Germany had more than its share of extremists and they would find no common accord. The Weimar Republic and its system of proportional representation tottered from one uneasy coalition government to the next. Politicians tried to reconcile workers, shopkeepers. Communist internationalists, powerful landowners, Prussian militarists, and industrial plutocrats. It often seemed as if the only thing that bound these disparate elements together was a dislike of the Weimar government.
Successive administrations were comprised mostly of men of good faith. Had they been given support from outside Germany, the Republic might have flourished. As it was, they did no better than survive from one muddled compromise to the next. The desire to impose upon the disorder of nature some orderly pattern or arrangement makes men into poets, painters, and gardeners; it also makes them prey to the illusion that a highly organized state will be civilized and preferable to a disorganized and muddled one. Men admired the neatly uniformed, disciplined Nazis, radiantly confident as they marched to military bands or chanted their slogans, and wanted to be a part of this parade before it passed them by.
By the time of the elections in January 1933, enough voters were attracted by Hitler’s bold new experiment in politics to give him a chance to demonstrate his ideas. Without a clear majority, it was necessary for Hitler to form a coalition government together with the conservative Nationalist Party. Franz von Papen, who had been Chancellor until the previous November, agreed to becoming Vice Chancellor to Hitler and giving the Nazis Frick and Goring places in the Cabinet.5
.While it is true to say that proportional representation gave the Nazis a chance to gain power, this can also be said of the whole democratic system. More important to Hitler’s subsequent success were Vice Chancellor von Papen’s personality and social skills.
Franz von Papen was a charming man about town. Ex-staff officer and Catholic aristocrat, he had married into a wealthy family of Rhineland industrialists. He therefore had links with the three most powerful elements of German political life: army, church, and industry.
Often ridiculed for his flamboyance, Papen was not unintelligent but his political skills were minimal. Some of his supporters believed that a man not so deeply committed to party politics might be able to unite the nation in a way that more dedicated dogmatists had failed to do. In any case, it was reasoned, Papen’s influence with Hindenburg— already it had been stipulated that the President would only receive Hitler when the Vice Chancellor was also present—and his political controls of the Cabinet would be enough to contain the power of the Nazis.
Hindenburg hesitated before ratifying the agreement between the Nazi and Nationalist parties. One of the men he consulted about the decision was General Werner von Blomberg. For the proposed Cabinet, Blomberg had already been chosen as Defense Minister. One-time chef des Truppenamts (Chief of General Staff), he had recently been commander of Wehrkreis I (East Prussia), Germany’s most sensitive and turbulent military region.6 It was a job given only to the army’s best men, and the SA units there, with many ex-Freikorps men, were integral to the military defenses. But a serious riding accident had caused Blomberg concussion of the brain and affected him to an extent that he requested to be released from active duty. His temporary assignment to a Geneva Disarmament Conference had given Blomberg direct access to the President in a way that few generals ever had. Blomberg told his President that there was little choice but to agree to the Hitler and Papen coalition. The German Army, he said, would be smashed to pieces if it came into armed conflict with the SA and SS.
Blomberg’s view was not entirely objective. This excitable man, who looked like an aging film star and was so vain that he continued to wear his general’s uniform throughout his life in spite of a law that prohibited ministers from holding army rank, supported the Nazis. A brief period in Soviet Russia had convinced him that the life-style and prestige of a general in a totalitarian society was something worth striving for. Now Blomberg had hitched his star to the Nazis for better or for worse.
President von Hindenburg gave his approval to the agreement that Papen and Hitler had made. It was assumed that some sort of deal would also be made with the Catholic Center Party, so that its seventy seats would be added to the coalition. Meanwhile the Nazis celebrated with torchlight parades and huge demonstrations.
In January 1933 Hitler held his first Cabinet meeting. It seemed that the Nazis were gradually adapting their totalitarian promises to the reality of democratic government. But Hitler was far too much of an extremist and far too devious to be content with leadership through a parliamentary system. He deliberately sabotaged his negotiations with the Center Party so that there would be a clamor for new elections.
Now Hitler’s plan became clear, for the Nazis already held key governmental posts and would continue to occupy them during the elections. Goring’s position as Prime Minister of the state of Prussia, for instance, gave the Nazis control of the police of two thirds of Germany’s total area, a huge region stretching from Poland to the Netherlands. Hurriedly Goring removed anti-Nazi police officials, promoted Nazis to positions of power, and authorized 40,000 Nazi Party members to be auxiliary policemen. Goring ordered that a small office in Berlin Police HQ, hitherto concerned only with the Constitution, should be reorganized as a secret police department. This was the beginning of the Gestapo.
Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda expert, wrote in his diary, “Now it will be easy... we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda.” Goebbels added, “And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money.”
Already in January, before coming to power. Hitler had told the industrialists that this was the moment to give as much money as they could possibly afford. He promised that he would suppress the trade unions and that his plans for Germany would greatly benefit big business. Accepting, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, what they saw as inevitable, the banks, insurance companies, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, I. G. Farben, rubber companies, potash, coal, and steel interests, including Krupp, all helped the Nazis. Cynically, Goring told industrialists that this might be the last election for a decade, or even for a century.
About a week before election day, which was set for 5 March, the Reichstag building was deliberately set on fire. A mentally retarded Dutch anarchist was arrested for the crime. At one time it was widely believed that the fire was started on secret orders from Hitler, but now we can be virtually certain that the Dutchman alone was responsible.7
Hitler was in Goebbels’s apartment when a phone call came to report the Reichstag fire. Goebbels was so certain that it was untrue that he did not even bother to tell Hitler until more calls came with the same news. “Now I have them,” said Hitler excitedly. Goring was already at the fire when they got there, his face flushed with heat and excitement. He screamed, “The Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. Everyone in alliance with the Communists is to be arrested. We are not going to spare the Social Democrats and members of the Reichsbanner either!”
Goring’s wrath was soon turned into action. He sent his policemen to arrest some 4,000 people before morning. As well as members of the Communist Party, a wide variety of other opponents of the Nazi Party disappeared. '
On 28 February, the day following the fire, Hitler went with his Vice Chancellor to see the eighty-six-year-old President von Hinden-burg. It is perhaps a measure of the wild hysteria fanned by Goebbels and his propaganda machine that Papen helped Hitler get Hinden-burg’s signature on the emergency decree. This document delivered Germany into Hitler’s hands. It restricted the press and rights of assembly. It enabled the authorities to intercept postal, telegraph, and phone services and made a “serious disturbance of the peace by armed persons” punishable by death. This decree and a supplementary one issued the same day meant that the Constitution was suspended and Germany was in a state of emergency. These “emergency laws” were the basis for the repressive, merciless regime of the Nazi state. Using their new powers, the Nazis arrested thousands of Communists and many Social Democrats and Liberals.
Detachments of brownshirts, some of them wearing the armband that identified them as auxiliary policemen and backed by senior police officers (who were mostly Nazi Party members), began arresting political opponents. Such prisoners included members of the Reichstag, although under the law they were immune from arrest. Amid this purge, all the trappings of Nazidom were organized: rallies, torchlight marches, speeches over the state radio, flags, posters, and intimidation. During the election period, fifty-one anti-Nazi politicians were murdered. Hundreds more were injured.
In spite of the Reichstag fire and the “masterpiece of propaganda,” the Nazis got only 44 per cent of the vote on 5 March. (The Nationalists slumped to 7 per cent.) To govern the country would require compromises and cooperation with the parties of the center. But this was not what Hitler had in mind. With nearly 100 left-wing deputies arrested or in hiding, Hitler “guarded” the Kroll Opera House, where the Reichstag convened, with SS units and chanting armies of SA men, while he asked the assembly for dictatorial powers
*
For four years by means of an “Enabling Act.” Even without the arrests among the opposition, he would have got the 66 per cent vote such a bill needed. The Center Party (of Christian Democrats) voted for him and only Social Democrats against. He got 441 votes to 84. He persuaded President von Hindenburg to ratify the measure by promising that he would consult the President before making serious changes.
There remained only a few steps. He took away the powers of the sovereign German states, revealing how limited were his previous political ambitions in Bavaria. His biggest potential opponents were the trade unions and the army. He removed the power of the trade unions by forming them into the “labor front,” a tool of the government. Thus there remained but one great threat to total Nazi control, the army.
World History
