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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH: A HISTORY OF NAZI GERMANY |
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7: THE NAZIFICATION OF GERMANY: 1933-34 THE THEORY WHICH HITLER had evolved in his vagabond days in Vienna and never forgotten -- that the way to power for a revolutionary movement was to ally itself with some of the powerful institutions in the State -- had now worked out in practice pretty much as he had calculated. The President, backed by the Army and the conservatives, had made him Chancellor. His political power, though great, was, however, not complete. It was shared with these three sources of authority, which had put him into office and which were outside and, to some extent, distrustful of the National Socialist movement. Hitler's immediate task, therefore, was to quickly eliminate them from the driver's seat, make his party the exclusive master of the State and then with the power of an authoritarian government and its police carry out the Nazi revolution. He had been in office scarcely twenty-four hours when he made his first decisive move, springing a trap on his gullible conservative "captors" and setting in motion a chain of events which he either originated or controlled and which at the end of six months would bring the complete Nazification of Germany and his own elevation to dictator of the Reich, unified and defederalized for the first time in German history. Five hours after being sworn in, at 5 P.M. on January 30, 1933, Hitler held his first cabinet meeting. The minutes of the session, which turned up at Nuremberg among the hundreds of tons of captured secret documents, reveal how quickly and adroitly Hitler, aided by the crafty Goering, began to take his conservative colleagues for a ride. [i] [1] Hindenburg had named Hitler to head not a presidential cabinet but one based on a majority in the Reichstag. However, the Nazis and the Nationalists, the only two parties represented in the government, had only 247 seats out of 583 in Parliament and thus lacked a majority. To attain it they needed the backing of the Center Party with its 70 seats. In the very first hours of the new government Hitler had dispatched Goering to talk with the Centrist leaders, and now he reported to the cabinet that the Center was demanding "certain concessions." Goering therefore proposed that the Reichstag be dissolved and new elections held, and Hitler agreed. Hugenberg, a man of wooden mind for all his success in business, objected to taking the Center into the government but on the other hand opposed new elections, well knowing that the Nazis, with the resources of the State behind them, might win an absolute majority at the polls and thus be in a position to dispense with his own services and those of his conservative friends. He proposed simply suppressing the Communist Party; with its 100 seats eliminated, the Nazis and the Nationalists would have a majority. But Hitler would not go so far at the moment, and it was finally agreed that the Chancellor himself would confer with the Center Party leaders on the following morning and that if the talks were fruitless the cabinet would then ask for new elections. Hitler easily made them fruitless. At his request the Center leader, Monsignor Kaas, submitted as a basis for discussion a list of questions which added up to a demand that Hitler promise to govern constitutionally. But Hitler, tricking both Kaas and his cabinet members, reported to the latter that the Center had made impossible demands and that there was no chance of agreement. He therefore proposed that the President be asked to dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections. Hugenberg and Papen were trapped, but after a solemn assurance from the Nazi leader that the cabinet would remain unchanged however the elections turned out, they agreed to go along with him. New elections were set for March 5. For the first time -- in the last relatively free election Germany was to have -- the Nazi Party now could employ all the vast resources of the government to win votes. Goebbels was jubilant. "Now it will be easy," he wrote in his diary on February 3, "to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money." [2] The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its businesses as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved. Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. "Private enterprise," he said, "cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality ... All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen ... We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist." He promised the businessmen that he would "eliminate" the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). "Now we stand before the last election," Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that "regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat." If he did not win, he would stay in power "by other means ... with other weapons." Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of "financial sacrifices" which "surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years." All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the "gratitude" of the businessmen "for having given us such a clear picture." Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. "I collected three million marks," he recalled at Nuremberg. [3] *** On January 31, 1933, the day after Hitler was named Chancellor, Goebbels wrote in his diary: "In a conference with the Fuehrer we lay down the line for the fight against the Red terror. For the moment we shall abstain from direct countermeasures. The Bolshevik attempt at revolution must first burst into flame. At the proper moment we shall strike." Despite increasing provocation by the Nazi authorities there was no sign of a revolution, Communist or Socialist, bursting into flames as the electoral campaign got under way. By the beginning of February the Hitler government had banned all Communist meetings and shut down the Communist press. Social Democrat rallies were either forbidden or broken up by the S.A. rowdies, and the leading Socialist newspapers were continually suspended. Even the Catholic Center Party did not escape the Nazi terror. Stegerwald, the leader of the Catholic Trade Unions, was beaten by Brownshirts when he attempted to address a meeting, and Bruening was obliged to seek police protection at another rally after S.A. troopers had wounded a number of his followers. Altogether fifty-one anti-Nazis were listed as murdered during the electoral campaign, and the Nazis claimed that eighteen of their own number had been done to death. Goering's key position as Minister of the Interior of Prussia now began to be noticed. Ignoring the restraining hand of Papen, who as Premier of Prussia was supposedly above him, Goering removed hundreds of republican officials and replaced them with Nazis, mostly S.A. and S.S. officers. He ordered the police to avoid "at all costs" hostility to the S.A., the S.S. and the Stahlhelm but on the other hand to show no mercy to those who were "hostile to the State." He urged the police "to make use of firearms" and warned that those who didn't would be punished. This was an outright call for the shooting down of all who opposed Hitler by the police of a state (Prussia) which controlled two thirds of Germany. Just to make sure that the job would be ruthlessly done, Goering on February 22 established an auxiliary police force of 50,000 men, of whom 40,000 were drawn from the ranks of the S.A. and the S.S. and the rest from the Stahlhelm. Police power in Prussia was thus largely carried out by Nazi thugs. It was a rash German who appealed to such a "police" for protection against the Nazi terrorists. And yet despite all the terror the "Bolshevik revolution" which Goebbels, Hitler and Goering were looking for failed to "burst into flames." If it could not be provoked, might it not have to be invented? On February 24, Goering's police raided the Karl Liebknecht Haus, the Communist headquarters in Berlin. It had been abandoned some weeks before by the Communist leaders, a number of whom had already gone underground or quietly slipped off to Russia. But piles of propaganda pamphlets had been left in the cellar and these were enough to enable Goering to announce in an official communique that the seized "documents" proved that the Communists were about to launch the revolution. The reaction of the public and even of some of the conservatives in the government was one of skepticism. It was obvious that something more sensational must be found to stampede the public before the election took place on March 5. THE REICHSTAG FIRE On the evening of February 27, four of the most powerful men in Germany were gathered at two separate dinners in Berlin. In the exclusive Herrenklub in the Vosstrasse, Vice-Chancellor von Papen was entertaining President von Hindenburg. Out at Goebbels' home, Chancellor Hitler had arrived to dine en famille. According to Goebbels, they were relaxing, playing music on the gramophone and telling stories. "Suddenly," he recounted later in his diary, "a telephone call from Dr. Hanfstaengl: 'The Reichstag is on fire!' I am sure he is telling a tall tale and decline even to mention it to the Fuehrer." [4] But the diners at the Herrenklub were just around the corner from the Reichstag.
The Vice-Chancellor packed the aged President home in his own car and hurried off to. the burning building. In the meantime Goebbels, according to his account, had had second thoughts about Putzi Hanfstaengl's "tall tale," had made some telephone calls and learned that the Reichstag was in flames. Within a few seconds he and his Fuehrer were racing "at sixty miles an hour down the Charlottenburger Chaussee toward the scene of the crime." That it was a crime, a Communist crime, they proclaimed at once on arrival at the fire. Goering, sweating and puffing and quite beside himself with excitement, was already there ahead of them declaiming to heaven, as Papen later recalled, that "this is a Communist crime against the new government." To the new Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, Goering shouted, "This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung Up." [6] The whole truth about the Reichstag fire will probably never be known. Nearly all those who knew it are now dead, most of them slain by Hitler in the months that followed. Even at Nuremberg the mystery could not be entirely unraveled, though there is enough evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that it was the Nazis who planned the arson and carried it out for their own political ends. From Goering's Reichstag President's Palace an underground passage, built to carry the central heating system, ran to the Reichstag building. Through this tunnel Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop who had become the Berlin S.A. leader, led a small detachment of storm troopers on the night of February 27 to the Reichstag, where they scattered gasoline and self-igniting chemicals and then made their way quickly back to the palace the way they had come. At the same time a half-witted Dutch Communist with a passion for arson, Marinus van der Lubbe, had made his way into the huge, darkened and to him unfamiliar building and set some small fires of his own. This feeble-minded pyromaniac was a godsend to the Nazis. He had been picked up by the S.A. a few days before after having been overheard in a bar boasting that he had attempted to set fire to several public buildings and that he was going to try the Reichstag next. The coincidence that the Nazis had found a demented Communist arsonist who was out to do exactly what they themselves had determined to do seems incredible but is nevertheless supported by the evidence. The idea for the fire almost certainly originated with Goebbels and Goering. Hans Gisevius, an official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior at the time, testified at Nuremberg that "it was Goebbels who first thought of setting the Reichstag on fire," and Rudolf Diels, the Gestapo chief, added in an affidavit that "Goering knew exactly how the fire was to be started" and had ordered him "to prepare, prior to the fire, a list of people who were to be arrested immediately after it." General Franz Halder, Chief of the German General Staff during the early part of World War II, recalled at Nuremberg how on one occasion Goering had boasted of his deed.
Van der Lubbe, it seems clear, was a dupe of the Nazis. He was encouraged to try to set the Reichstag on fire. But the main job was to be done -- without his knowledge, of course -- by the storm troopers. Indeed, it was established at the subsequent trial at Leipzig that the Dutch half-wit did not possess the means to set so vast a building on fire so quickly. Two and a half minutes after he entered, the great central hall was fiercely burning. He had only his shirt for tinder. The main fires, according to the testimony of experts at the trial, had been set with considerable quantities of chemicals and gasoline. It was obvious that one man could not have carried them into the building, nor would it have been possible for him to start so many fires in so many scattered places in so short a time. Van der Lubbe was arrested on the spot and Goering, as he afterward told the court, wanted to hang him at once. The next day Ernst Torgler, parliamentary leader of the Communists, gave himself up to the police when he heard that Goering had implicated him, and a few days later Georgi Dimitroff, a Bulgarian Communist who later became Prime Minister of Bulgaria, and two other Bulgarian Communists, Popov and Tanev, were apprehended by the police. Their subsequent trial before the Supreme Court at Leipzig turned into something of a fiasco for the Nazis and especially for Goering, whom Dimitroff, acting as his own lawyer, easily provoked into making a fool of himself in a series of stinging cross-examinations. At one point, according to the court record, Goering screamed at the Bulgarian, "Out with you, you scoundrel!"
Torgler and the three Bulgarians were acquitted, though the German Communist leader was immediately taken into "protective custody," where he remained until his death during the second war. Van der Lubbe was found guilty and decapitated. [7] The trial, despite the subserviency of the court to the Nazi authorities, cast a great deal of suspicion on Goering and the Nazis, but it came too late to have any practical effect. For Hitler had lost no time in exploiting the Reichstag fire to the limit. On the day following the fire, February 28, he prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree "for the Protection of the People and the State" suspending the seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. Described as a "defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state," the decree laid down that:
In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence for a number of crimes, including "serious disturbances of the peace" by armed persons. [8] Thus with one stroke Hitler was able not only to legally gag his opponents and arrest them at his will but, by making the trumped-up Communist threat "official," as it were, to throw millions of the middle class and the peasantry into a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for National Socialism at the elections a week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over. Some four thousand Communist officials and a great many Social Democrat and liberal leaders were arrested, including members of the Reichstag, who, according to the law, were immune from arrest. This was the first experience Germans had had with Nazi terror backed up by the government. Truckloads of storm troopers roared through the streets all over Germany, breaking into homes, rounding up victims and carting them off to S.A. barracks, where they were tortured and beaten. The Communist press and political meetings were suppressed; the Social Democrat newspapers and many liberal journals were suspended and the meetings of the democratic parties either banned or broken up. Only the Nazis and their Nationalist allies were permitted to campaign unmolested. With all the resources of the national and Prussian governments at their disposal and with plenty of money from big business in their coffers, the Nazis carried on an election propaganda such as Germany had never seen before. For the first time the State-run radio carried the voices of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels to every corner of the land. The streets, bedecked with swastika flags, echoed to the tramp of the storm troopers. There were mass rallies, torchlight parades, the din of loud-speakers in the squares. The billboards were plastered with flamboyant Nazi posters and at night bonfires lit up the hills. The electorate was in turn cajoled with promises of a German paradise, intimidated by the brown terror in the streets and frightened by "revelations" about the Communist "revolution." The day after the Reichstag fire the Prussian government issued a long statement declaring that it had found Communist "documents" proving:
Publication of the "documents proving the Communist conspiracy" was promised, but never made. The fact, however, that the Prussian government itself vouched for their authenticity impressed many Germans. The waverers were also impressed perhaps by Goering's threats. At Frankfurt on March 3, on the eve of the elections, he shouted:
Almost unheard was the voice of former Chancellor Bruening, who also spoke out that day, proclaiming that his Center Party would resist any overthrow of the constitution, demanding an investigation of the suspicious Reichstag fire and calling on President Hindenburg "to protect the oppressed against their oppressors." Vain appeal! The aged President kept his silence. It was now time for the people, in their convulsion, to speak. *** On March 5, 1933, the day of the last democratic elections they were to know during Hitler's life, they spoke with their ballots. Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes -- an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler. All the persecution and suppression of the previous weeks did not prevent the Center Party from actually increasing its vote from 4,230,600 to 4,424,900; with its ally, the Catholic Bavarian People's Party, it obtained a total of five and a half million votes. Even the Social Democrats held their position as the second largest party, polling 7,181,629 votes, a drop of only 70,000. The Communists lost a million supporters but still polled 4,848,058 votes. The Nationalists, led by Papen and Hugenberg, were bitterly disappointed with their own showing, a vote of 3,136,760, a mere 8 per cent of the votes cast and a gain of less than 200,000. Still, the Nationalists' 52 seats, added to the 288 of the Nazis, gave the government a majority of 16 in the Reichstag. This was enough, perhaps, to carry on the day-to-day business of government but it was far short of the two-thirds majority which Hitler needed to carry out a new, bold plan to establish his dictatorship by consent of Parliament. GLEICHSCHALTUNG: THE "CO-ORDINATION" OF THE REICH The plan was deceptively simple and had the advantage of cloaking the seizure of absolute power in legality. The Reichstag would be asked to pass an "enabling act" conferring on Hitler's cabinet exclusive legislative powers for four years. Put even more simply, the German Parliament would be requested to turn over its constitutional functions to Hitler and take a long vacation. But since this necessitated a change in the constitution, a two-thirds majority was needed to approve it. How to obtain that majority was the main order of business at a cabinet meeting on March 15, 1933, the minutes of which were produced at Nuremberg. [10] Part of the problem would be solved by the "absence" of the eighty-one Communist members of the Reichstag. Goering felt sure that the rest of the problem could be easily disposed of "by refusing admittance to a few Social Democrats." Hitler was in a breezy, confident mood. After all, by the decree of February 28, which he had induced Hindenburg to sign the day after the Reichstag fire, he could arrest as many opposition deputies as was necessary to assure his two-thirds majority. There was some question about the Catholic Center, which was demanding guarantees, but the Chancellor was certain that this party would go along with him. Hugenberg, the Nationalist leader, who had no desire to put all the power in Hitler's hands, demanded that the President be authorized to participate in preparing laws decreed by the cabinet under the enabling act. Dr. Meissner, the State Secretary in the Presidential Chancellery, who had already committed his future to the Nazis, replied that "the collaboration of the Reich President would not be necessary," He was quick to realize that Hitler had no wish to be tied down by the stubborn old President, as the republican chancellors had been. But Hitler wished, at this stage, to make a grandiose gesture to the aged Field Marshal and to the Army and the nationalist conservatives as well, and in so doing link his rowdy, revolutionary regime with Hindenburg's venerable name and with all the past military glories of Prussia. To accomplish this he and Goebbels, who on March 13 became Minister of Propaganda, conceived a master stroke. Hitler would open the new Reichstag, which he was about to destroy, in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, the great shrine of Prussianism, which aroused in so many Germans memories of imperial glories and grandeur, for here lay buried the bones of Frederick the Great, here the Hohenzollern kings had worshiped, here Hindenburg had first come in 1866 on a pilgrimage when he returned as a young Guards officer from the Austro-Prussian War, a war which had given Germany its first unification. The date chosen for the ceremonial opening of the first Reichstag of the Third Reich, March 21, was significant too, for it fell on the anniversary of the day on which Bismarck had opened the first Reichstag of the Second Reich in 1871. As the old field marshals, generals and admirals from imperial times gathered in their resplendent uniforms in the Garrison Church, led by the former Crown Prince and Field Marshal von Mackensen in the imposing dress and headgear of the Death's-Head Hussars, the shades of Frederick the Great and the Iron Chancellor hovered over the assembly. Hindenburg was visibly moved, and at one point in the ceremony Goebbels, who was staging the performance and directing the broadcasting of it to the nation, observed -- and noted in his diary -- that the old Field Marshal had tears in his eyes. Flanked by Hitler, who appeared ill at ease in his formal cutaway morning coat, the President, attired in field-gray uniform with the grand cordon of the Black Eagle, and carrying a spiked helmet in one hand and his marshal's baton in the other, had marched slowly down the aisle, paused to salute the empty seat of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the imperial gallery, and then in front of the altar had read a brief speech giving his blessings to the new Hitler government.
Hitler's reply was shrewdly designed to play on the sympathies and enlist the confidence of the Old Order so glitteringly represented.
And then, turning to Hindenburg, who sat stiffly in his chair a few feet in front of him:
Hitler, with a show of deep humility toward the President he intended to rob of his political power before the week was up, stepped down, bowed low to Hindenburg and gripped his hand. There in the flashing lights of camera bulbs and amid the clicking of movie cameras, which Goebbels had placed along with microphones at strategic spots, was recorded for the nation and the world to see, and to hear described, the solemn handclasp of the German Field Marshal and the Austrian corporal uniting the new Germany with the old. "After the dazzling pledge made by Hitler at Potsdam," the French ambassador, who was present at the scene, later wrote, "how could such men -- Hindenburg and his friends, the Junkers and monarchist barons, Hugenberg and his German Nationalists, the officers of the Reichswehr -- how could they fail to dismiss the apprehension with which they had begun to view the excesses and abuses of his party? Could they now hesitate to grant him their entire confidence, to meet all his requests, to concede the full powers he claimed?" [12] The answer was given two days later, on March 23, in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, where the Reichstag convened. Before the house was the so-called Enabling Act -- the "Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich (Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Yolk und Reich)," as it was officially called. Its five brief paragraphs took the power of legislation, including control of the Reich budget, approval of treaties with foreign states and the initiating of constitutional amendments, away from Parliament and handed it over to the Reich cabinet for a period of four years. Moreover, the act stipulated that the laws enacted by the cabinet were to be drafted by the Chancellor and "might deviate from the constitution." No laws were to "affect the position of the Reichstag" -- surely the cruelest joke of all -- and the powers of the President remained "undisturbed." [13] Hitler reiterated these last two points in a speech of unexpected restraint to the deputies assembled in the ornate opera house, which had long specialized in the lighter operatic works and whose aisles were now lined with brown-shirted storm troopers, whose scarred bully faces indicated that no nonsense would be tolerated from the representatives of the people.
The fiery Nazi leader sounded quite moderate and almost modest; it was too early in the life of the Third Reich for even the opposition members to know full well the value of Hitler's promises. Yet one of them, Otto Wells, leader of the Social Democrats, a dozen of whose deputies had been "detained" by the police, rose -- amid the roar of the storm troopers outside yelling, "Full powers, or else!" -- to defy the would-be dictator. Speaking quietly and with great dignity, Wells declared that the government might strip the Socialists of their power but it could never strip them of their honor.
Furious, Hitler jumped to his feet, and now the assembly received a real taste of the man.
The Social Democrats, who bore a heavy responsibility for the weakening of the Republic, would at least stick to their principles and go down -- this one time -- defiantly. But not the Center Party, which once had successfully defied the Iron Chancellor in the Kulturkampf. Monsignor Kaas, the party leader, had demanded a written promise from Hitler that he would respect the President's power of veto. But though promised before the voting, it was never given. Nevertheless the Center leader rose to announce that his party would vote for the bill. Bruening remained silent. The vote was soon taken: 441 for, and 84 (all Social Democrats) against. The Nazi deputies sprang to their feet shouting and stamping deliriously and then, joined by the storm troopers, burst into the Horst Wessel song, which soon would take its place alongside "Deutschland ueber Alles" as one of the two national anthems:
Thus was parliamentary democracy finally interred in Germany. Except for the arrests of the Communists and some of the Social Democratic deputies, it was all done quite legally, though accompanied by terror. Parliament had turned over its constitutional authority to Hitler and thereby committed suicide, though its body lingered on in an embalmed . state to the very end of the Third Reich, serving infrequently as a sounding board for some of Hitler's thunderous pronunciamentos, its members henceforth hand-picked by the Nazi Party, for there were to be no more real elections. It was this Enabling Act alone which formed the legal basis for Hitler's dictatorship. From March 23, 1933, on, Hitler was the dictator of the Reich, freed of any restraint by Parliament or, for all practical purposes, by the weary old President. To be sure, much remained to be done to bring the entire nation and all its institutions completely under the Nazi heel, though, as we shall see, this also was accomplished with breathless speed and with crudeness, trickery and brutality. "The street gangs," in the words of Alan Bullock, "had seized control of the resources of a great modern State, the gutter had come to power." But -- as Hitler never ceased to boast -- "legally," by an overwhelming vote of Parliament. The Germans had no one to blame but themselves. *** One by one, Germany's most powerful institutions now began to surrender to Hitler and to pass quietly, unprotestingly out of existence. The states, which had stubbornly maintained their separate powers throughout German history, were the first to fall. On the evening of March 9, two weeks before the passage of the Enabling Act, General von Epp, on orders from Hitler and Frick and with the help of a few storm troopers, turned out the government of Bavaria and set up a Nazi regime. Within a week Reich Commissars were appointed to take over in the other states, with the exception of Prussia, where Goering was already firmly in the saddle. On March 31, Hitler and Frick, using the Enabling Act for the first time, promulgated a law dissolving the diets of all states except Prussia and ordering them reconstituted on the basis of the votes cast in the last Reichstag election. Communist seats were not to be filled. But this solution lasted only a week. The Chancellor, working at feverish haste, issued a new law on April 7, appointing Reich Governors (Reichsstaathaelter) in all the states and empowering them to appoint and remove local governments, dissolve the diets, and appoint and dismiss state officials and judges. Each of the new governors was a Nazi and they were "required" to carry out "the general policy laid down by the Reich Chancellor." Thus, within a fortnight of receiving full powers from the Reichstag, Hitler had achieved what Bismarck, Wilhelm II and the Weimar Republic had never dared to attempt: he had abolished the separate powers of the historic states and made them subject to the central authority of the Reich, which was in his hands. He had, for the first time in German history, really unified the Reich by destroying its age-old federal character. On January 30, 1934, the first anniversary of his becoming Chancellor, Hitler would formally complete the task by means of a Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich. "Popular assemblies" of the states were abolished, the sovereign powers of the states were transferred to the Reich, all state governments were placed under the Reich government and the state governors put under the administration of the Reich Minister of the Interior.14 As this Minister, Frick, explained it, "The state governments from now on are merely administrative bodies of the Reich." The preamble to the law of January 30, 1934, proclaimed that it was "promulgated with the unanimous vote of the Reichstag." This was true, for by this time all the political parties of Germany except the Nazis had been quickly eliminated. It cannot be said that they went down fighting. On May 19, 1933, the Social Democrats -- those who were not in jail or in exile -- voted in the Reichstag without a dissenting voice to approve Hitler's foreign policy. Nine days before, Goering's police had seized the party's buildings and newspapers and confiscated its property. Nevertheless, the Socialists still tried to appease Hitler. They denounced their comrades abroad who were attacking the Fuehrer. On June 19 they elected a new party committee, but three days later Frick put an end to their attempts to compromise by dissolving the Social Democratic Party as "subversive and inimical to the State." Paul Lobe, the surviving leader, and several of his party members in the Reichstag were arrested. The Communists, of course, had already been suppressed. This left the middle-class parties, but not for long. The Catholic Bavarian People's Party, whose government had been kicked out of office by the Nazi coup on March 9, announced its own dissolution on July 4, and its al1y, the Center Party, which had defied Bismarck so strenuously and been a bulwark of the Republic, fol1owed suit the next day, leaving Germany for the first time in the modern era without a Catholic political party -- a fact which did not discourage the Vatican from signing a concordat with Hitler's government a fortnight later. Stresemann's old party, the People's Party, committed hara-kiri on the Fourth of July; the Democrats (Staatspartei) had already done so a week before. And what of Hitler's partner in government, the German National Party, without whose support the former Austrian corporal could never have come legally to power? Despite its closeness to Hindenburg, the Army, the Junkers and big business and the debt owed to it by Hitler, it went the way of all other parties and with the same meekness. On June 21 the police and the storm troopers took over its offices throughout the country, and on June 29 Hugenberg, the bristling party leader, who had helped boost Hitler into the Chancellery but six months before, resigned from the government and his aides "voluntarily" dissolved the party. The Nazi Party alone remained, and on July 14 a law decreed:
The one-party totalitarian State had been achieved with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance, and within four months after the Reichstag had abdicated its democratic responsibilities. The free trade unions, which, as we have seen, once had crushed the fascist Kapp putsch by the simple means of declaring a general strike, were disposed of as easily as the political parties and the states -- though not until an elaborate piece of trickery had been practiced on them. For half a century May Day had been the traditional day of celebration for the German -- and European -- worker. To lull the workers and their leaders before it struck, the Nazi government proclaimed May Day, 1933, as a national holiday, officially named it the "Day of National Labor" and prepared to celebrate it as it had never been celebrated before. The trade-union leaders were taken in by this surprising display of friendliness toward the working class by the Nazis and enthusiastically co-operated with the government and the party in making the day a success. Labor leaders were flown to Berlin from all parts of Germany, thousands of banners were unfurled acclaiming the Nazi regime's solidarity with the worker, and out at Tempelhof Field Goebbels prepared to stage the greatest mass demonstration Germany had ever seen. Before the massive rally, Hitler himself received the workers' delegates, declaring, "You will see how untrue and unjust is the statement that the revolution is directed against the German workers. On the contrary." Later in his speech to more than 100,000 workers at the airfield Hitler pronounced the motto, "Honor work and respect the worker!" and promised that May Day would be celebrated in honor of German labor "throughout the centuries." Late that night Goebbels, after describing in his most purple prose the tremendous enthusiasm of the workers for this May Day celebration which he had so brilliantly staged, added a curious sentence in his diary: "Tomorrow we shall occupy the trade-union buildings. There will be little resistance." [iii] [16] That is what happened. On May 2 the trade-union headquarters throughout the country were occupied, union funds confiscated, the unions dissolved and the leaders arrested. Many were beaten and lodged in concentration camps. Theodor Leipart and Peter Grassmann, the chairmen of the Trade Union Confederation, had openly pledged themselves to cooperate with the Nazi regime. No matter, they were arrested. "The Leiparts and Grassmanns," said Dr. Robert Ley, the alcoholic Cologne party boss who was assigned by Hitler to take over the unions and establish the German Labor Front, "may hypocritically declare their devotion to the Fuehrer as much as they like -- but it is better that they should be in prison." And that is where they were put. At first, though, both Hitler and Ley tried to assure the workers that their rights would be protected. Said Ley in his first proclamation: "Workers! Your institutions are sacred to us National Socialists. I my- self am a poor peasant's son and understand poverty ... I know the exploitation of anonymous capitalism. Workers! I swear to you, we will not only keep everything that exists, we will build up the protection and the rights of the workers still further." Within three weeks the hollowness of another Nazi promise was exposed when Hitler decreed a law bringing an end to collective bargaining and providing that henceforth "labor trustees," appointed by him, would "regulate labor contracts" and maintain "labor peace."18 Since the decisions of the trustees were to be legally binding, the law, in effect, outlawed strikes. Ley promised "to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of a factory -- that is, the employer ... Only the employer can decide. Many employers have for years had to call for the 'master in the house.' Now they are once again to be the 'master in the house.'" For the time being, business management was pleased. The generous contributions which so many employers had made to the National Socialist German Workers' Party were paying off. Yet for business to prosper a certain stability of society is necessary, and all through the spring and early summer law and order were crumbling in Germany as the frenzied brown-shirted gangs roamed the streets, arresting and beating up and sometimes murdering whomever they pleased while the police looked on without lifting a nightstick. The terror in the streets was not the result of the breakdown of the State's authority, as it had been in the French Revolution, but on the contrary was carried out with the encouragement and often on the orders of the State, whose authority in Germany had never been greater or more concentrated. Judges were intimidated; they were afraid for their lives if they convicted and sentenced a storm trooper even for cold-blooded murder. Hitler was now the law, as Goering said, and as late as May and June 1933 the Fuehrer was declaiming that "the National Socialist Revolution has not yet run its course" and that "it will be victoriously completed only if a new German people is educated." In Nazi parlance, "educated" meant "intimidated" -- to a point where all would accept docilely the Nazi dictatorship and its barbarism. To Hitler, as he had publicly declared a thousand times, the Jews were not Germans, and though he did not exterminate them at once (only a relative few-a few thousand, that is -- were robbed, beaten or murdered during the first months), he issued laws excluding them from public service, the universities and the professions. And on April 1, 1933, he proclaimed a national boycott of Jewish shops. The businessmen, who had been so enthusiastic over the smashing of the troublesome labor unions, now found that left-wing Nazis, who really believed in the party's socialism, were trying to take over the employers' associations, destroy the big department stores and nationalize industry. Thousands of ragged Nazi Party officials descended on the business houses of those who had not supported Hitler, threatening to seize them in some cases, and in others demanding well-paying jobs in the management. Dr. Gottfried Feder, the economic crank, now insisted that the party program be carried out -- nationalization of big business, profit sharing and the abolition of unearned incomes and "interest slavery." As if this were not enough to frighten the businessmen, Walther Dam:, who had just been named Minister of Agriculture, threw the bankers into jitters by promising a big reduction in the capital debts of the farmers and a cut in the interest rate on what remained to 2 per cent. Why not? Hitler was, by midsummer of 1933, the master of Germany. He could now carry out his program. Papen, for all his cunning, had been left high and dry, and all his calculations that he and Hugenberg and the other defenders of the Old Order, with their 8-to-3 majority in the cabinet against the Nazis, could control Hitler and indeed use him for their own conservative ends, had exploded in his face. He himself had been booted out of his post as Prime Minister of Prussia and replaced by Goering. Papen remained Vice-Chancellor in the Reich cabinet but, as he ruefully admitted later, "this position turned out to be anomalous." Hugenberg, the apostle of business and finance, was gone, his party dissolved. Goebbels, the third most important man in the Nazi Party, had been brought into the cabinet on March 13 as Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Darre, regarded as a "radical," as was Goebbels, was Minister of Agriculture. Dr. Hans Luther, the conservative president of the Reichsbank, the key post in the German economic system, was fired by Hitler and packed off to Washington as ambassador. Into his place, on March 17, 1933, stepped the jaunty Dr. Schacht, the former head of the Reichsbank and devoted follower of Hitler, who had seen the "truth and necessity" of Nazism. No single man in all of Germany would be more helpful to Hitler in building up the economic strength of the Third Reich and in furthering its rearmament for the Second World War than Schacht, who later became also Minister of Economics and Plenipotentiary-General for War Economy. It is true that shortly before the second war began he turned against his idol, eventually relinquished or was fired from all his offices and even joined those who were conspiring to assassinate Hitler. But by then it was too late to stay the course of the Nazi leader to whom he had for so long given his loyalty and lent his prestige and his manifest talents. "NO SECOND REVOLUTION!" Hitler had conquered Germany with the greatest of ease, but a number of problems remained to be faced as summer came in 1933. There were at least five major ones: preventing a second revolution; settling the uneasy relations between the S.A. and the Army; getting the country out of its economic morass and finding jobs for the six million unemployed; achieving equality of armaments for Germany at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva and accelerating the Reich's secret rearming, which had begun during the last years of the Republic; and deciding who should succeed the ailing Hindenburg when he died. It was Roehm, chief of the S.A., who coined the phrase "the second revolution," and who insisted that it be carried through. He was joined by Goebbels, who in his diary of April 18, 1933, wrote: "Everyone among the people is talking of a second revolution which must come. That means that the first revolution is not at an end. Now we shall settle with the Reaktion. The revolution must nowhere come to a halt." [19] The Nazis had destroyed the Left, but the Right remained: big business and finance, the aristocracy, the Junker landlords and the Prussian generals, who kept tight rein over the Army. Roehm, Goebbels and the other "radicals" in the movement wanted to liquidate them too. Roehm, whose storm troopers now numbered some two million-twenty times as many as the troops in the Army -- sounded the warning in June:
And in August he added, in a speech, "There are still men in official positions today who have not the least idea of the spirit of the revolution. We shall ruthlessly get rid of them if they dare to put their reactionary ideas into practice." But Hitler had contrary thoughts. For him the Nazi socialist slogans had been merely propaganda, means of winning over the masses on his way to power. Now that he had the power he was uninterested in them. He needed time to consolidate his position and that of the country. For the moment at least the Right -- business, the Army, the President -- must be appeased. He did not intend to bankrupt Germany and thus risk the very existence of his regime. There must be no second revolution. This he made plain to the S.A. and S.S. leaders themselves in a speech to them on July 1. What was needed now in Germany, he said, was order. "I will suppress every attempt to disturb the existing order as ruthlessly as I will deal with the so-called second revolution, which would lead only to chaos." He repeated the warning to the Nazi state governors gathered in the Chancellery on July 6:
No more authoritative statement was ever made that the Nazi revolution was political, not economic. To back up his words, Hitler dismissed a number of Nazi "radicals" who had tried to seize control of the employers' associations. He restored Krupp von Bohlen and Fritz Thyssen to their positions of leadership in them, dissolved the Combat League of Middle-Class Tradespeople, which had annoyed the big department stores, and in place of Hugenberg named Dr. Karl Schmitt as Minister of Economics. Schmitt was the most orthodox of businessmen, director general of Allianz, Germany's largest insurance company, and he lost no time in putting an end to the schemes of the National Socialists who had been naive enough to take their party program seriously. The disillusion among the rank-and-file Nazis, especially among the S.A. storm troopers, who formed the large core of Hitler's mass movement, was great. Most of them had belonged to the ragged army of the dispossessed and the unsatisfied. They were anticapitalist through experience and they believed that the revolution which they had fought by brawling in the streets would bring them loot and good jobs, either in business or in the government. Now their hopes, after the heady excesses of the spring, were dashed. The old gang, whether they were party members or not, were to keep the jobs and to keep control of jobs. But this development was not the only reason for unrest in the S.A. The old quarrel between Hitler and Roehm about the position and purpose of the S.A. cropped up again. From the earliest days of the Nazi movement Hitler had insisted that the storm troopers were to be a political and not a military force; they were to furnish the physical violence, the terror, by which the party could bludgeon its way to political power. To Roehm, the S.A. had been not only the backbone of the Nazi revolution but the nucleus of the future revolutionary army which would be for Hitler what the French conscript armies were to Napoleon after the French Revolution. It was time to sweep away the reactionary Prussian generals -- those "old clods," as he contemptuously called them -- and form a revolutionary fighting force, a people's army, led by himself and his tough aides who had conquered the streets of Germany. Nothing could be further from Hitler's thoughts. He realized more clearly than Roehm or any other Nazi that he could not have come to power without the support or at least the toleration of the Army generals and that, for the time being at least, his very survival at the helm depended in part on their continued backing, since they still retained the physical power to remove him if they were so minded. Also Hitler foresaw that the Army's loyalty to him personally would be needed at that crucial moment, which could not be far off, when the eighty-six-year-old Hindenburg, the Commander in Chief, would pass on. Furthermore, the Nazi leader was certain that only the officer corps, with all its martial traditions and abilities, could achieve his goal of building up in a short space of time a strong, disciplined armed force. The S.A. was but a mob -- good enough for street fighting but of little worth as a modem army. Moreover, its purpose had now been served and from now on it must be eased tactfully out of the picture. The views of Hitler and Roehm were irreconcilable, and from the summer of 1933 to June 30 of the following year a struggle literally to the death was to be fought between these two veterans of the Nazi movement who were also close friends (Ernst Roehm was the only man whom Hitler addressed by the familiar personal pronoun du). Roehm expressed the deep sense of frustration in the ranks of the storm troopers in a speech to fifteen thousand S.A. officers in the Sportpalast in Berlin on November 5, 1933. "One often hears ... that the S.A. had lost any reason for existence," he said, warning that it had not. But Hitler was adamant. "The relation of the S.A. to the Army," he had warned at Bad Godesberg on August 19, "must be the same as that of the political leadership." And on September 23 at Nuremberg he spoke out even more clearly:
Some time before this, Hitler had secretly given the armed forces assurances which had brought many of the higher officers to his side. On February 2, 1933, three days after assuming office, he had made a twohour address to the top generals and admirals at the home of General von Hammerstein, the Army Commander in Chief. Admiral Erich Raeder revealed at Nuremberg the tenor of this first meeting of the Nazi Chancellor with the officer corps. [22] Hitler, he said, freed the military elite from its fears that the armed services might be called upon to take part in a civil war and promised that the Army and Navy could now devote themselves unhindered to the main task of quickly rearming the new Germany. Admiral Raeder admitted that he was highly pleased at the prospect of a new Navy, and General von Blomberg, whose hasty assumption of the office of Minister of Defense on January 30, 1933, had stamped out any temptation on the part of the Army to revolt against Hitler's becoming Chancellor, declared later in his unpublished memoirs that the Fuehrer opened up "a field of activities holding great possibilities for the future." Further to augment the enthusiasm of the military leaders Hitler created, as early as April 4, the Reich Defense Council to spur a new and secret rearmament program. Three months later, on July 20, the Chancellor promulgated a new Army Law, abolishing the jurisdiction of the civil courts over the military and doing away with the elected representation of the rank and file, thus restoring to the officer corps its ancient military prerogatives. A good many generals and admirals began to see the Nazi revolution in a different and more favorable light. As a sop to Roehm, Hitler named him -- along with Rudolf Hess, the deputy leader of the party -- a member of the cabinet on December I and on New Year's Day, 1934, addressed to the S.A. chief a warm and friendly letter. While reiterating that "the Army has to guarantee the protection of the nation against the world beyond our frontiers," he acknowledged that "the task of the S.A. is to secure the victory of the National Socialist Revolution and the existence of the National Socialist State" and that the success of the S.A. had been "primarily due" to Roehm. The letter concluded:
The letter, employing the familiar du, was published in the chief Nazi daily paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, on January 2, 1934, and did much to ease for the moment the feelings of resentment in the S.A. In the atmosphere of good feeling that prevailed over the Christmas and New Year holidays, the rivalry between the SA. and the Army and the clamor of the radical Nazis for the "second revolution" was temporarily stilled. THE BEGINNINGS OF NAZI FOREIGN POLICY "It is no victory, for the enemies were lacking," observed Oswald Spengler in commenting on how easily Hitler had conquered and Nazified Germany in 1933. "This seizure of power -- " the author of The Decline of the West wrote early in the year, "it is with misgiving that I see it celebrated each day with so much noise. It would be better to save that for a day of real and definitive successes, that is, in the foreign field. There are no others." [24] The philosopher-historian, who for a brief moment was an idol of the Nazis until a mutual disenchantment set in, was unduly impatient. Hitler had to conquer Germany before he could set out to conquer the world. But once his German opponents were liquidated -- or had liquidated themselves -- he lost no time in turning to what had always interested him the most: foreign affairs. Germany's position in the world in the spring of 1933 could hardly have been worse. The Third Reich was diplomatically isolated and militarily impotent. The whole world had been revolted by Nazi excesses, especially the persecution of the Jews. Germany's neighbors, in particular France and Poland, were hostile and suspicious, and as early as March 1933, following a Polish military demonstration in Danzig, Marshal Pilsudski suggested to the French the desirability of a joint preventive war against Germany. Even Mussolini, for all his outward pose of welcoming the advent of a second fascist power, had not in fact been enthusiastic about Hitler's coming to power. The Fuehrer of a country potentially so much stronger than Italy might soon put the Duce in the shade. A rabidly Pan- German Reich would have designs on Austria and the Balkans, where the Italian dictator had already staked out his claims. The hostility toward Nazi Germany of the Soviet Union, which had been republican Germany's one friend in the years since 1921, was obvious. The Third Reich was indeed friendless in a hostile world. And it was disarmed, or relatively so in comparison with its highly armed neighbors. The immediate strategy and tactics of Hitler's foreign policy therefore were dictated by the hard realities of Germany's weak and isolated position. But, ironically, this situation also provided natural goals which corresponded to his own deepest desires and those of the vast majority of the German people: to get rid of the shackles of Versailles without provoking sanctions, to rearm without risking war. Only when he had achieved these dual short-term goals would he have the freedom and the military power to pursue the long-term diplomacy whose aims and methods he had set down so frankly and in such detail in Mein Kampf. The first thing to do, obviously, was to confound Germany's adversaries in Europe by preaching disarmament and peace and to keep a sharp eye for a weakness in their collective armor. On May 17, 1933, before the Reichstag, Hitler delivered his "Peace Speech," one of the greatest of his career, a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved the German people and unified them behind him and which made a profound and favorable impression on the outside world. The day before, President Roosevelt had sent a ringing message to the chiefs of state of forty-four nations outlining the plans and hopes of the United States for disarmament and peace and calling for the abolition of all offensive weapons -- bombers, tanks and mobile heavy artillery. Hitler was quick to take up the President's challenge and to make the most of it.
There was much else in the speech, whose moderateness and profession of love for peace pleasantly surprised an uneasy world. Germany did not want war. War was "unlimited madness." It would "cause the collapse of the present social and political order." Nazi Germany had no wish to "Germanize" other peoples. "The mentality of the last century, which led people to think that they would make Germans out of Poles and Frenchmen, is alien to us ... Frenchmen, Poles and others are our neighbors, and we know that no event that is historically conceivable can change this reality." There was one warning. Germany demanded equality of treatment with all other nations, especially in armaments. If this was not to be obtained, Germany would prefer to withdraw from both the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations. The warning was forgotten amid the general rejoicing throughout the Western world at Hitler's unexpected reasonableness. The Times of London agreed that Hitler's claim for equality was "irrefutable." The Daily Herald of London, official organ of the Labor Party, demanded that Hitler be taken at his word. The conservative weekly Spectator of London concluded that Hitler had grasped the hand of Roosevelt and that this gesture provided new hope for a tormented world. In Washington the President's secretary was quoted by the official German news bureau as saying, "The President was enthusiastic at Hitler's acceptance of his proposals." From the Nazi firebrand dictator had come not brutal threats, as so many had expected, but sweetness and light. The world was enchanted. And in the Reichstag even the Socialists' deputies, those who were not in jailor in exile, voted without dissent to make the assembly's approval of Hitler's foreign policy declaration unanimous. But Hitler's warning was not an empty one, and when it became clear early in October that the Allies would insist on an interval of eight years to bring their armaments down to Germany's level, he abruptly announced on October 14 that, denied equality of rights by the other powers at Geneva, Germany was immediately withdrawing from the Disarmament Conference and from the League of Nations. At the same time he took three other steps: He dissolved the Reichstag, announced that he would submit his decision to leave Geneva to a national plebiscite and ordered General von Blomberg, the Minister of Defense, to issue secret directives to the armed forces to resist an armed attack should the League resort to sanctions. [25] This precipitate action revealed the hollowness of the Hitler conciliatory speech in the spring. It was Hitler's first open gamble in foreign affairs. It meant that from now on Nazi Germany intended to rearm itself in defiance of any disarmament agreement and of Versailles. This was a calculated risk -- also the first of many -- and Blomberg's secret directive to the Army and Navy, which came to light at Nuremberg, reveals not only that Hitler gambled with the possibility of sanctions but that Germany's position would have been hopeless had they been applied. [iv] In the West against France and in the East against Poland and Czechoslovakia, the directive laid down definite defense lines which the German forces were ordered "to hold as long as possible." It is obvious from Blomberg's orders that the German generals, at least, had no illusions that the defenses of the Reich could be held for any time at all. This, then, was the first of many crises over a period that would extend for three years -- until after the Germans reoccupied the demilitarized left bank of the Rhine in 1936 -- when the Allies could have applied sanctions, not for Hitler's leaving the Disarmament Conference and the League but for violations of the disarmament provisions of Versailles which had been going on in Germany for at least two years, even before Hitler. That the Allies at this time could easily have overwhelmed Germany is as certain as it is that such an action would have brought the end of the Third Reich in the very year of its birth. But part of the genius of this one-time Austrian waif was that for a long time he knew the mettle of his foreign adversaries as expertly and as uncannily as he had sized up that of his opponents at home. In this crisis, as in those greater ones which were to follow in rapid succession up to 1939, the victorious Allied nations took no action, being too divided, too torpid, too blind to grasp the nature or the direction of what was building up beyond the Rhine. On this, Hitler's calculations were eminently sound, as they had been and were to be in regard to his own people. He knew well what the German people would say in the plebiscite, which he fixed -- along with new elections of a single-party Nazi slate to the Reichstag -- for November 12, 1933, the day after the anniversary of the 1918 armistice, a black day that still rankled in German memories. "See to it that this day," he told an election rally at Breslau on November 4, "shall later be recorded in the history of our people as a day of salvation -- that the record shall run: On an eleventh of November the German people formally lost its honor; fifteen years later came a twelfth of November and then the German people restored its honor to itself." On the eve of the polling, November 11, the venerable Hindenburg added his support in a broadcast to the nation: "Show tomorrow your firm national unity and your solidarity with the government. Support with me and the Reich Chancellor the principle of equal rights and of peace with honor, and show the world that we have recovered, and with the help of God will maintain, German unity!" The response of the German people, after fifteen years of frustration and of resentment against the consequences of a lost war, was almost unanimous. Some 96 per cent of the registered voters cast their ballots and 95 per cent of these approved Germany's withdrawal from Geneva. The vote for the single Nazi list for the Reichstag (which included Hugenberg and a half-dozen other non-Nazis) was 92 per cent. Even at the Dachau concentration camp 2,154 out of 2,242 inmates voted for the government which had incarcerated them! It is true that in many communities threats were made against those who failed to vote or who voted the wrong way; and in some cases there was fear that anyone who cast his vote against the regime might be detected and punished. Yet even with these reservations the election, whose count at least was honest, was a staggering .victory for Adolf Hitler. There was no doubt that in defying the outside world as he had done, he had the overwhelming support of the German people. *** Three days after the plebiscite and election, Hitler sent for the new Polish ambassador, Josef Lipski. At the end of their talk a joint communique was issued which amazed not only the German public but the outside world. The Polish and German governments agreed "to deal with the questions touching both countries by means of direct negotiations and to renounce all application of force in their relations with each other for the consolidation of European peace." Even more than France, Poland was the hated and despised enemy in the minds of the Germans. To them the most heinous crime of the Versailles peacemakers had been to separate East Prussia from the Reich by the Polish Corridor, to detach Danzig and to give to the Poles the province of Posen and part of Silesia, which, though predominantly Polish in population, had been German territory since the days of the partition of Poland. No German statesmen during the Republic had been willing to regard the Polish acquisitions as permanent. Stresemann had refused even to consider an Eastern Locarno pact with Poland to supplement the Locarno agreement for the West. And General von Seeckt, father of the Reichswehr and arbiter of foreign policy during the first years of the Republic, had advised the government as early as 1922, "Poland's existence is intolerable, incompatible with the essential conditions of Germany's life. Poland," he insisted, "must go and will go." Its obliteration, he added, "must be one of the fundamental drives of German policy ... With the disappearance of Poland will fall one of the strongest pillars of the Versailles Peace, the hegemony of France." [26] Before Poland could be obliterated, Hitler saw, it must be separated from its alliance with France. The course he now embarked on offered several immediate advantages besides the ultimate one. By renouncing the use of force against Poland he could strengthen his propaganda for peace and allay the suspicions aroused in both Western and Eastern Europe by his hasty exit from Geneva. By inducing the Poles to conduct direct negotiations he could bypass the League of Nations and then weaken its authority. And he could not only deal a blow to the League's conception of "collective security" but undermine the French alliances in Eastern Europe, of which Poland was the bastion. The German people, with their traditional hatred of the Poles, might not understand, but to Hitler one of the advantages of a dictatorship over democracy was that unpopular policies which promised significant results ultimately could be pursued temporarily without internal rumpus. On January 26, 1934, four days before Hitler was to meet the Reichstag on the first anniversary of his accession to power, announcement was made of the signing of a ten-year nonaggression pact between Germany and Poland. From that day on, Poland, which under the dictatorship of Marshal Pilsudski was itself just eliminating the last vestiges of parliamentary democracy, began gradually to detach itself from France, its protector since its rebirth in 1919, and to grow ever closer to Nazi Germany. It was a path that was to lead to its destruction long before the treaty of "friendship and nonaggression" ran out. *** When Hitler addressed the Reichstag on January 30, 1934, he could look back on a year of achievement without parallel in German history. Within twelve months he had overthrown the Weimar Republic, substituted his personal dictatorship for its democracy, destroyed all the political parties but his own, smashed the state governments and their parliaments and unified and defederalized the Reich, wiped out the labor unions, stamped out democratic associations of any kind, driven the Jews out of public and professional life, abolished freedom of speech and of the press, stifled the independence of the courts and "co-ordinated" under Nazi rule the political, economic, cultural and social life of an ancient and cultivated people. For all these accomplishments and for his resolute action in foreign affairs, which took Germany out of the concert of nations at Geneva, and proclaimed German insistence on being treated as an equal among the great powers, he was backed, as the autumn plebiscite and election had shown, by the overwhelming majority of the German people. Yet as the second year of his dictatorship got under way clouds gathered on the Nazi horizon. THE BLOOD PURGE OF JUNE 30, 1934 The darkening of the sky was due to three unresolved problems, and they were interrelated: the continued clamor of radical party and S.A. leaders for the "second revolution"; the rivalry of the S.A. and the Army; and the question of the succession to President Hindenburg, the sands of whose life at last began to run out with the coming of spring. Roehm, the chief of staff of the S.A., now swollen to two and a half mil lion storm troopers, had not been put off by Hitler's gesture of appointing him to the cabinet nor by the Fuehrer's friendly personal letter on New Year's Day. In February he presented to the cabinet a lengthy memorandum proposing that the S.A. should be made the foundation of a new People's Army and that the armed forces, the S.A. and S.S. and all veterans' groups should be placed under a single Ministry of Defense, over which- -- he implication was clear -- he should preside. No more revolting idea could be imagined by the officer corps, and its senior members not only unanimously rejected the proposal but appealed to Hindenburg to support them. The whole tradition of the military caste would be destroyed if the roughneck Roehm and his brawling Brownshirts should get control of the Army. Moreover, the generals were shocked by the tales, now beginning to receive wide circulation, of the corruption and debauchery of the homosexual clique around the S.A. chief. As General von Brauchitsch would later testify, "rearmament was too serious and difficult a business to permit the participation of peculators, drunkards and homosexuals." For the moment Hitler could not afford to offend the Army, and he gave no support to Roehm's proposal. Indeed, on February 21 he secretly told Anthony Eden, who had come to Berlin to discuss the disarmament impasse, that he was prepared to reduce the S.A. by two thirds and to agree to a system of inspection to make sure that the remainder received neither military training nor arms -- an offer which, when it leaked out, further inflamed the bitterness of Roehm and the S.A. As the summer of 1934 approached, the relations between the S.A. chief of staff and the Army High Command continued to deteriorate. There were stormy scenes in the cabinet between Roehm and General von Blomberg, and in March the Minister of Defense protested to Hitler that the S.A. was secretly arming a large force of special staff guards with heavy machine guns -- which was not only a threat against the Army but, General von Blomberg added, an act done so publicly that it threatened Germany's clandestine rearmament under the auspices of the Reichswehr. It is plain that at this juncture Hitler, unlike the headstrong Roehm and his cronies, was thinking ahead to the day when the ailing Hindenburg would breathe his last. He knew that the aged President as well as the Army and other conservative forces in Germany were in favor of a restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy as soon as the Field Marshal had passed away. He himself had other plans, and when early in April the news was secretly but authoritatively conveyed to him and Blomberg from Neudeck that the President's days were numbered, he realized that a bold stroke must soon be made. To ensure its success he would need the backing of the officer corps; to obtain that support he was prepared to go to almost any length. The occasion for confidential parleys with the Army soon presented itself. On April 11 the Chancellor, accompanied by General von Blomberg and the commanders in chief of the Army and the Navy, General Freiherr von Fritsch and Admiral Raeder, set out on the cruiser Deutschland from Kiel for Koenigsberg to attend the spring maneuvers in East Prussia. The Army and Navy commanders were told of Hindenburg's worsening condition and Hitler, backed by the compliant Blomberg, bluntly proposed that he himself, with the Reichswehr's blessing, be the President's successor. In return for the support of the military, Hitler offered to suppress Roehm's ambitions, drastically reduce the S.A. and guarantee the Army and Navy that they would continue to be the sole bearers of arms in the Third Reich. It is believed that Hitler also held out to Fritsch and Raeder the prospect of an immense expansion of the Army and Navy, if they were prepared to go along with him. With the fawning Raeder there was no question but that he would, but Fritsch, a tougher man, had first to consult his senior generals. This consultation took place at Bad Nauheim on May 16, and after the "Pact of the Deutschland" had been explained to them, the highest officers of the German Army unanimously endorsed Hitler as the successor to President Hindenburg.27 For the Army this political decision was to prove of historic significance. By voluntarily offering to put itself in the unrestrained hands of a megalomaniacal dictator it was sealing its own fate. As for Hitler, the deal would make his dictatorship supreme. With the stubborn Field Marshal out of the way, with the prospect of the restoration of the Hohenzollerns snuffed out, with himself as head of state as well as of government, he could go his way alone and unhindered. The price he paid for this elevation to supreme power was paltry: the sacrifice of the S.A. He did not need it, now that he had all the authority. It was a raucous rabble that only embarrassed him. Hitler's contempt for the narrow minds of the generals must have risen sharply that spring. They could be had, he must have thought, for surprisingly little. It was a judgment that he held, unaltered, except for one bad moment in June, to the end -- his end and theirs. Yet, as summer came, Hitler's troubles were far from over. An ominous tension began to grip Berlin. Cries for the "second revolution" multiplied, and not only Roehm and the storm troop leaders but Goebbels himself, in speeches and in the press which he controlled, gave vent to them. From the conservative Right, from the Junkers and big industrialists around Papen and Hindenburg, came demands that a halt be called to the revolution, that the arbitrary arrests, the persecution of the Jews, the attacks against the churches, the arrogant behavior of the storm troopers be curbed, and that the general terror organized by the Nazis come to an end. Within the Nazi Party itself there was a new and ruthless struggle for power. Roehm's two most powerful enemies, Goering and Himmler, were uniting against him. On April I Himmler, chief of the black-coated S.S., which was still an arm of the S.A. and under Roehm's command, was named by Goering to be chief of the Prussian Gestapo, and he immediately began to build up a secret-police empire of his own. Goering, who had been made a General der lnfanterie by Hindenburg the previous August (though he was Minister of Aviation), gladly shed his shabby brown S.A. uniform for the more showy one of his new office, and the change was symbolic: as a general and a member of a family from the military caste, he quickly sided with the Army in its fight against Roehm and the S.A. To protect himself in the jungle warfare which was now going on, Goering also recruited his own personal police force, the Landespolizeigruppe General Goering, several thousand men strong, which he concentrated in the former Cadet School at Lichterfelde, where he had first entered the Army and which was strategically located on the outskirts of Berlin. Rumors of plots and counterplots added to the tension in the capital. General von Schleicher, unable to bear a decent obscurity or to remember that he no longer enjoyed the confidence of Hindenburg, the generals or the conservatives and was therefore powerless, had begun to mix again in politics. He was in touch with Roehm and Gregor Strasser and there were reports, some of which reached Hitler, that he was busy trying to make a deal whereby he would become Vice-Chancellor in place of his old enemy, Papen, Roehm would become Minister of Defense and the S.A. would be amalgamated with the Army. Cabinet "lists" circulated by the dozen in Berlin; in some of them Bruening was to be made Foreign Minister and Strasser Minister of Economics. These reports had little foundation but they were grist to the mill of Goering and Himmler, who, desirous each for his own reasons to destroy Roehm and the S.A., and at the same time to settle accounts with Schleicher and the disgruntled conservatives, embroidered them and brought them to Hitler, who at any time needed little prodding to have his suspicions aroused. What Goering and his Gestapo chief had in mind was not only to purge the S.A. but to liquidate other opponents on the Left and Right, including some who had opposed Hitler in the past and were no longer politically active. At the end of May Bruening and Schleicher were warned that they were marked for murder. The former slipped quietly out of the country in disguise, the latter went off on a vacation to Bavaria but returned to Berlin toward the end of June. At the beginning of June, Hitler had a showdown with Roehm which, according to his own account given to the Reichstag later, lasted for nearly five hours and which "dragged on until midnight." It was, Hitler said, his "last attempt" to come to an understanding with his closest friend in the movement.
According to Hitler, Roehm left him with the "assurance that he would do everything possible to put things right." Actually, Hitler later claimed, Roehm began "preparations to eliminate me personally." This was almost certainly untrue. Though the whole story of the purge, like that of the Reichstag fire, will probably never be known, all the evidence that has come to light indicates that the S.A. chief never plotted to put Hitler out of the way. Unfortunately the captured archives shed no more light on the purge than they do on the Reichstag fire; in both cases it is likely that all the incriminating documents were destroyed on the orders of Goering. Whatever was the real nature of the long conversation between the two Nazi veterans, a day or two after it took place Hitler bade the S.A. go on leave for the entire month of July, during which the storm troopers were prohibited from wearing uniforms or engaging in parades or exercises. On June 7, Roehm announced that he himself was going on sick leave but at the same time he issued a defiant warning: "If the enemies of S.A. hope that the SA. will not be recalled, or will be recalled only in part after its leave, we may permit them to enjoy this brief hope. They will receive their answer at such time and in such form as appears necessary. The S.A. is and remains the destiny of Germany." Before he left Berlin Roehm invited Hitler to confer with the S.A. leaders at the resort town of Wiessee, near Munich, on June 30. Hitler readily agreed and indeed kept the appointment, though not in a manner which Roehm could possibly have imagined. Perhaps not in a way, either, that Hitler himself at this moment could foresee. For, as he later admitted to the Reichstag, he hesitated "again and again before taking a final decision ... I still cherished the secret hope that I might be able to spare the movement and my S.A. the shame of such a disagreement and that it might be possible to remove the mischief without severe conflicts." "It must be confessed," he added, "that the last days of May continuously brought to light more and more disquieting facts." But did they? Later Hitler claimed that Roehm and his conspirators had made preparations to seize Berlin and take him into custody. But if this were so why did all the S.A. leaders depart from Berlin early in June, and -- even more important -- why did Hitler leave Germany at this moment and thus provide an opportunity for the S.A. chiefs to grab control of the State in his absence? For on June 14 the Fuehrer flew to Venice to hold the first of many conversations with his fellow fascist dictator, Mussolini. The meeting, incidentally, did not go off well for the German leader, who, in his soiled raincoat and battered soft hat, seemed ill at ease in the presence of the more experienced Duce, resplendent in his glittering, bemedaled black Fascisti uniform and inclined to be condescending to his visitor. Hitler returned to Germany in a state of considerable irritation and called a meeting of his party leaders in the little town of Gera in Thuringia for Sunday, June 17, to report on his talks with Mussolini and to assess the worsening situation at home. As fate would have it, another meeting took place on that Sunday in the old university town of Marburg which attracted much more attention in Germany and indeed in the world, and which helped bring the critical situation to a climax. The dilettante Papen, who had been rudely shoved to the sidelines by Hitler and Goering but who was still nominally Vice-Chancellor and still enjoyed the confidence of Hindenburg, summoned enough courage to speak out publicly against the excesses of the regime which he had done so much to foist on Germany. In May he had seen the ailing President off to Neudeck -- it was the last time he was to see his protector alive -- and the grizzly but enfeebled old Field Marshal had said to him: "Things are going badly, Papen. See what you can do to put them right." Thus encouraged, Papen had accepted an invitation to make an address at the University of Marburg on June 17. The speech was largely written by one of his personal advisers, Edgar lung, a brilliant Munich lawyer and writer and a Protestant, though certain ideas were furnished by one of the Vice-Chancellor's secretaries, Herbert von Bose, and by Erich Klausener, the leader of Catholic Action -- a collaboration that soon cost all three of them their lives. It was a courageous utterance and, thanks to lung, eloquent in style and dignified in tone. It called for an end of the revolution, for a termination of the Nazi terror, for the restoration of normal decencies and the return of some measure of freedom, especially of freedom of the press. Addressing Dr. Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, Papen said:
The speech, when it became known, was widely heralded in Germany, but it fell like a bombshell on the little group of Nazi leaders gathered at Gera, and Goebbels moved quickly to see that it became known as little as possible. He forbade the broadcast of a recording of the speech scheduled for the same evening as well as any reference to it in the press, and ordered the police to seize copies of the Frankfurter Zeitung which were on the streets with a partial text. But not even the absolute powers of the Propaganda Minister were sufficient to keep the German people and the outside world from learning the contents of the defiant address. The wily Papen had provided the foreign correspondents and diplomats in Berlin with advance texts, and several thousand copies were hastily run off on the presses of Papen's newspaper, Germania, and secretly distributed. On learning of the Marburg speech, Hitler was stung to fury. In a speech the same afternoon at Gera he denounced the "pygmy who imagines he can stop, with a few phrases, the gigantic renewal of a people's life." Papen was furious too, at the suppression of his speech. He rushed to Hitler on June 20 and told him he could not tolerate such a ban "by a junior minister," insisted that he had spoken "as a trustee for the President," and then and there submitted his resignation, adding a warning that he "would advise Hindenburg of this immediately." [29] This was a threat that obviously worried Hitler, for he was aware of reports that the President was so displeased with the situation that he was considering declaring martial law and handing over power to the Army. In order to size up the seriousness of this danger to the very continuance of the Nazi regime, he flew to Neudeck on the following day, June 21, to see Hindenburg. His reception could only have increased his fears. He was met by General von Blomberg and quickly saw that his Defense Minister's usual lackeylike attitude toward him had suddenly disappeared. Blomberg instead was now the stern Prussian general and he brusquely informed Hitler that he was authorized by the Field Marshal to tell him that unless the present state of tension in Germany was brought quickly to an end the President would declare martial law and turn over the control of the State to the Army. When Hitler was permitted to see Hindenburg for a few minutes in the presence of Blomberg, the old President confirmed the ultimatum. This was a disastrous turn of affairs for the Nazi Chancellor. Not only was his plan to succeed the President in jeopardy; if the Army took over, that would be the end of him and of Nazi government. Flying back to Berlin the same day he must have reflected that he had only one choice to make if he were to survive. He must honor his pact with the Army, suppress the S.A. and halt the continuance of the revolution for which the storm troop leaders were pressing. The Army, backed by the venerable President, it was obvious, would accept no less. And yet, in that last crucial week of June, Hitler hesitated -- as least as to how drastic to be with the S.A. chiefs to whom he owed so much. But now Goering and Himmler helped him to make up his mind. They had already drawn up the scores they wanted to settle, long lists of present and past enemies they wished to liquidate. All they had to do was convince the Fuehrer of the enormity of the "plot" against him and of the necessity for swift and ruthless action. According to the testimony at Nuremberg of Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior and one of Hitler's most faithful followers, it was Himmler who finally succeeded in convincing Hitler that "Roehm wanted to start a putsch. The Fuehrer," Frick added, "ordered Himmler to suppress the putsch." Himmler, he explained, was instructed to put it down in Bavaria, and Goering in Berlin. [30] The Army prodded Hitler too and thereby incurred a responsibility for the barbarity which was soon to take place. On June 25 General von Fritsch, the Commander in Chief, put the Army in a state of alert, canceling all leaves and confining the troops to barracks. On June 28 Roehm was expelled from the German Officers' League -- a plain warning that the S.A. chief of staff was in for trouble. And just to make sure that no one, Roehm above all, should have any illusions about where the Army stood, Blomberg took the unprecedented step of publishing a signed article on June 29 in the Voelkischer Beobachter, affirming that "the Army ... stands behind Adolf Hitler ... who remains one of ours." The Army, then, was pressing for the purge, but it did not want to soil its own hands. That must be done by Hitler, Goering and Himmler, with their black-coated S.S. and Goering's special police. Hitler left Berlin on Thursday, June 28, for Essen to attend the wedding of a local Nazi gauleiter, Josef Terboven. The trip and its purpose hardly suggest that he felt a grave crisis to be imminent. On the same day Goering and Himmler ordered special detachments of the S.S. and the "Goering Police" to hold themselves in readiness. With Hitler out of town, they evidently felt free to act on their own. The next day, the twenty-ninth, the Fuehrer made a tour of Labor Service camps in Westphalia, returning in the afternoon to Godesberg on the Rhine, where he put up at a hotel on the riverbank run by an old war comrade, Dreesen. That evening Goebbels, who seems to have hesitated as to which camp to join -- he had been secretly in touch with Roehm -- arrived in Godesberg, his mind made up, and reported what Hitler later described as "threatening intelligence" from Berlin. Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop and ex-bouncer in a cafe frequented by homosexuals, whom Roehm had made leader of the Berlin SA., had alerted the storm troopers. Ernst, a handsome but not a bright young man, believed then and for the remaining twenty-four hours or so of his life that he was faced by a putsch from the Right, and he would die shouting proudly, "Heil Hitler!" Hitler later claimed that up to this moment, June 29, he had decided merely to "deprive the chief of staff [Roehm] of his office and for the time being keep him in custody and arrest a number of S.A. leaders whose crimes were unquestioned ... and in an earnest appeal to the others, I would recall them to their duty."
Hitler never revealed from whom the "urgent messages" came but the implication is that they were sent by Goering and Himmler. What is certain is that they were highly exaggerated. In Berlin, S.A. Leader Ernst thought of nothing more drastic than to drive to Bremen that Saturday with his bride to take ship for a honeymoon at Madeira. And in the south, where the S.A. "conspirators" were concentrated? At the moment of 2 A.M. on June 30 when Hitler, with Goebbels at his side, was taking off from Hangelar Airfield near Bonn, Captain Roehm and his S.A. lieutenants were peacefully slumbering in their beds at the Hanslbauer Hotel at Wiessee on the shores of the Tegernsee. Edmund Heines, the S.A. Obergruppenfuehrer of Silesia, a convicted murderer, a notorious homosexual with a girlish face on the brawny body of a piano mover, was in bed with a young man. So far did the S.A. chiefs seem from staging a revolt that Roehm had left his staff guards in Munich. There appeared to be plenty of carousing among the S.A. leaders but no plotting. Hitler and his small party (Otto Dietrich, his press chief, and Viktor Lutze, the colorless but loyal S.A. leader of Hanover, had joined it) landed in Munich at 4 A.M. on Saturday, June 30, and found that some action already had been taken. Major Walther Buch, head of USCHLA, the party court, and Adolf Wagner, Bavarian Minister of the Interior, aided by such early cronies of Hitler as Emil Maurice, the ex-convict and rival for Geli Raubal's love, and Christian Weber, the horse dealer and former cabaret bouncer, had arrested the Munich S.A. leaders, including Obergruppenfuehrer Schneidhuber, who was also chief of police in Munich. Hitler, who was now working himself up to a fine state of hysteria, found the prisoners in the Ministry of the Interior. Striding up to Schneidhuber, a former Army colonel, he tore off his Nazi insignia and cursed him for his "treason." Shortly after dawn Hitler and his party sped out of Munich toward Wiessee in a long column of cars. They found Roehm and his friends still fast asleep in the Hanslbauer Hotel. The awakening was rude. Heines and his young male companion were dragged out of bed, taken outside the hotel and summarily shot on the orders of Hitler. The Fuehrer, according to Otto Dietrich's account, entered Roehm's room alone, gave him a dressing down and ordered him to be brought back to Munich and lodged in Stadelheim prison, where the S.A. chief had served time after his participation with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. After fourteen stormy years the two friends, who more than any others were responsible for the launching of the Third Reich, for its terror and its degradation, who though they had often disagreed had stood together in the moments of crisis and defeats and disappointments, had come to a parting of the ways, and the scar-faced, brawling battler for Hitler and Nazism had come to the end of his violent life. Hitler, in a final act of what he apparently thought was grace, gave orders that a pistol be left on the table of his old comrade. Roehm refused to make use of it. "If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself," he is reported to have said. Thereupon two S.A. officers, according to the testimony of an eyewitness, a police lieutenant, given twenty-three years later in a postwar trial at Munich in May 1957, entered the cell and fired their revolvers at Roehm point-blank. "Roehm wanted to say something," said this witness, "but the S.S. officer motioned him to shut up. Then Roehm stood at attention -- he was stripped to the waist -- with his face full of contempt." [v] And so he died, violently as he had lived, contemptuous of the friend he had helped propel to the heights no other German had ever reached, and almost certainly, like hundreds of others who were slaughtered that day -- like Schneidhuber, who was reported to have cried, "Gentlemen, I don't know what this is all about, but shoot straight" -- without any clear idea of what was happening, or why, other than that it was an act of treachery which he, who had lived so long with treachery and committed it so often himself, had not expected from Adolf Hitler. In Berlin, in the meantime, Goering and Himmler had been busy. Some 150 S.A. leaders were rounded up and stood against a wall of the Cadet School at Lichterfelde and shot by firing squads of Himmler's S.S. and Goering's special police. Among them was Karl Ernst, whose honeymoon trip was interrupted by S.S. gunmen as his car neared Bremen. His bride and his chauffeur were wounded; he himself was knocked unconscious and flown back to Berlin for his execution. *** The S.A. men were not the only ones to fall on that bloody summer weekend. On the morning of June 30, a squad of S.S. men in mufti rang the doorbell at General von Schleicher's villa on the outskirts of Berlin. When the General opened the door he was shot dead in his tracks, and when his wife, whom he had married but eighteen months before -- he had been a bachelor until then -- stepped forward, she too was slain on the spot. General Kurt von Bredow, a close friend of Schleicher, met a similar fate the same evening. Gregor Strasser was seized at his home in Berlin at noon on Saturday and dispatched a few hours later in his cell in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse Gestapo jail on the personal orders of Goering. Papen was luckier. He escaped with his life. But his office was ransacked by an S.S. squad, his principal secretary, Bose, shot down at his desk, his confidential collaborator, Edgar Jung, who had been arrested a few days earlier by the Gestapo, murdered in prison, another collaborator, Erich Klausener, leader of Catholic Action, slain in his office in the Ministry of Communications, and the rest of his staff, including his private secretary, Baroness Stotzingen, carted off to concentration camp. When Papen went to protest to Goering, the latter, who at that moment had no time for idle talk, "more or less," he later recalled, threw him out, placing him under house arrest at his villa, which was surrounded by heavily armed S.S. men and where his telephone was cut and he was forbidden to have any contact with the outside world -- an added humiliation which the Vice-Chancellor of Germany swallowed remarkably well. For within less than a month he defiled himself by accepting from the Nazi murderers of his friends a new assignment as German minister to Vienna, where th,e Nazis had just slain Chancellor Dollfuss. How many were slain in the purge was never definitely established. In his Reichstag speech of July 13, Hitler announced that sixty-one persons were shot, including nineteen "higher S.A. leaders," that thirteen more died "resisting arrest" and that three "committed suicide" -- a total of seventy-seven. The While Book of the Purge, published by emigres in Paris, stated that 40 I had been slain, but it identified only 116 of them. At the Munich trial in 1957, the figure of "more than 1,000" was given. Many were killed out of pure vengeance for having opposed Hitler in the past, others were murdered apparently because they knew too much, and at least one because of mistaken identity. The body of Gustav van Kahr, whose suppression of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 we have already recounted, and who had long since retired from politics, was found in a swamp near Dachau hacked to death, apparently by pickaxes. Hitler had neither forgotten nor forgiven him. The body of Father Bernhard Stempfle of the Hieronymite Order, who, it will be remembered from earlier pages, helped edit Mein Kampf and later talked too much, perhaps, about his knowledge of why Hitler's love, Geli Raubal, committed suicide, was found in the forest of Harlaching near Munich, his neck broken and three shots in the heart. Heiden says the murder gang that killed him was led by Emil Maurice, the ex-convict who had also made love to Geli Raubal. Others who "knew too much" included three S.A. men who were believed to have been accomplices of Ernst in setting the Reichstag on fire. They were dispatched with Ernst. One other murder deserves mention. At seven-twenty on the evening of June 30, Dr. Willi Schmid, the eminent music critic of the Muenchener Neueste Nachrichten, a leading Munich daily newspaper, was playing the cello in his study while his wife prepared supper and their three children, aged nine, eight and two, played in the living room of their apartment in the Schackstrasse in Munich. The doorbell rang, four S.S. men appeared and without explanation took Dr. Schmid away. Four days later his body was returned in a coffin with orders from the Gestapo not to open it in any circumstances. Dr. Willi Schmid, who had never participated in politics, had been mistaken by the S.S. thugs for Willi Schmidt, a local S.A. leader, who in the meantime had been arrested by another S.S. detachment and shot. [vi] *** Was there a plot against Hitler at all? There is only his word for it, contained in the official communiques and in his Reichstag speech of July 13. He never presented a shred of evidence. Roehm had made no secret of his ambition to see the S.A. become the nucleus of the new Army and to head it himself. He had certainly been in touch with Schleicher about the scheme, which they had first discussed when the General was Chancellor. Probably, as Hitler stated, Gregor Strasser "was brought in." But such talks certainly did not constitute treason. Hitler himself was in contact with Strasser and early in June, according to Otto Strasser, offered him the post of Minister of Economics. At first Hitler accused Roehm and Schleicher of having sought the backing of a "foreign power" -- obviously France -- and charged that General von Bredow was the intermediary in "foreign policy." This was part of the indictment of them as "traitors." And though Hitler repeated the charges in his Reichstag speech and spoke sarcastically of "a foreign diplomat [who could have been no other than Francois-Poncet, the French ambassador] explaining that the meeting with Schleicher and Roehm was of an entirely harmless character," he was unable to substantiate his accusations. It was crime enough, he said lamely, for any responsible German in the Third Reich even to see foreign diplomats without his knowledge.
When Francois-Poncet protested vigorously against the insinuation that he had participated in the Roehm "plot" the German Foreign Office officially informed the French government that the accusations were wholly without foundation and that the Reich government hoped the ambassador would remain in his post. Indeed, as this writer can testify, Francois-Poncet continued to remain on better personal terms with Hitler than any other envoy from a democratic state. In the first communiques, especially in a blood-curdling eyewitness account given the public by Otto Dietrich, the Fuehrer's press chief, and even in Hitler's Reichstag speech, much was made of the depraved morals of Roehm and the other S.A. leaders who were shot. Dietrich asserted that the scene of the arrest of Heines, who was caught in bed at Wiessee with a young man, "defied description," and Hitler in addressing the surviving storm troop leaders in Munich at noon on June 30, just after the first executions, declared that for their corrupt morals alone these men deserved to die. And yet Hitler had known all along, from the earliest days of the party, that a large number of his closest and most important followers were sexual perverts and convicted murderers. It was common talk, for instance, that Heines used to send S.A. men scouring all over Germany to find him suitable male lovers. These things Hitler had not only tolerated but defended; more than once he had warned his party comrades against being too squeamish about a man's personal morals if he were a fanatical fighter for the movement. Now, on June 30, 1934, he professed to be shocked by the moral degeneration of some of his oldest lieutenants. *** Most of the killing was over by Sunday afternoon, July 1, when Hitler, who had flown back to Berlin from Munich the night before, was host at a tea party in the gardens of the Chancellery. On Monday President Hinden burg thanked Hitler for his "determined action and gallant personal intervention which have nipped treason in the bud and rescued the German people from great danger." He also congratulated Goering for his "energetic and successful action" in suppressing "high treason." On Tuesday General von Blomberg expressed to the Chancellor the congratulations of the cabinet, which proceeded to "legalize" the slaughter as a necessary measure "for the defense of the State." Blomberg also issued an order of the day to the Army expressing the High Command's satisfaction with the turn of events and promising to establish "cordial relations with the new S.A." It was natural, no doubt, that the Army should be pleased with the elimination of its rival, the S.A., but what about the sense of honor, let alone of decency, of an officer corps which not only condoned but openly praised a government for carrying out a massacre without precedent in German history, during which two of its leading officers, Generals van Schleicher and von Bredow, having been branded as traitors, were cold-bloodedly murdered? Only the voices of the eighty-five-year-old Field Marshal von Mackensen and of General von Hammerstein, the former Commander in Chief of the Army, were raised in protest against the murder of their two fellow officers and the charges of treason which had been the excuse for it. [vii] This behavior of the corps was a black stain on the honor of the Army; it was also a mark of its unbelievable shortsightedness. In making common cause with the lawlessness, indeed the gangsterism, of Hitler on June 30, 1934, the generals were putting themselves in a position in which they could never oppose future acts of Nazi terrorism not only at home but even when they were aimed across the frontiers, even when they were committed against their own members. For the Army was backing Hitler's claim that he had become the law, or, as he put it in his Reichstag speech of July 13, "If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge [oberster Gerichtsherr] of the German people." And Hitler added, for good measure, "Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot." This was a warning that was to catch up with the generals in ten years almost to a day when at last the more desperate of them dared to raise their hand to strike down their "supreme judge." Moreover, the officer corps only deluded itself in thinking that on June 30 it got rid forever of the threat of the Nazi movement against its traditional prerogatives and power. For in the place of the S.A. came the S.S. On July 26 the S.S., as a reward for carrying out the executions, was made independent of the S.A., with Himmler -- as its Reichsfuehrer -- responsible only to Hitler. Soon this much-better-disciplined and loyal force would become much more powerful than the S.A. had ever been and as a rival to the Army would succeed where Roehm's ragged Brownshirts had failed. For the moment, however, the generals were smugly confident. As Hitler reiterated in his Reichstag address on July 13, the Army was to remain "the sole bearer of arms." At the High Command's bidding, the Chancellor had got rid of the S.A., which had dared to dispute that dictum. The time now came when the Army had to carry out its part of the "Pact of the Deutschland." THE DEATH OF HINDENBURG All through the summer the seemingly indestructible Hindenburg had been sinking and on August 2, at nine in the morning, he died in his eighty-seventh year. At noon, three hours later, it was announced that according to a law enacted by the cabinet on the preceding day the offices of Chancellor and President had been combined and that Adolf Hitler had taken over the powers of the head of state and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. The title of President was abolished; Hitler would be known as Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor. His dictatorship had become complete. To leave no loopholes Hitler exacted from all officers and men of the armed forces an oath of allegiance -- not to Germany, not to the constitution, which he had violated by not calling for the election of Hindenburg's successor, but to himself. It read:
From August 1934 on, the generals, who up to that time could have overthrown the Nazi regime with ease had they so desired, thus tied themselves to the person of Adolf Hitler, recognizing him as the highest legitimate authority in the land and binding themselves to him by an oath of fealty which they felt honor-bound to obey in all circumstances no matter how degrading to them and the Fatherland. It was an oath which was to trouble the conscience of quite a few high officers when their acknowledged leader set off on a path which they felt could only lead to the nation's destruction and which they opposed. It was also a pledge which enabled an even greater number of officers to excuse themselves from any personal responsibility for the unspeakable crimes which they carried out on the orders of a Supreme Commander whose true nature they had seen for themselves in the butchery of June 30. One of the appalling aberrations of the German officer corps from this point on rose out of this conflict of "honor" -- a word which, as this author can testify by personal experience, was often on their lips and of which they had such a curious concept. Later and often, by honoring their oath they dishonored themselves as human beings and trod in the mud the moral code of their corps. When Hindenburg died, Dr. Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, officially announced that no last will and testament of the Field Marshal had been found and that it must be presumed there was none. But on August 15, four days before the plebiscite in which the German people were asked to approve Hitler's taking over the President's office, Hindenburg's political testament turned up, delivered to Hitler by none other than Papen. Its words of praise for Hitler provided strong ammunition to Goebbels in the final days of the plebiscite campaign, and it was reinforced on the eve of the voting by a broadcast of Colonel Oskar van Hindenburg:
Almost certainly this was not true. For Hindenburg, on the best evidence available, had recommended as his last wish a restoration of the monarchy after his death. This part of the testament Adolf Hitler suppressed. Some, if not all, of the mystery which cloaked the truth about the aged President's testament was cleared up after the war by Papen's interrogation at Nuremberg and later in his memoirs. And while Papen is not an unimpeachable witness and may not have told all he knew, his testimony cannot be ignored. He himself wrote the initial draft of Hindenburg's last will, and, according to him, at the Field Marshal's request.
Papen delivered his draft to Hindenburg in April 1934, he says.
No German was as well placed as Papen to observe how Hitler took the advantage.
Oskar, who had not been able to find the important document immediately after his father's death, suddenly found it. That this could not have been a very difficult feat was attested to by Count von der Schulenburg, Hindenburg's adjutant, in his testimony at Papen's denazification trial. He revealed that the President on May 11 signed two documents, his testament and his last wishes. The first was addressed to "the German People" and the second to the "Reich Chancellor." When Hindenburg left Berlin on his last journey to Neudeck Schulenburg took the papers with him. Papen says he did not know this at the time. But in due course his secretary returned from Neudeck bringing two sealed envelopes turned over to him by Oskar von Hindenburg. On August 15 Papen delivered them to Hitler at Berchtesgaden.
What happened to the second document recommending that not Hitler but a Hohenzollern become head of state Papen does not say and perhaps does not know. Since it has never turned up among the hundreds of tons of captured secret Nazi documents it is likely that Hitler lost no time in destroying it. Perhaps it would have made little difference if Hitler had been courageous and honest enough to publish it. Even before Hindenburg's death, he had made the cabinet promulgate a law giving him the President's powers. This was on August 1, the day before the Field Marshal died. That the "law" was illegal also made little difference in a Germany where the former Austrian corporal had now become the law itself. That it was illegal was obvious. On December 17, 1932, during the Schleicher government, the Reichstag had passed by the necessary two-thirds majority an amendment to the constitution providing that the president of the High Court of Justice, instead of the Chancellor, should act as President until a new election could be held. And while the Enabling Act, which was the "legal" basis of Hitler's dictatorship, gave the Chancellor the right to make laws which deviated from the constitution, it specifically forbade him to tamper with the institution of the Presidency. But what mattered the law now? It mattered not to Papen, who cheerfully went off to serve Hitler as minister in Vienna and smooth over the mess caused by the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss by the Nazis. It mattered not to the generals, who went eagerly to work to build up Hitler's Army. It mattered not to the industrialists, who turned enthusiastically to the profitable business of rearmament. Conservatives of the old school, "decent" Germans like Baron von Neurath in the Foreign Office and Dr. Schacht in the Reichsbank, did not resign. No one resigned. In fact, Dr. Schacht took on the added duties of Minister of Economics on August 2, the day Hitler seized the powers of the expiring President. And the German people? On August 19, some 95 per cent of those who had registered went to the polls, and 90 per cent, more than thirty-eight million of them, voted approval of Hitler's usurpation of complete power. Only four and a quarter million Germans had the courage -- or the desire -- to vote "No." No wonder that Hitler was in a confident mood when the Nazi Party Congress assembled in Nuremberg on September 4. I watched him on the morning of the next day stride like a conquering emperor down the center aisle of the great flag-bedecked Luitpold Hall while the band blared forth "The Badenweiler March" and thirty thousand hands were raised in the Nazi salute. A few moments later he sat proudly in the center of the vast stage with folded arms and shining eyes as Gauleiter Adolf Wagner of Bavaria read the Fuehrer's proclamation.
Being mortal, he would not live a thousand years, but as long as he lived he would rule this great people as the most powerful and ruthless autocrat they had ever had. The venerable Hindenburg was no longer there to dispute his authority, the Army was in his hands, bound to obedience by an oath no German soldier would lightly break. Indeed, all Germany and all the Germans were in his bloodstained hands now that the last recalcitrants had been done away with or had disappeared for good. "It is wonderful!" he exulted at Nuremberg to the foreign correspondents at the end of the exhausting week of parades, speeches, pagan pageantry and the most frenzied adulation for a public figure this writer had ever seen. Adolf Hitler had come a long way from the gutters of Vienna. He was only forty-five, and this was just the beginning. Even one returning to Germany for the first time since the death of the Republic could see that, whatever his crimes against humanity, Hitler had unleashed a dynamic force of incalculable proportions which had long been pent up in the German people. To what purpose, he had already made clear in the pages of Mein Kampf and in a hundred speeches which had gone unnoticed or unheeded or been ridiculed by so many -- by almost everyone -- within and especially without the Third Reich. _______________ Notes: i. This cabinet meeting, of course, was private. and, like most of the other conferences, many of them taking place in the strictest secrecy, held by Hitler and his political and military aides during the Third Reich, its proceedings and decisions were not accessible to the public until the captured German documents were first perused during the Nuremberg trial. A great many of these highly confidential discussions and the decisions emanating from them -- all regarded as state secrets -- will henceforth be chronicled in this book, which, from here to the end. largely rests on the documents which recorded them at the time. At the risk of somewhat cluttering the pages with numbers indicating notes, these sources will be indicated. No other history of a nation over a specific epoch has been so fully documented, I believe, as that of the Third Reich, and to have left out reference to the documents, it seemed to the author, would have greatly weakened whatever value this book may have as an authentic historical record. ii. Both in his interrogations and at his trial at Nuremberg, Goering denied to the last that he had had any part in setting fire to the Reichstag. iii. A document which carne to light at Nuremberg shows that the Nazis had been planning for some time to destroy the trade unions. A secret order dated April 21 and signed by Dr. Ley contained detailed instructions for "co-ordinating" the unions on May 2. S.A. and S.S. troops were to carry out the "occupation of trade-union properties" and to "take into protective custody" all union leaders. Union funds were to be seized. [17] The Christian (Catholic) Trade Unions were not molested on May 2. Their end carne on June 24. iv. Some months previously, on May 11, Lord Hailsham, the British Secretary of State for War, had publicly warned that any attempt of Germany to rearm would be a breach of the peace treaty and would be answered by sanctions, in accordance with the treaty. In Germany it was thought that sanctions would mean armed invasion. v. The Munich trial in May 1957 was the first occasion on which actual eyewitnesses and participants in the June 30, 1934, purge talked in public. During the Third Reich it would not have been possible. Sepp Dietrich, whom this author recalls personally as one of the most brutal men of the Third Reich, commanded Hitler's S.S. Bodyguard in 1934 and directed the executions in Stadelheim prison. Later a colonel general in the Waffen S.S. during the war, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for complicity in the murder of American prisoners of war during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Released after ten years, he was brought to Munich in 1957 and sentenced on May 14 to eighteen months in prison for his part in the June 30, 1934, executions. His sentence and that of Michael Lippert, who was convicted as being one of the two S.S. officers who actually killed Roehm, was the first punishment given to the Nazi executioners who took part in the purge. vi. Kate Eva Hoerlin, former wife of Willi Schmid, told the story of her husband's murder in an affidavit sworn on July 7, 1945, at Binghamton, N.Y. She became an American citizen in 1944. To hush up the atrocity Rudolf Hess himself visited the widow, apologized for the "mistake" and secured for her a pension from the German government. The affidavit is given in Nuremberg Document L-135, NCA, VII, pp. 883-90. vii. The two senior officers continued their efforts to clear the names of Schleicher and Bredow, and succeeded in getting Hitler, at a secret meeting of party and military leaders in Berlin on January 3, 1935, to admit that the killing of the two generals had been "in error" and to announce that their names would be restored to the honor rolls of their regiments. This "rehabilitation" was never published in Germany, but the officer corps accepted it as such. (See Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power, p. 337.) viii. It is interesting and perhaps revealing that Hitler now promoted Oskar from colonel to major general. See above, p. 181.
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