The Nazis- a Warning From History Read online

  The suffering hit middle-class families, such as Jutta Rüdiger’s: ‘My father did not become unemployed but he was told he had to agree to work for a lower salary.’ Jutta Rüdiger thought she would have to ‘kiss goodbye’ to the chance of going to university, until a kindly uncle stepped in and gave her an allowance. A family experience like the Rüdigers’ would not have appeared on any unemployment statistic, yet they suffered and feared further suffering. As German unemployment grew in the early 1930s to over 5 million, the longing for a radical solution to the nation’s economic troubles was not confined to the unemployed – it also extended to millions of middle-class families like the Rüdigers.

  The election of September 1930 was a breakthrough for the Nazi Party: their share of the vote increased to 18.3 per cent. Just as worrying for those looking for a life without conflict was the increase in the German Communist Party’s vote from 10.6 per cent to 13.1 per cent. Germany seemed to be splitting towards the extremes. With a Reichstag (Parliament) in which the Nazis and Communists were now heavily represented, the German Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, began to bypass it and issue emergency decrees, signed by President Hindenburg under Article 48 of the Constitution, in order to govern Germany. German democracy did not suddenly die with the arrival of Hitler; it began its slow death under Brüning.

  Social unrest grew along with unemployment. ‘You had to sign on every day at the dole office,’ remembers Alois Pfaller. ‘Everybody met there, the Nazi people, the SPD [German Socialist Party], the Communists – and then the discussions would start and the fights.’ Gabriele Winckler gives a young woman’s perspective: ‘You felt uneasy when you crossed the road, you felt uneasy when you were alone in the woods and so on. The unemployed lay in the ditches and played cards.’ In this atmosphere of danger and despair Jutta Rüdiger heard Hitler speak for the first time: ‘There was a huge crowd and you got the feeling that he was aiming for electrifying tension. Today, I can probably only explain it with the poverty the people had been suffering and were suffering . . . In that context Hitler with his statements seemed to be the bringer of salvation. He said, “I will get you out of this misery, but you all have to join in.” And everybody understood that.’

  During this period the Nazis developed new forms of propaganda to push their message across – famously the ‘Hitler over Germany’ presidential campaign of April 1932, which saw Hitler speak to twenty-one meetings in seven days, travelling between them by light aircraft. But the importance of Nazi propaganda should not be overstated. Academic research conducted by Dr Richard Bessel shows that in the district of Neidenburg in East Prussia, where the Nazi Party did not build a firm organizational base until 1931, the Nazi vote nonetheless increased over the three years leading up to that time. In May 1928 the Nazis received only 360 votes (2.3 per cent) but this increased to 3831 (25.8 per cent) in September 1930. The voters of Neidenburg did not vote Nazi because they were entranced by Hitler or swamped with Nazi propaganda; they supported the Nazis because they wanted fundamental change.

  Hitler was open about the nature of the change the Nazis intended to bring to German political life once they gained power. In a speech he gave on 27 July 1932 at Eberswalde in Brandenburg he openly wallowed in his contempt for democracy: ‘The workers have their own parties,’ he said, ‘and not just one, that wouldn’t be enough. There have to be at least three or four. The bourgeoisie, which is more intelligent, needs even more parties. The middle classes have to have their party. The economy has its party, the farmer his own party, and here again three or four of them. And the house-owners also have to have their particular political and philosophical interests represented by a party. And the tenants can’t stay behind, of course. And the Catholics too, their own party, and even the Württembergers have a special party – thirty-four in one little land. And this at a time when before us lie the greatest tasks, which can only be undertaken if the strength of the whole nation is put together. The enemy accuses us National Socialists, and me in particular, of being intolerant and quarrelsome. They say that we do not want to work with other parties . . . So is it typically German to have thirty parties? I have to admit one thing: the gentlemen are quite right. We are intolerant. I have given myself one aim: to sweep the thirty parties out of Germany.’

  This speech illustrates a crucial point – Hitler and the Nazis wanted a revolution in Germany and they were open in saying what they planned. In this the Nazis had common cause with the German Communist Party; both thought that democracy had failed. Democracy, after all, was relatively new in Germany; its arrival had virtually coincided with the disastrous peace settlement of Versailles, and in the early 1930s democracy appeared to many to be responsible both for the continuing crippling reparation payments and for massive unemployment. Incredible as it may seem to us today, by 1932 the majority of the German people, in supporting either the Communists or the Nazis, were voting for political parties openly committed to the overthrow of German democracy. Most of them, having seen what democracy had delivered, felt that it was time not just for another party to be given a chance, but for another system.

  On 30 May 1932 Brüning resigned as Chancellor after losing President Hindenburg’s support. The aristocratic Franz von Papen was appointed Chancellor on 1 June, but his government immediately ran into problems; at the Reichstag elections held on 31 July the Nazis gained 37.4 per cent of the vote and won 230 seats. They were now the biggest party in the Reichstag. Hitler claimed the right to be Chancellor and saw Hindenburg to press his claim on 13 August 1932. Otto Meissner, chief of the Reich Chancellery, described what happened: ‘Hindenburg declared that he recognized Hitler’s patriotic conviction and selfless intentions, but given the atmosphere of tension and his responsibility before God and the German people, he could not bring himself to give government power to a single party which did not represent the majority of the electorate, and which, furthermore, was intolerant, lacking in discipline and frequently even appeared violent. In foreign affairs, it was of the utmost importance to proceed extremely cautiously and to allow matters to mature. We should at all cost avoid conflicts with other states. As far as domestic affairs were concerned, any widening of the chasm between the opposing sides must be prevented and all powers should be concentrated in order to alleviate economic disaster.’15

  Given what we know happened once Hitler did gain power, Hindenburg’s concerns about him and the Nazis have a prophetic ring to them. Such sentiments clearly show that the aged President knew the dangers Germany faced under Hitler’s Chancellorship. So that should have been that; Hitler’s political demands had been crushingly rejected. Yet five months later, and at a time when the Nazi Party, wracked by internal crisis, had lost many votes in the November Reichstag election, Hitler was made Chancellor by the self-same President Hindenburg. Why? The Nazi Party’s popularity appeared to have peaked in the summer of 1932. Its support was inherently unstable, the party held together more by emotion and notions of its leader’s charisma than by any coherent manifesto of concrete policy. Its rapid growth in popularity owed much to the crisis in which Germany found herself and over which the Nazis had no control. If the German economy began to pick up, success could vanish as rapidly as it had appeared, and the signs were that the economy was about to improve given the political agreement at the Lausanne conference in June 1932 that effectively ended German reparation payments.

  At the elections in November 1932 the Nazi Party vote dropped from 37 per cent to 33 per cent. Goebbels had seen the danger to the party when he wrote in his diary the previous April: ‘We must come to power in the foreseeable future. Otherwise we’ll win ourselves to death in elections.’ (This failure in the November elections of 1932 was, as Dr Bessel points out, despite a massive propaganda effort – yet more evidence that the ‘party’s fortunes were not determined primarily by its propaganda’.)16 The party was in financial trouble, the seemingly endless round of elections having shaken its finances. Worse, Gregor Strasser, leader of the north German wi
ng of the Nazis, resigned amid emotional scenes on 7 December 1932. Strasser had been offered the Vice-Chancellorship by the new Chancellor, General von Schleicher (who had succeeded von Papen on 2 December 1932), but Hitler had insisted he turn the offer down. Strasser did so but quit politics after delivering a stinging indictment of Hitler’s intransigence in holding out for the chancellorship. It appeared that Hitler might lose control of a Nazi Party that was nervy and on edge. (Hitler never forgave Strasser for his ‘treachery’ and he was murdered on the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ on 30 June 1934.)

  In parallel with these developments was a series of events that persuaded the aged President Hindenburg to change his mind and appoint Hitler. In November 1932 Hjalmar Schacht, the former head of the Reichsbank, was one of a number of financiers and industrialists (though few apart from Schacht were prominent figures) who signed a petition to President Hindenburg asking him to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. The letter was respectful but clearly influenced by the fact that the November 1932 elections showed another increase in the Communist vote; many of Germany’s industrial elite may have disliked the Nazis but they feared the Communists more. Equally, it was obvious that the aristocratic cabinet of von Papen commanded little public support. ‘It is clear,’ said the letter, ‘that the oft-repeated dissolution of the Reichstag, with the growing number of elections that exacerbate the party struggle, has had a bad effect, not only political, but also on economic calm and stability. But it is also clear that any constitutional change which is not supported by the broadest popular currents will have even worse political, economic and spiritual consequences.’ The letter went on to call for the transfer of the political leadership of the Reich to ‘the leader of the largest national group’. This was Hitler. Such a course of action ‘will arouse the millions of people who today stand at the margins, making of them an affirmative and approving force’.

  Hitler had not been a figure whom these people had wanted to embrace in the past, but the economic crisis and huge popular support for the Nazi movement now made them feel that an accommodation must be reached. Key figures on the conservative Right also wanted an authoritarian solution to Germany’s problems, and without Hitler no proposal they could initiate would have a base of mass-support. Johannes Zahn, the distinguished German banker, says that since young people at the time were joining either the Storm Troopers or the Communists, those in business preferred the Nazis because of their ‘discipline and order’. In addition, ‘At the beginning,’ he says, ‘you really have to say this today, at the beginning, you couldn’t tell whether National Socialism was something good with a few bad side-effects, or something evil with a few good side-effects, you couldn’t tell.’ There was talk of a strategy of ‘taming’ Hitler. Such a policy was to be enthusiastically proposed by von Papen once he had been forced to step down as Chancellor in favour of General von Schleicher on 2 December 1932.

  Then, more worrying news came to Hindenburg. The results of an army war-game, ‘Planspiel Ott’, were discussed at a cabinet meeting at the start of December 1932. The Armed Forces had examined a number of hypothetical scenarios of civil unrest in an attempt to gauge their ability to respond if called upon during a state of emergency. Major Ott presented their conclusion: ‘. . . all preparations have been made to be able to introduce an immediate state of emergency, if ordered. But after careful consideration, it has been shown that the forces of order of the Reich and the Lander [German states] are in no way sufficient to maintain constitutional order against National Socialists and Communists and to protect the borders.’17 The army was effectively saying it could not control the country if there was a civil war between the Nazis and the Communists. General von Schleicher tried to make the best of it at the cabinet meeting but to no avail: ‘Even when Schleicher tried to dampen the effect of what was said at the end by stating that a war-game would always have to be based on a worst-case scenario, and that one would not always have to expect such a worst-case scenario to happen, the deep impression that Ott’s discourse made on the cabinet, even on the Chancellor who kept on wiping his eyes during the talk, was unmistakable.’18

  On 4 January 1933 von Papen and Hitler met at the house of the Cologne banker Kurt von Schröder to discuss the way forward. It was the first in a series of meetings that led to von Papen agreeing that he would push for Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, but only on condition that he, von Papen, was made Vice-Chancellor and there were only two other Nazis in the cabinet apart from Hitler (Göring as Minister without Portfolio and acting Prussian Minister of the Interior, and Wilhelm Frick as Reich Minister of the Interior). Hitler agreed. As a result, on 30 January 1933, following these intrigues, and once von Papen’s influence on President Hindenburg had finally opened the door, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.

  Bruno Hähnel, a committed Nazi, describes his reaction to the news as ‘elation’. But the reaction from the Nazis’ political opponents was less straightforward. Josef Felder, a German Socialist Party (SPD) MP at the time, tells how the SPD believed that since Hitler was now the legally chosen Chancellor, then they were the legal opposition; the SPD could carry on as if in a normal, stable democracy. ‘We hadn’t fully realized what it would mean,’ says Herr Felder. ‘We believed that we could still control him through Parliament – total lunacy!’

  When Eugene Leviné heard the news that Hitler was Chancellor he was concerned less because he was Jewish than because he was a Communist. He remembers that ‘there were quite a few Storm Troopers who had Jewish girlfriends and therefore a lot of Germans just thought, “Oh well, it’s not going to be so bad – they have Jewish girlfriends, they can’t hate us all.”’ He also had personal reasons to suppose that the Nazis were capable of exercising their anti-Semitism with a degree of restraint: ‘At one of the schools I was in there was a Nazi and he said to me, “You really should be one of us.” I said, “Look, I can’t, I’m a Jew,” and he would say, “We don’t mean you, decent chaps like you will be perfectly all right in the new Germany.”’

  As for the Communist Party, their attitude to the news of Hitler’s Chancellorship was scarcely a call to world revolution: ‘It all happened so fast in those days, after one had seen it coming gradually,’ says Eugene Leviné. ‘The Communist Party line, to which I still belonged, was that it didn’t matter if Hitler gets to power. That’s good. He’ll soon have proved himself incompetent and then it’s our turn . . . For some extraordinary reason they didn’t realize that he was going to change the law once he came to power.’

  To Alois Pfaller the lesson of Hitler’s appointment is clear: ‘The danger is always here, when crises are happening, that people come who say they have the wisdom and the answer, and they can bring salvation to everybody.’

  Adolf Hitler had come to power legally within the existing constitutional system. Now he was to keep his promise and sweep democracy away.

  2

  CHAOS AND CONSENT – THE NAZI RULE IN GERMANY

  IN POPULAR MYTHOLOGY there is one quality above all others that the Germans possess – efficiency. Their cars are sold by advertisements that trumpet it (‘If only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen’). Their national football team performs with it (‘There go the Germans with typical efficiency’). Hardly surprising then, that this one attribute, more than any other, is ascribed to the Nazis. Since efficiency is the one quality that Fascists are popularly supposed to have (Mussolini is alleged to have ‘made the trains run on time’), a combination of being German and Fascist ought, so the logic goes, to have produced the most efficient state of all time. The propaganda images of Nazi parades, most famously in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will (1936), certainly support this idea. The propaganda confirms that German society, under Nazi rule, was run with clarity and order. But it wasn’t.

  ‘The Führer marches alone along the front,’ says Dr Günter Lohse, a former Foreign Office official and member of the Nazi Party, talking of these Triumph of the Will-type images. ‘
This is propaganda and it is impressive. They’re all standing in one line! But one simply mustn’t look behind the scenes. There was no order there – it was total chaos.’ Dr Lohse had to deal with liaison between the Foreign Office and other government departments during the 1930s. He estimates that at least 20 per cent of his day was spent fighting the other departments over jurisdiction. One former Foreign Office official, he claims, estimated that 60 per cent of his day was wasted in this way. Many words can be used to describe the Nazi rule of Germany in the 1930s, but ‘efficient’ isn’t one of them.

  In the first seventeen months of Hitler’s Chancellorship there were plenty of opportunities to see the radical, chaotic and destructive nature of Nazi rule. Once in power, Hitler quickly called new elections, but made it clear that they were simply a vote of confidence; neither the cabinet nor the government would change as a result of them. (Even with bans imposed on newspapers and public meetings attacking the new state, and with thousands of political opponents already rounded up, the Nazis gained only 43.9 per cent of the vote in March 1933 and failed to acquire the absolute majority they had hoped for.) After the Reichstag had been set on fire on the night of 27 February (almost certainly by the Communist sympathizer, Marinus van der Lubbe), there were mass arrests of Communists the next day, and the Reichstag Fire Decree was inaugurated, which suspended indefinitely all personal rights and freedoms. Under its provisions, political prisoners could be held indefinitely in ‘protective custody’. In March the Reichstag passed an Enabling Act, which gave Hitler absolute power. Outside on the streets, according to one Nazi Storm Trooper, there was chaos: ‘Everyone is arresting everyone else, avoiding the prescribed official channels, everyone is threatening everyone else with protective custody, everyone is threatening everyone else with Dachau . . . Every little street cleaner today feels he is responsible for matters which he has never understood.’1