Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  Yet all of these factors are insufficient to explain why Hitler succeeded in his second attempt to gain power. He was neither swept into the office of Chancellor by the masses, nor was he simply adopted by President Hindenburg and those around him; 30 January 1933 was possible only because Hitler was very skilful in pursuing a number of strategies to gain power (at times in parallel with each other) and was finally able to combine them: the alliance with the right-wing conservatives (the so-called Harzburg Front); agreements with the Catholic Centre Party; the attempt to use the pressure of the streets to make a solo bid for power; finally, the demand (as leader of the strongest party) to become Chancellor of a government backed by the President. Admittedly, he was successful only because he had contacts in the conservative establishment. In the final years of the Republic they repeatedly made significant concessions to him and in the end, when all viable alternatives seemed to have been exhausted, they agreed on 30 January to a compromise that gave Hitler the scope he needed to ‘seize power’. At the same time, he had pulled off the feat of holding together the rapidly expanding and very diverse National Socialist ‘movement’, within which there was a growing threat of internal conflict. In this he was aided by the ‘Führer myth’ that had been created around him and acted as an integrating factor. The ‘visionary’ Führer was relieved of the tiresome need to provide concrete detail about unclear points of the Party programme or to make frequent statements about the political issues of the day. Hitler prevented the creation of a leadership apparatus with clearly defined roles (which would have imposed obligations upon him) and instead preferred a leadership style that focused on individuals. Thus surrounded by an aura of unapproachability and unpredictability, he hovered as the ultimate arbiter above the, at times, warring Party factions and ensured that their disparate aims were, as far as possible, not openly fought over. For Party members, the Führer figure embodied the hope of imminent victory and this expectation could be kept alive over a considerable period of time, even if at the end of 1932 his supporters were showing clear signs of weariness.

  By contrast, the ‘Führer myth’ seems to have played only a limited role in the NSDAP’s election victories. Although a relatively coherent National Socialist milieu, in which ‘belief in the Führer’ was an essential element, did form around the Party, the majority of NSDAP voters probably did not vote for the Party because they saw Hitler as a saviour, the personification of their ‘last hope,’ but first and foremost because they wanted a way of registering a protest against the Weimar ‘system’ and hoped the Party, by now the strongest political force in Germany, would bring concrete improvements in the economic and social situation. Accordingly, in the final years of the Weimar Republic NSDAP election propaganda focused primarily on ‘issues’, although they were given highly charged demagogic treatment. Hitler as ‘Führer’ was central to propaganda only in the Presidential elections of 1932 and the November elections of the same year, and both times he was unsuccessful: in the Presidential elections Hitler was the clear loser to Hindenburg and in November 1932 the Party lost 4 per cent of its vote.

  Once he had become Chancellor (on the back, significantly, of conservative support), Hitler, unlike in 1923, was able to break out relatively quickly from the ‘frame’ designed to contain him. He had at his disposal millions of active supporters ready to bring the ‘National Socialist revolution’ to every part of society. But the fact that by the summer of 1933 the Nazis had neutralized all political opposition and by the summer of 1934 had set up a dictatorship is due in large measure to Hitler’s extremely skilful direction of events. For, as circumstances demanded, he mobilized his diverse supporters or pulled them back, and, when necessary, eliminated less biddable sections of his support with brutal force. Once in possession of total power Hitler established a leadership style suited to his political requirements and his personality. Consistently evading any collective and formalized decision-making, he aimed to personalize the political process to an extreme degree, intending to shape it as an active dictator whose power could no longer be legitimately curtailed from any quarter. As ‘Führer’ who felt responsible for just about everything, he now had the mechanism with which to implement his wide-ranging ideas systematically with the support of his loyal followers.

  While in the process of seizing power, Hitler had already intervened in foreign policy and brought foreign affairs relatively quickly under his control. At first his ideas on this subject seemed to conform fully to the policy, which enjoyed popular support, of revising the Versailles Treaty. Between 1933 and 1936 he swept aside the military restrictions imposed by Versailles and through the reincorporation of the Saarland managed to achieve the first of the revisionist territorial demands. Yet as early as 1933 and 1934 his ‘revolutionary’ attempt to ‘coordinate’ Germany’s neighbour Austria from within showed that he intended to leave behind traditional revisionist policies. In order definitively to move beyond them, he worked from 1936 onwards to create an anti-communist bloc that would include Poland, Italy, several south-eastern European states, Japan, and even Great Britain. Keeping the creation of this bloc in view, during the course of 1937 Hitler increasingly developed a politics of acting from strength.

  He accepted the reverses that followed from this, in particular the ultimate failure of his plan for an alliance with Britain, since, as a result, he no longer had to take account of Britain as a potential partner in his foreign policy. At the end of 1937, at any rate, he saw a favourable opportunity to annex Austria and Czechoslovakia the following year, without having to reckon with interventions from France, Britain, or the Soviet Union. After embarking on this course, he set in motion an accelerated process of forcible territorial expansion that culminated, via the annexation of Austria (the Anschluss), the weekend crisis of May 1938, the Munich Agreement, the defeat of Czechoslovakia, and the occupation of Memel, in a war against the western powers. In doing so, Hitler was in no way being swept along by events, but rather he dictated the objectives, the means to be employed, and the pace of events, in the face of serious misgivings among the leadership and the generals. What was crucial was his determination to achieve his foreign policy goals regardless of any conflict with the western powers. Indeed, he was resolved to embark on this, to his mind unavoidable, confrontation sooner rather than later, even though the set of alliances he had aimed to create did not materialize and the foreign agreements and alliances he did achieve turned out to be largely ineffective.

  To guarantee support domestically for his decision to go to war he similarly made early and persistent interventions in the most important areas of policy. His overriding aim was to achieve, at any price and against all opposition, an extraordinary level of rearmament, the basis for his high-risk foreign policy, and at the same time to weld the German nation into a ‘national community’ prepared for war, united, racially homogeneous, and ready to serve. Every important stage in the rearmament process can be traced back in detail to Hitler’s decisions. His generally exaggerated and, in view of the strained economic base, seemingly delusional demands sprang from his strategy of constantly demanding too much so that he would extract the maximum effort from the government rearmament team. At the same time, he kept a close eye on the economic distortions and social tensions that inevitably resulted, intervened, and repeatedly took counter-measures in order to ensure that rearmament remained the top priority and that the direction of his policy would meet with acquiescence. This is also the context in which we must view his personal backing for prestige projects such as the motorways and the Volkswagen, which were designed to give a population tired of austerity the prospect of prosperity in the affluent National Socialist society of the future. Convinced since the start of his career of its absolute effectiveness, Hitler reserved for himself the leading role in propaganda both at home and abroad and used it to determine even press headlines and topics for the cinema newsreels. He paid great attention to all fundamental issues concerning the structure of the administration an
d of public law and the ‘constitution’ of the Third Reich and was watchful that they were settled in line with his ideas, while in Party matters, although he left routine business to the Reichsleiters, he nevertheless took care to prevent either a powerful deputy or a governing body from emerging. He retained the authority to make final decisions about the structure, the allocation of spheres of responsibility, and appointments to senior positions within the NSDAP; at internal meetings he pledged the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters to his policies, and demonstrated his absolute claim to be ‘Führer’ at regular mass events (such as the Party Rallies in Nuremberg and the November commemorations in Munich) in a positively ritualized form. As supreme ‘master builder’ of the Third Reich, he attempted to assert his regime’s claim to power through monumental building projects. Styling himself a serious artist and connoisseur of art, he intervened actively in Nazi cultural policy, for example in his ‘cultural addresses,’ which were heralded as being ground-breaking, and also in his role as a patron.

  He also put serious effort into the regime’s policy towards the Churches. As far as the Catholic Church was concerned, his aim was to eliminate ‘political Catholicism’, and although he gave an assurance in 1933 that German Catholicism would be preserved, he did in fact try to back-pedal in the years that followed. As early as 1934 he failed in his project of neutralizing German Protestantism by turning it into a Reich Church with the aid of the German Christians. From then on he wavered between two policies. On the one hand, he instigated campaigns against the Churches on several occasions (1935, 1936, and 1937) with the aim of bringing about a consistent separation of Church and state and marginalizing the Churches, but on the other hand he took a number of initiatives, in the interests of internal unity and rearmament, to establish a modus vivendi with them. When he ceased his attacks on the Churches in the summer of 1937 the second course of action in the end prevailed. Among his entourage, however, he made his fundamentally anti-Christian attitude only too evident, continually emphasizing that the ultimate ‘day of reckoning’ for the Churches was yet to come. By contrast, his policies with regard to all those – Jews, the ‘racially inferior’, ‘asocials’ – who could not belong to the homogeneous ‘national community’ he was aiming to create were significantly more consistent, although still influenced by tactical considerations. From the beginning Hitler, who since the start of his political career had accorded huge significance to these issues, controlled all fundamental decisions concerning the regime’s anti-Semitic policies, gave decisive impetus to ‘policy on hereditary illness’, which included compulsory sterilization and abortion on ‘eugenic’ grounds, and in the final months before the outbreak of war personally initiated the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme.

  His virtually limitless power, the elimination of formal procedures for reaching decisions, and the extreme curtailment of decision-making processes, also his powerful presence both in foreign policy and in various core areas of domestic politics allowed Hitler – and this is crucial to the way he exercised power – to respond in critical situations to complex issues in an ad hoc and effective manner and one that had far-reaching consequences. In the process he combined technical and political issues in an extremely idiosyncratic way, wrong-footed everyone by shifting the emphasis onto new topics, and thus reshaped the political agenda to suit his purposes. Although he had his ideological idées fixes, he could nonetheless demonstrate an extraordinary degree of flexibility, which confounded both opponents and colleagues and made him unpredictable even to those who knew him best. His ability to combine domestic and foreign policy effectively became apparent as early as the autumn of 1933: in the midst of the series of large-scale events and propaganda campaigns that publicly marked the uniting of the German nation under his leadership he made the surprise decision to leave the League of Nations in spectacular fashion and immediately had this move confirmed by a plebiscite and fresh elections. The overwhelming support was hailed by the regime as the culmination of the process of national unification.

  The reality was, of course, different. In the spring of 1934 the economic problems were coming to a head. There was widespread discontent and bitter conflicts broke out over the role of the SA, while a conservative opposition formed around the Vice Chancellor, Franz von Papen. Taken together, all these developments threatened to produce a serious crisis for the regime, one that Hitler ‘resolved’ by claiming that the real cause of these problems was a broadly based conspiracy, the alleged instigators of which he neutralized by a double blow struck at the SA leadership and various figures in the conservative opposition. In addition, he exploited this opportunity to cut the Catholic opposition, apparently regrouping, ruthlessly down to size. The following year he ‘sorted out’ internal political disputes that were emerging from the, once again, precarious economic situation and also from the continued attacks mounted by the Party mob on Jews, the Churches, and the forces of ‘reaction’. He made the surprise move of having the Reichstag pass the Nuremberg Laws during the Party Rally in 1935, thereby using the ‘resolution of the Jewish question’ as the Nazis’ political cure-all to which all other problems were subordinated.

  When in 1936 the rapid pace of rearmament was threatened by the acute crisis surrounding the supply of raw materials and foreign exchange, Hitler again intervened decisively by cutting across the boundaries of individual areas of policy. In April he conferred special economic powers on Göring and charged him in the late summer with the implementation of the Four-Year Plan. In doing so Hitler made it clear that the additional finance required was to be raised from the Jewish minority. German intervention in the Spanish Civil War, entrusted to Göring in July of the same year, was not only a strategic decision but was also designed to secure Germany raw materials as a quid pro quo. The appointment of Himmler as Chief of Police in June and the agreement made with him for the police to move to a ‘general prevention’ strategy, resulting in more punitive measures being taken against ‘troublemakers’, was designed to further underpin the unpopular rearmament policy. His personal initiative in launching the Volkswagen project shortly after aimed to offer the promise of a prosperous future to offset the anxieties of the present.

  Hitler exploited the embarrassing affair involving War Minister Blomberg and army chief Fritsch in February 1938 to carry out a purge of top diplomatic and military personnel securing him much greater power to intervene in foreign policy and the Wehrmacht. And he lost no time in testing out the effectiveness of these powers, not least to transform his loss of prestige following the crisis into a triumphant success. For only a week after the end of the Blomberg–Fritsch crisis he began to put massive pressure on the Austrian government as a prelude to the ‘coordination’ of Germany’s neighbour. When he met with unexpected resistance, within a month he had orchestrated the occupation and the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria. Having thus used a domestic political crisis to initiate the policy of expansion by force that he had announced in November 1937, after only a little more than two months he took advantage of rapidly developing foreign policy tensions to intervene drastically in domestic affairs: He reacted to the week-end crisis of May 1938, which once again he perceived as a serious blow to his prestige, not only by deciding to crush Czechoslovakia in the near future but also by ordering the acceleration of rearmament. The implementation of this decision led very quickly to an unprecedented mobilization of the German economy and society for war. This involved a far-reaching refocusing of the Four-Year Plan on the production of the immediate requirements for war, the conscription of civilian workers, large-scale arrests of the ‘work-shy’, and the diversion of the resources of the German construction industry to work on the western defensive wall [‘West Wall’].

  At the height of the Sudeten crisis he was confronted with clear evidence of the limits to his expansionist policies; the anticipated crushing of Czechoslovakia had been frustrated after he was compelled to accept the Munich Agreement. The reluctance of the population to go to war had als
o become evident. Again he responded by striking a double blow. At the beginning of October 1938 he ordered yet another exorbitant increase in rearmament and only a few weeks later, on 9 November, he instigated the November pogrom. This allegedly spontaneous wave of anti-Semitic violence issuing ‘from the people’ was to change radically the all too peaceful veneer of the Third Reich. The very next day Hitler announced to the press that there was to be a general shift in propaganda from an emphasis on peace to preparation for war. In addition, he pushed ahead with the plan he had indicated back in 1936 of expropriating Jewish property by legal means as a way of financing arms production.