The Nazis- a Warning From History Read online

  In those first months of power the chaotic terror was directed mainly at the Nazis’ former political opponents. Josef Felder was an SPD member of the Reichstag who was picked up by the Nazis and taken to the newly established concentration camp at Dachau, outside Munich. He was thrown into a cell and chained to an iron ring, and his Nazi jailers removed the straw palliasse which was lying on the concrete floor, saying: ‘You won’t be needing this because you’ll only be leaving here as a corpse.’ The abuse continued as the guard took a rope and demonstrated the best way Felder could use it to hang himself. Felder told him, ‘I have a family. I’m not going to do that. You’ll have to do it yourselves!’ He was eventually released after more than eighteen months in Dachau, having contracted a lung disease.

  The pragmatists among the Nazis’ political opponents either escaped Germany or tried to conform to the wishes of the new regime; only the exceptional, like Alois Pfaller, tried to resist. In 1934 he tried to restart his old Communist youth group. It was a heroic act but, against a ruthless regime that singled out Communists as a particular enemy, failure was inevitable. Pfaller was betrayed by a double agent – a woman who worked for both the Communist Party and the Gestapo. He was arrested, taken to a police station and brutally interrogated; his nose was broken and he was beaten unconscious with leather belts: ‘And when I came to again, they did it a second time, again unconscious, the fourth time, again unconscious, then they stopped because I hadn’t said anything.’ Now the interrogation tactics changed. One man sat at a typewriter to take down Pfaller’s ‘confession’, while the other smashed his fist into Pfaller’s face every time he failed to answer a question. The interrogation grew worse after the violent policeman sprained his right hand and began using his left. Now he hit Pfaller on the side of the head and split his ear-drum. ‘Then I heard an incredible racket,’ says Pfaller. ‘It was a roaring, as if your head was on the sea-bed, an incredible roaring.’ Pfaller resolved to kill the man who was beating him, even though it would also mean his own certain death. He had learnt judo when he was young and he intended to stretch out and stick his fingers into his interrogator’s eyes. But just as he decided on this course of action, he haemorrhaged. The interrogation stopped and Pfaller was given a bucket and cloth and ordered to clean his own blood off the floor. Then he was taken to a cell for the night and subsequently transferred to a concentration camp. He was not released until 1945.

  In a period of history rich in stories of collaboration and weakness, Alois Pfaller’s own personal history is uplifting. Here is a man who was tortured to betray his comrades and refused: ‘It’s a question of honour,’ he says. ‘I’d have let them beat me to death but I never would have betrayed anyone. I would rather have died miserably.’

  Most Germans did not confront the regime. More common was the experience of Manfred Freiherr von Schröder, a banker’s son from Hamburg, who welcomed the new regime and joined the Nazi Party in 1933. He thought himself an idealist and believed that 1933 was the beginning of a wonderful new period for Germany: ‘Everything was in order again, and clean. There was a feeling of national liberation, a new start.’ Like most Germans, von Schröder knew that Socialists and Communists were imprisoned in concentration camps, but he dismisses this as unimportant in the context of history: ‘You have never had anything of this kind since Cromwell in England. Closest is the French Revolution, isn’t it? To be a French nobleman in the Bastille was not so agreeable, was it? So people said, “Well, this is a revolution; it is an astonishing, peaceful revolution but it is a revolution.” There were the concentration camps, but everybody said at that time, “Oh, the English invented them in South Africa with the Boers.”’ Although these remarks are unacceptably dismissive of the horror of Nazi concentration camps, it should be remembered that the camps which sprang up in 1933 were, for all their horror, not identical to the extermination camps of the Holocaust which were to emerge in during the war. If you were imprisoned in Dachau during the early 1930s, it was probable that you would be released after a brutal stay of about a year. (Alois Pfaller’s experience is unusual for a political opponent arrested in 1934, in that he had to endure eleven years in a concentration camp.) On release, former inmates were compelled to sign a paper agreeing never to talk about the experience, on pain of immediate re-entry to the camp. Thus it was possible for Germans to believe, if they wanted to, that concentration camps were ‘merely’ places designed to shock opponents of the regime into conforming. Since the terror was mostly confined to the Nazis’ political opponents, or to Jews, the majority of Germans could watch what Göring called the ‘settling of scores’ with equanimity, if not pleasure.

  On 6 July 1933 Hitler announced that he wanted an end to arbitrary violence on the streets. ‘Revolution is not a permanent state,’ he declared. He realized that the Storm Troopers posed a threat to the stability of the new Germany. One group of powerful Germans agreed with him wholeheartedly – the army. The professional soldier Johann-Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg remembers: ‘One rejected the Storm Troopers because of their behaviour, the way they looked, the way they were . . . they were hated by most soldiers.’ Von Kielmansegg confirms that the regular army believed that Ernst Röhm, leader of the Storm Troopers, was trying to take over the armed forces of Germany. They thought he wanted to integrate the Nazi Storm Troopers into the regular army and become supreme commander of them all. This was not in the interests of either the army or of Hitler.

  Von Kielmansegg emphasizes the importance of making a distinction between support for the Nazis and support for Hitler himself. He maintains that the Nazis were ‘rejected’ by professional soldiers like him, but that Hitler, the individual, wasn’t. Given that Hitler epitomized his party in a way that few political leaders have ever done, such a distinction seems tenuous today. It was also a distinction Hitler adamantly denied, declaring: ‘The Führer is the party and the party is the Führer.’ Notwithstanding this, von Kielmansegg’s separation of Hitler from the Nazis was a distinction some officers clearly felt able to make at the time. To the uncharitable mind, it can be seen as one way in which professional soldiers could reconcile any disquiet they might have felt about the abuses committed by rampaging Storm Trooper thugs, with their own approval of Hitler’s rearmament programme.

  Hitler himself soon felt compelled to act against the Storm Troopers. In addition to learning of the concerns of the Armed Forces, he also spotted what he took to be a deterioration in Röhm’s behaviour. Röhm had talked of a ‘second revolution’ so that the Storm Troopers could receive the rewards they felt had been denied them. For Hitler, this was not to be countenanced. Heinrich Himmler seized the moment and made up a story about Röhm – that he was planning a coup – and Hitler believed him. Himmler, whose SS were still technically under the umbrella of the Storm Troopers, moved his men against Röhm on 30 June 1934 – the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. Hitler also used this occasion to settle old scores against Gregor Strasser (who had quit the Nazi Party in December 1932) and General von Schleicher (the former German Chancellor) who both lost their lives. In all, around eighty-five people were killed.

  General von Blomberg, the Minister of Defence, was delighted at the news, so much so that he ensured the army publicly thanked Hitler for the action. Only a few weeks later (after Hindenburg’s death on 2 August 1934) he arranged for all soldiers to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler personally. All the soldiers we interviewed from that time emphasized the importance of this oath in the context of what was to happen; for this was an oath sworn not to an office-holder but to a man – Adolf Hitler. Karl Boehm-Tettelbach took the oath in 1934 as a young Luftwaffe officer. For him, like many others, the oath was sacred and accompanied him to the very end of the war. He felt, and still feels, that if he had broken the oath, he might have had to ‘commit suicide’. For Boehm-Tettelbach this was to have clear consequences when he was at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, the Wolfsschanze (the ‘Wolf’s Lair’) in 1944 and witnessed the results of Count
von Stauffenberg’s attempt to blow up Hitler. Boehm-Tettelbach had not been approached to take part in the bomb plot himself, but had he been he would have refused. He would never break his oath.

  Karl Boehm-Tettelbach served as an attaché to the Minister of Defence, General von Blomberg, who was ‘like a father’ to him. ‘Blomberg was a good soldier,’ says Boehm-Tettelbach, ‘but he also saw good things for the army in Hitler.’ In 1933, Blomberg later said, he had been given three things as a result of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor: faith, veneration for a man and complete dedication to an idea. A kind remark from Hitler could bring tears to Blomberg’s eyes and he used to say that a friendly handshake from the Führer could cure him of colds. Boehm-Tettelbach witnessed how much Blomberg venerated Hitler when he regularly drove him back from his audiences with the Führer: ‘There was hardly a trip back when he didn’t praise him, and said that he had a good idea.’2

  Once Hitler had removed Röhm, become head of state as well as Chancellor (on Hindenburg’s death) and been the subject of a solemn oath of allegiance from the army, his hold on power was secure. He and his Nazi Party were masters of Germany. Now he pursued one simple policy – rearmament. As for the day-to-day domestic considerations that weigh heavily on most political leaders, Hitler either delegated or abnegated them. Chaos may have disappeared from the streets but it became rampant inside the Nazi administration and government.

  Fritz Wiedemann, one of Hitler’s adjutants, wrote that Hitler ‘disliked the study of documents. I have sometimes secured decisions from him, even ones about important matters, without his ever asking to see the relevant files. He took the view that many things sorted themselves out on their own if one did not interfere.’ The result was, in the words of Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press chief, that ‘in the twelve years of his rule in Germany Hitler produced the biggest confusion in government that has ever existed in a civilized state.’

  Nor does Hitler’s daily routine at this time sound like that of a political workaholic. Fritz Wiedemann wrote, ‘Hitler would appear shortly before lunch, read through the press cuttings prepared by Reich press chief Dietrich, and then go into lunch. When Hitler stayed at the Obersalzberg [the mountain in southern Bavaria on whose slopes Hitler built his house – the Berghof], it was even worse. There he never left his room before 2.00 p.m. Then he went to lunch. He spent most afternoons taking a walk; in the evening straight after dinner, there were films.’

  Albert Speer, the architect who was to become the Nazi armaments minister, tells how, when Hitler was staying in Munich, there would be only ‘an hour or two’ a day available for conferences: ‘Most of his time he spent marching about building sites, relaxing in studios, cafés and restaurants, or hurling long monologues at his associates, who were already amply familiar with the un-changing themes and painfully tried to conceal their boredom.’3 The fact that Hitler ‘squandered’ his working time was anathema to Speer, a man who threw himself into his work. ‘When,’ Speer often asked himself, ‘did he really work?’ The conclusion was inescapable: ‘In the eyes of the people Hitler was the leader who watched over the nation day and night. This was hardly so.’4

  Hitler was not a dictator like Stalin who sent countless letters and orders interfering with policy, yet he exercised as much or more ultimate authority over the state and was at least as secure as a dictator. How was this possible? How could a modern state function with a leader who spent a great deal of time in his bedroom or in a café? One answer has been provided by Professor Ian Kershaw in a careful study of a seemingly unimportant speech given by Werner Willikens, State Secretary in the Ministry of Food, on 21 February 1934. Willikens said: ‘Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Führer can hardly dictate from above everything he intends to realize sooner or later. On the contrary, up till now everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Führer . . . in fact it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice it soon enough. But anyone who really works towards the Führer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.’5

  ‘Working towards the Führer’ suggests a strange kind of political structure. Not one in which those in power issue orders but one in which those at the lower end of the hierarchy initiate policies themselves within what they take to be the spirit of the regime and carry on implementing them until corrected. Perhaps the nearest example we have in British history occurred when Henry II is supposed to have said, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ and the barons rushed to Canterbury to murder Thomas a Becket. No direct order was given, but the courtiers sensed what would please their liege lord.

  Professor Kershaw believes that the practice of ‘working towards the Führer’ is a key insight into understanding how the Nazi state functioned, not just in the 1930s, but also during the war, and is particularly relevant when examining the provenance of many of the administrative decisions taken in the occupied territories. It gives the lie to the excuse offered by some Nazis that they were just ‘acting under orders’. Often, in fact, they were creating their own orders within the spirit of what they believed was required of them. Nor does the idea of ‘working towards the Führer’ excuse Hitler from blame. The reason Nazi functionaries acted as they did was because they were trying to make an informed judgement about what Hitler wanted of them and, more often than not, the substance of their actions was retrospectively legitimized. The system could not have functioned without Hitler or without those subordinates who initiated what they believed were desired policies.

  ‘Working towards the Führer’ can be used to explain the decision-making process in many of those areas of domestic policy that Hitler, through temperament, neglected. Most political parties, for example, have a carefully conceived economic policy at the core of their manifesto. The Nazis did not. Indeed, one academic joked to me that the question, ‘What was Hitler’s economic policy?’ was easy to answer – ‘He hadn’t got one.’ Perhaps that is unfair in one respect, for despite a lack of policy, Hitler always had economic aims. He promised to rid Germany of unemployment, and, less publicly trumpeted but, in his eyes, more important, to bring about rearmament. Initially he had only one idea how to achieve this and that was to ask Hjalmar Schacht, a former president of the Reichsbank and a brilliant economist, to ‘sort it out’ (see Chapter Three). Apart from rearmament and strengthening the army, Hitler had little detailed interest in domestic policies.

  Surprisingly, for those who believe that a successful economy has to be guided by a political leader, in the short term Hitler’s delegation of the economy to Schacht seemed to work. Schacht pursued a policy of reflation financed on credit, and alongside this implemented a work-creation programme based on compulsory work service for the unemployed. For average citizens, unless they were among the regime’s racial or political enemies, life began to improve. They knew little of the economic theory behind the reflation of the economy. Nor did they suspect Hitler of indolence when it came to details of domestic policy. Instead they looked around and saw with their own eyes what the regime had done – and most liked what they saw. Almost everyone we talked to emphasized the Nazi achievement of reducing unemployment and clearing the streets of the desolate-looking jobless. (Unemployment, with some massaging of the figures, dropped from a high of 6 million in January 1932 to 2.4 million by July 1934.) The programme of public works – particularly the high-profile building of the autobahns – was seen as proof of Germany’s new dynamism. ‘Everybody was now happy,’ says Karl Boehm-Tettelbach (in what is plainly an exaggeration). ‘People now said, “My wife and all my daughters can walk through the park in darkness and not be molested.” Today it’s really dangerous again but at that time it was safe and this made them happy.’

  Unlike most officers, Boehm-Tettelbach had the opport
unity in the 1930s of getting to know the top Nazis. As Field-Marshal von Blomberg’s aide, he sat alongside them at dinner parties and was impressed with what he saw. Göring was admired as a man who knew how to speak to pilots thanks to his exploits in the Richthofen fighter squadron during World War I. Goebbels had a ‘pleasant’ manner and would enquire, while drinking a glass of champagne, what films the Field-Marshal had seen so that he could then recommend his own favourites, such as Gone with the Wind (a film Goebbels was obsessed with). But it was another Nazi leader for whom Boehm-Tettelbach has the kindest words – Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and by 1936 chief of the political and criminal police throughout Germany: ‘He was a very nice and agreeable guest because he always involved younger people like me and would enquire about the air force, how I was getting along, how long I would be with Blomberg, if I liked it, what I had seen the last trip to Hungary and things like that.’ All these people, Boehm-Tettelbach thought, were good at their jobs. When, much later, he learned of the horrors Himmler perpetrated, he found them hard to reconcile with the considerate man he had met across the dinner table. Unpalatable as it may be to accept today, it was not just the Nazi regime that was popular during the 1930s, but also many of the Nazi elite, whose names were later to become synonyms for evil.6

  Erna Kranz was a teenager in the 1930s and is now a grandmother living just outside Munich. She remembers the early years of Nazi rule, around 1934, as offering a ‘glimmer of hope . . . not just for the unemployed but for everybody because we all knew that we were downtrodden’. She looked at the effect of Nazi policies on her own family and approved: salaries increased and Germany seemed to have regained its sense of purpose. ‘I can only speak for myself,’ she emphasized a number of times during our interview, conscious no doubt that her views were not politically correct. ‘I thought it was a good time. I liked it. We weren’t living in affluence like today but there was order and discipline.’ Ask Erna Kranz to compare life today with life in the 1930s under the Nazis and she says, ‘I thought it was a better time then. To say this is, of course, taking a risk. But I’ll say it anyway.’