National Socialists, meanwhile, were constantly moving. In March, using the crisis to bolster their hold over the state, they drafted the so-called Enabling Act, which allowed them to pass legislation without parliamentary approval. That law, carefully drafted, laid the legal basis for the future dictatorship of the Third Reich. The parties of the center and the right decided, foolishly enough, to vote for the act. Still not knowing Hitler well enough, they thought that would give them enough credit with the Nazis to survive. Hitler himself did everything he could to soothe them: he promised to use his newly won power only rarely, against a Communist revolution and only after due consultation with the president. Still, he lacked the parliamentary majority of two-thirds, required to approve the new law. The Communists and the Social Democrats still held a blocking majority. The Nazis, though, would not be stopped by such trifles. On March 5, all Communist deputies were arrested. Göring, president of the Reichstag, made it clear that if necessary, Social Democrats would be kept out of the chamber to secure the right number of votes.

  The left-wing deputies who did make it into the provisional chamber of the Reichstag, located in a Berlin opera house, discovered an atmosphere far from amiable. The SA, the private militia of the Nazi Party, filled the galleries and intimidated the deputies with loud interjections, boos, and singing. Still, the Social Democrats did not give up. Their leader, Otto Wels, delivered the swan song of the parliamentary left in Germany. “We, the German Social Democrats,” he said, “pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, liberty and socialism. No enabling act will give you the power to destroy these indestructible, eternal values.”12 Hitler was not impressed: “You are late, but still you come! . . . No one needs you anymore . . . The star of Germany will rise, and yours will fall. Your death bells are already tolling . . . I am not interested in your votes. Germany will be free, but not through you.”13

  The death bells of the Social Democratic Party were indeed tolling, to the cheers and applause of their rivals. On June 22, 1933, National Socialist Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick declared the party “an enemy of state and nation,” and ordered it dissolved forthwith. The biggest party of the German left ceased to exist.

  The parties of the center and the right did not fare any better, in spite of their previous cooperation with Hitler. On June 21, police and SA forces stormed the headquarters of the Nationalist People’s Party. The party leader, Alfred Hugenberg, was a political ally of Hitler and shared many of his ultranationalist, imperialist, and anti-Semitic views. He even served as a cabinet minister. But the Nazis showed no mercy to the person whose close cooperation helped them to win power. The party was forced to dissolve itself, and on June 26, Hugenberg resigned from the government. One week later, on July 4 and 5, the two Catholic parties were forced to disband as well. Their fate was sealed on July 14, when the government issued the following act, turning Germany officially into a one-party state: “The German National Socialist Workers’ party is the only political party in Germany. Any individual taking upon himself to form an organization of another political party, or to establish another political party, is subject to imprisonment for up to three years, or detention from six months to three years.”14

  That was the end of the political parties, the most natural, most important source of legal opposition in Germany. The Gleichschaltung, however, did not stop there. Now Hitler turned to the other centers of national power, and swept them aside without resistance.

  That outcome was far from obvious. Germany had a strong tradition of regionalism, going back to the preunification era. Before 1871, the German-speaking territories were divided into numerous independent principalities with their own currencies, governments, and armies. When these principalities saw the need, many did not hesitate to fight each other or to form alliances with outside powers. Some, like Prussia, were considered world powers. After the unification, under Bismarck, the newly formed German Empire did not abolish the principalities but instead rearranged them under its own political authority. Even in 1918, when a wave of revolution swept through the principalities and turned them into republics, the federal structure of the country was kept intact and the states retained local governments of their own. One of them, Bavaria, had been on the verge of separatism in the early 1920s.

  Now things were different. The local governments kowtowed to the regime, only to be tossed out one after another. Instead of elected prime ministers, the new rulers appointed National Socialist governors (Gauleiter), who answered not to their constituencies but only to the Nazi Party in Berlin. Only Bavaria, the southern Catholic state with its strong local identity, resisted, before a coup solved that problem. National Socialist militiamen, working in close cooperation with the police, stormed local prime minister Dr. Heinrich Held’s office. Held was removed and replaced by one of Hitler’s lieutenants. Now, Bavaria, too, had been integrated in the Gleichschaltung.

  The trade unions, which boasted millions of members from all over the Reich, were also quick to fade away. To the surprise of some of their more ardent supporters, the scenario of 1920 did not repeat itself, and a general strike against the new regime was not even considered. The trade-union leaders believed that by going along with Hitler, they might reach a modus vivendi with the regime. Therefore, they competed with one another to declare the most ardent loyalty to Hitler. That didn’t help them. The Nazi leadership did not tolerate competing power centers, let alone ones hitherto associated with the left.

  In this case, the Nazis resorted to a ploy. Hitler declared May 1 to be Workers’ Day, a National Socialist holiday, and the trade unions were invited to celebrate it along with the party. The festivities were boisterous, with an impressive parade held by both National Socialists and trade unionists. Years later, Communist activist Franz Jung bemoaned the fact that he and his comrades “marched thickly surrounded by SA, SS, and Hitler Youth.” An ideal picture of class harmony, indeed.15

  The scheme worked as planned. The leaders of the trade unions felt warm and secure, only to be mortally surprised the next day. The brouhaha of the parades had not quite died down when the trade unions were confronted by an all-out attack. Their offices were stormed, documents were seized, and they—who had really tried to prove their loyalty to the new regime—were duly led to concentration camps. With the trade unions all but gone, the German workers were quickly swallowed in the maelstrom of the Gleichschaltung and reorganized in a countrywide Nazi organization called the Labor Front.

  Other power centers were also easily neutralized. From April 7, 1933, onward, government ministries were purged of Jews and political undesirables. Sweeping purges were also made in courts, police forces, schools, and universities. Most intellectuals did not even try to protest on behalf of their demoted colleagues. In fact, most of them, including some luminaries such as the philosopher Martin Heidegger, closed ranks behind the new regime. Resistance also failed to come from industrial, economic, and financial circles. After overcoming some initial misgivings, the leading industrialists, businessmen, and financiers quickly joined in to grab a piece of the pie. Hitler and his close colleagues knew how to seduce them: the banning of strikes and trade unions, a moratorium on the unpopular democratic regime, and most importantly, large-scale rearmament, which carried the potential for enormous profits.

  “It cannot be denied, he has grown. Surprisingly for his opponents, the demagogue and party leader, the fanatic and rabble-rouser seems to be developing into a real statesman.” That was the March 21 entry in the diary of novelist Erich Ebermayer, who was by no means a Nazi.16 He was not alone. Many other Germans were enchanted by Hitler’s charisma and found their place among the masses march
ing for Gleichschaltung. On November 12, 1933, general elections were held again. The turnout was massive, reaching more than 95 percent. Only the National Socialist Party had been allowed to run, so Hitler “won” in a landslide: 92.11 percent voted for him, with only 7.89 percent daring to dissent or abstain.17 These elections, of course, were held under dictatorial conditions, with no competition, and were fueled by massive government propaganda. The secrecy of the ballot was also not ensured. Still, the massive turnout suggested that most Germans were sympathetic to the new regime.

  Hitler and his advisers wisely avoided some obvious pitfalls. When faced by demands of Nazi radicals to stage a second social revolution, the chancellor flatly refused, an effective way to win support among the revolution-wary upper classes. This was especially true for the army. This proud, stiffly conservative organization had a long tradition of autonomy and claiming political power. Many saw it as an independent force, the only refuge from Nazi lawlessness. However, from early on, it was clear to keen observers that this was an illusion. Unlike the Social Democrats and the Communists, the army was not a rival but an ally of the Nazi regime. True, some of Hitler’s top commanders looked down on his barbarism, but even they were ready to cooperate with him. The higher echelons of the Reichswehr (later to be renamed the Wehrmacht) were hoping for a compromise regime, led by Hitler but dominated by themselves. Most young soldiers were loyal to the regime, as were many other German youths. Even senior officers began, in growing numbers, to abandon the dominant cautious approach to become dyed-in-the-wool Nazis. Dissenters were mostly silenced or made to retire. Foremost among them was Gen. Kurt von Hammerstein, the commander in chief and an implacable rival of Hitler. In 1934, a handful of officers still tried to fight the incorporation of racial theory into military regulations, but their resistance faded quickly, too. The army slowly but surely bound itself to Hitler’s leadership.