Authors: Heinrich Fraenkel,Roger Manvell
The following day, 2nd May, the S.A. and S.S. took possession of trade union offices throughout Germany. Union officials were arrested, maltreated and imprisoned. A new German Labour Front was proclaimed under Robert Ley. It was a
coup d'état
.
With so much success on his hands, Goebbels' next demonstration was a serious blunder he was never to live down. During 10th May, at his direct instigation, groups of Nazis in Berlin and in all other German university centres were formed into raiding-parties to break into libraries, both private and public, and seize there the books of proscribed authors. These books were flung out into the streets where they were collected by other gangs of Party thugs and taken, in the case of Berlin, to the Franz-Josephsplatz for the night's ceremony. By the time it was dark the volumes which Goebbels had chosen for this barbaric martyrdom were piled like the bricks of a crumbled building in a vast, disorderly heap. Load after load of books, tied into bundles, were delivered by the Party mobs who, as they arrived, shouted and yelled in the cause of Nazi
Kultur
. Books by Jews and Marxists lay scattered beside classics, and classics beside the works of modern authors who had inspired Goebbels' hatred. Then at dusk the students, urged on by Storm Troopers, arrived with their torches to set fire to the books and to dance like savages round the flames, chanting the slogans prepared for them:
Brenne,Heinrich Mann, Brenne, Stefan Zweig, Brenne, Erich Kastner, Brenne, Karl Marx, Brenne, Sigmund Freud, Brenne, Heinrich Heine
and so on, like some ritual death by fire. Perhaps no one knew that on one of the blackened, curling pages was a sentence written by Heine in 1823: “Wherever they burn books, sooner or later they will burn human beings also.”
The flames lit up the Opera House on the one side and the University of Berlin on the other. Then a line of cars drew near bringing Goebbels to make a national broadcast from the scene of the giant bonfire. Goebbels stepped to the microphone and proclaimed the end of the age of “extreme Jewish intellectualism”. “The evil spirit of the past” was rightly committed to the flames. This was “a strong, great and symbolic act”, he went on. “Never, as today, have young men had the right to cry out; studies are thriving, spirits awakening. From these ashes there will arise the phoenix of a new spirit.”
14
But he must have had misgivings as he left the students and the Storm Troopers to their orgy. He ordered the ceremonies to be reported with restraint in the press, and even staunch supporters of the Nazis (such as Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's personal photographer) regarded the burning of the books as a grave error that would do the movement great harm in world opinion.
15
He was right.
The success of the régime from 1933 until the war is a model demonstration in the technique of calculated and wholly successful aggression.
The sheer ability of Hitler, coupled with his intuitive genius for smelling out the weakness of his opponents both at home and abroad, accelerated the pace of events until the spoils began to fall into the lap of Germany with the gathering speed of a landslide. Later Hitler was led by his vanity to rely more and more on his own individual intuition until he became deluded by the myth of his omnipotence, and forgot that he was human and fallible. He left behind him the men on whose help he had relied to achieve his initial successes, and he lived increasingly like a recluse absorbed in his personal divinity. Like Napoleon he came to trust in his star rather than in the advice of men such as Goebbels, who might have helped him secure the plunder his astuteness had won for him and would probably have kept him back from launching the European and later the world war which was to destroy them all. Had Hitler taken Goebbels' advice he might still be in power today and be the absolute master of the central parts of Europe, if no more.
Hitler adopted the policy of divide and rule. No one to whom he gave power was excluded from the effects of this soul-destroying policy, not even Goebbels who had come to regard Hitler as his personal friend.
16
But he, like the rest, was not exempt from the Fuhrer's system of government which gradually made him the active source of all decisions, many of which were announced without prior consultation with his ministers. Departments of government such as Goebbels controlled were deliberately made to overlap with each other, and bitter rivalries were created among the ministers and their senior assistants; rumour was thus encouraged, and intrigue, both secret and open, inevitably developed among rival ministers to secure prior knowledge of Hitler's intentions and to be the first to take advantage of any changes in policy or administration that seemed likely to occur. Within the next ten years Goebbels was to learn to his cost how difficult it is to be the infallible prophet of a divine being who is inconsistent in his confidences. Such methods might pass in the hurly-burly of party struggle, but they could not be applied to the administration of a great State. The German tendency to over-organise and clog the machinery of government was accentuated by the Nazi leaders who could do little else but regard each other with suspicion, knowing by what unscrupulous means each one had achieved his authority. In trying to outwit and frustrate each other they merely impaired the functioning of the régime, though they spent much of their time boasting of its efficiency.
To begin with, however, the ecstasy of the sudden possession of power seemed only a glorious extension to the old struggle. Opposition had to be made illegal, and this was great fun for those who had in the past suffered at the hands of the men who were now placed overnight at their mercy. Concentration camps (the invention of the British, said Göring to Sir Nevile Henderson,
17
with an ironic reference to the Boer War) were set up to cope with all those still spirited enough to oppose, but the majority of the German nation was either cowed into submission or persuaded that what was being done by Hitler would indeed make Germany a land fit for a master-race to live in after the humiliation of the past fifteen years. For those who did not agree, Hitler soon had at his disposal a network of camps and prisons as well as the handymen of the S.A., the S.S., and of the Gestapo
(Geheime Staatspolizei)
which had been created in 1933 immediately he had come to power. Heinrich Himmler, Supreme Commander of the S.S., who had once been the inefficient secretary whom Gregor Strasser had replaced by young Joseph Goebbels and whom Hitler had rediscovered in 1929 running a small poultry farm near Munich, was appointed head of the Prussian Gestapo in 1934. Now he could keep men instead of fowls behind his wire fences.
The immediate years saw the quick, careful creation of controls that made Germany secure for Hitler, side by side with the conduct of a foreign policy based initially on caution. The most dramatic event in the half-submerged process of forging these controls was the bloodbath of Saturday and Sunday 29th-30th June 1934 in which Goebbels played a prominent part. This was the “night of the long knives” which continued its massacre over two days and nights and involved many hundreds of men and women, how many hundreds will never now be known. Of Hitler's early opponents within the Nazi movement only Gregor Strasser and Ernst Rohm had emerged as potential leaders of subversion. Strasser, as we have already seen, had retired in disgust and anger a year before, but Hitler had not forgotten his dis- loyalty and the dangerous temptations Strasser's comparative moderation had represented to other prominent Nazis at a crucial moment in the fight for power. Rohm, as leader of the S.A., was in an even more powerful position than Strasser had been, so powerful indeed even Goebbels himself was for a while in danger of drawing into association with him.
To the S.A., the riff-raff who had learnt the taste of blood, the establishment of their party in power meant the time had come for the dividing of the spoils. Hitler, however, was still anxious to seem respectable in the eyes of both Germany and the outside world, and was fully prepared to go through the diplomatic routines of morning-dress and top hat and face-saving constitutionalism for so long as it seemed to him advantageous to do so. But the men of the S.A., the fist behind the throne, were impatient for jobs and sinecures; they wanted to set about expelling the fatted swine from the capitalist front-office and take over the spoils for themselves. They were increasingly jealous, too, of the privileged position of the regular Army, the
Reichswehr,
whose formality and professionalism they despised. The S.A. was radical and revolutionary by origin, and it numbered now between two and three million men. Goebbels, too, had always been more radical in outlook than his master, who knew by instinct the value to him of the industrialists and the generals. He needed their support to help establish his régime. They had to serve their turn.
Röhm became increasingly impatient with his position and concerned over the restiveness of his men, in spite of the fact that in December 1933 he had been created, as Chief of Staff of the S.A., a member of the Reich Cabinet. His was still the amateur army, though pensions were granted in February 1934 to those who had suffered bodily in the political fighting.
But what Röhm wanted was to become Minister of Defence, with charge of all the armed forces. Hitler knew neither Hindenburg nor the Army High Command would agree to make such an appointment. Hindenburg, however, would soon be of no further use to Hitler. He was dying, and the question of his successor was all the time in the mind of Hitler, who was determined it should be himself, for he needed the President's constitutional authority over the Army. He had gone so far as to agree to the reduction of the membership of the S.A. by two-thirds when Anthony Eden, Lord Privy Seal of Britain, had visited Berlin in February 1934 and discussed the status of the S.A. He had even agreed to reduce the offensive power of the remaining third. This apparent concession had suited his purpose. It not only set him in a good light with Britain, as a prominent power in Europe which had its eye on him, it gave him an excuse to reduce the influence of the Party's private army which he no longer wanted to keep at its original fighting strength. In April he held private conferences with the Minister of Defence and the Commanders-in-Chief of the Army and Navy during naval manœuvres off Kiel, during which he is thought to have come to terms with them.
How far Goebbels was in sympathy with Röhm cannot now be precisely determined.
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His radical leanings and constant association with the S.A., who had supported him on innumerable difficult occasions in the past, must certainly have coloured his views. Also he was to some extent a personal friend of Röhm—in fact the only friend Röhm now had among the leaders of the Party. Up to within about a fortnight of Rohm's death Goebbels was in active contact with him, and then suddenly he decided to betray him as he had betrayed Strasser in 1926. Goebbels, it must always be remembered, was loyal first of all to power. He was close enough to Röhm to know what was within the bounds of possibility. Had Röhm displaced Hitler, Goebbels would naturally want to keep his high position in the State, if not better it. However, as the point of no return was reached, he decided once more for Hitler. When the time for the assassinations came, Goebbels, aware of what suspicion might do for him while vengeance ran riot, stayed close by Hitler, the only place where he knew he would be safe. Otto Strasser claims that he has documentary proof of the fact that Goebbels, as late as the third week in June, had long and secret meetings with Röhm in the Bratwurst-Gloeckle, Rohm's favourite tavern in Munich. Both the owner and the head-waiter of the tavern were among those murdered during the week-end purge, though neither of them was involved politically. But they were, says Strasser, witnesses of the meeting which Goebbels had at all costs to keep hidden.
19
Hitler was ready for a show-down, and the technique he used was substantially the same as that employed against the Communists in the case of the Reichstag fire. He invented a plot and then set about destroying those he claimed were involved in it before it had materialised. The situation was further aggravated by a violent attack on the régime, its methods and its propaganda made with great courage by von Papen, Vice-Chancellor of Germany and the favourite of Hindenburg, at the University of Marburg on 17th June. Goebbels at once suppressed reports of this speech, which had in fact been written for von Papen by Edgar Jung, a prominent right-wing intellectual, but copies were smuggled abroad; Goebbels himself had been attacking the aristocratic and bureaucratic class to which von Papen belonged and he continued to attack it with renewed venom. Once again it became clear to Hitler that the time was ripe to put the house in order, in spite of his personal regard for Rohm, the only one among the Nazi leaders who had been in the position to address him with the intimate form of
‘du’
.
Hitler was later to give his own account to the Reichstag of what happened during the crucial month of June. He made great play with the appeals he had made to his former friend to remain loyal to the Nazi cause. He admitted Rohm's notorious addiction to homosexual practices. Then he claimed that Röhm was conspiring to take over the Government from him by force in a putsch timed to take place at the end of June. What in fact happened was that Hitler's vengeance overtook Röhm and many others whom Hitler credited with disloyalty to himself before there was any question of an active plot against him. Among those who were to die in the purge were Gregor Strasser and the former German Chancellor von Schleicher.
The purge was arranged, with the Army's connivance, by Göring and Himmler. On 28th June Hitler went away to attend a wedding in Essen, while Göring and Himmler ordered the police and the S.S. to stand by for action. Röhm himself was away on sick leave, unarmed and unguarded by the banks of the Tegernsee some forty miles south of Munich, surrounded only by personable young men, and the whole of the S.A. were in fact on leave. On 29th June Hitler was in Godes-berg on the Rhine, where he was joined by Goebbels who had brought him news that the Berlin S.A. had been ordered to report to their posts. This was, of course, a strategic he. Hitler made his decision. On the night of the 29th he flew to Munich, and simultaneously the first wave of the purge began. Goebbels, mindful of his personal safety, kept close to Hitler. At dawn a fleet of cars took Hitler and others who had joined him, including Goebbels, out to the lakeside house where Röhm was staying. There Röhm was dragged from the bed he was sharing with a youth; he was pale from the night's excesses and even more so from horrified astonishment at this visitation as by a troop of avenging angels. Otto Dietrich, who was among those present, remembers Hitler pacing up and down before the Storm Troop leader “with huge strides, fiery as some higher being, the very personification of justice”.
20
Röhm was taken forthwith to Munich and shot.