Hitler (56 page)

Hitler himself appeared not to waver for a moment in his tactical conduct. What he had learned back in 1923 and not forgotten was that even the shakiest system remained impervious to attacks by street mobs. There were plenty of romantic hotheads in the party who could not imagine a revolution without powder smoke and who immediately after the triumph of September 14 began to rant about marching on Berlin and waging the final struggle. Hitler, however, would not be budged from his policy of legality, although he made no secret of his reasons for it: “We are not in principle a parliamentary party,” he declared in Munich, “for that would be a contradiction of our whole outlook; we are a parliamentary party by compulsion, and that compulsion is the Constitution.... The victory we have just won is nothing but the winning of a new weapon for our struggle.” Göring stated the matter even more cynically: “We are fighting against this State and the present system because we wish to destroy it utterly, but in a legal manner. Before we had the Law for the Protection of the Republie, we said we hated this State; under this law, we say we love it—and still everyone knows what we mean.”
⁹

 

Hitler's caution was partly guided by the one eye he kept cocked in the direction of the army. It was on the Reichwehr's account, he later admitted, that he had renounced the idea of a
coup d'état.
For the more patently public order was disintegrating, the more decisive the power and influence of the Reichswehr became. The 1923 putsch, and the subsequent ban on contact between the army and the newly founded SA, had considerably clouded mutual relationships. As early as March, 1929, however, Hitler had made tentative overtures to the representatives of the state's armed might. In a pointed speech he had questioned the concept of the “unpolitical soldier,” formulated by General von Seeckt. He drew a picture of a leftist victory, after which the army officers would find themselves serving as “executioners and political commissars.” Then he contrasted this dreadful prospect with the radiant aims of his own movement, concerned as it was for the greatness and the military honor of the nation. The speech was a piece of skillful psychology and impressed in particular the younger members of the officer corps.

A few days after the September election three officers of the army garrison at Ulm were placed on trial at the federal high court in Leipzig. They were charged with violating a decree of the Reich Defense Ministry by establishing connections with the NSDAP and proselytizing for the Nazis inside the Reichswehr. At the request of his lawyer, Hans Frank, Hitler was invited to testify. The sensational trial gave him an opportunity for publicly wooing the army and a platform for presenting his political aims effectively. On the third day of the trial, September 25, 1930, Hitler stepped forward to testify with the self-assurance of a recently victorious party leader, confident more than ever of ultimate victory.

Under cross-examination he explained that his convictions were a response to three challenges: the peril of foreign racial influences, or internationalism; the devaluation of personality and the rise of the democratic idea; and the poisoning of the German people with the spirit of pacifism. In 1918, he said, he had entered public life in order to oppose to these disturbing tendencies a party of fanatical Germanism, of absolute authority for the leader, and of uncompromising struggle. But he was by no means an antagonist of the armed power of the state. Whoever sowed sedition in the army was an enemy of the people; the SA was not intended to attack the state or to compete with the army.

He was then questioned about his position on legality and boldly assured the court that the National Socialist Party had no need of violence: “Another two or three elections and the National Socialist movement will have the majority in the Reichstag, and then we will make the national revolution.” Asked what he meant by that, Hitler replied:

The concept of National Revolution has generally been considered in terms of purely domestic politics, but to National Socialists it means simply a German patriotic uprising. Germany was tied hand and foot by the peace treaties. All German legislation today is nothing but an attempt to impose the terms of the peace treaties on the German people. The National Socialists regard these treaties not as binding law, but as something forced upon us. We do not acknowledge our war guilt, nor will we burden future generations who are entirely guiltless with these fictitious debts. We will proceed against these treaties both on the diplomatic front and by circumventing every one of their provisions. If we fight against them with every means at our disposal, we will be on the way of the Revolution.

 

This reply, which turned the concept of revolution against the outside world, concealed his plans for domestic policy. When the presiding judge asked whether the revolution directed against the outside world would also make use of illegal methods, Hitler was remarkably frank: “All methods, including those that from the world's viewpoint are illegal.” Asked about his many threats against so-called traitors at home, Hitler responded:

 

I stand here under oath to God Almighty. I tell you that if I come to power legally, in my legal government I will set up state tribunals which will be empowered to pass sentences by law on those responsible for the misfortunes of our nation. Possibly, then, quite a few heads will roll legally.
¹⁰

 

The applause from the gallery indicated the mood in the courtroom. The counterarguments of the Ministry of the Interior, which came forth with ample proofs of the Nazi party's anti-Constitutional activities, were disregarded. With perfect calm the court heard Hitler's subsequent statement that he felt bound by the Constitution only during the struggle for power; as soon as he possessed constitutional powers he would eliminate or at any rate replace the Constitution. In fact, according to the tenets of the time, this was not so brazen as it seems. The Constitution could be legally abrogated. One of the people's rights was to give up its sovereignty. This was a door through which Hitler could advance unhindered, paralyze all resistance, seize the government and subject the state to his will.

But there was more behind Hitler's pledges of loyalty to the Constitution, more than his frank admission that he was forgoing violence only until he could cloak it with legality. Throughout this period Hitler injected into his professions of legalism a note of disturbing ambiguity. Though he proclaimed that he stood “hard as granite on the ground of legality,” he was encouraging his followers to make reckless speeches in which violence appeared chiefly in images and frightening metaphors: “We come as enemies! Like the wolf breaking into the sheepfold, that is how we are coming.” Strictly speaking, only the party heads talked the language of legality. Further down, in the backyards of the Berlin Wedding District, a working-class area, in the nocturnal streets of Altona or Essen, murder, manslaughter, and contempt for the law prevailed. Evidence of such conduct was dismissed with a shrug as “excesses of local units.” Goebbels gave the game away. Speaking to Lieutenant Scheringer, one of the three young officers at the Leipzig trial (who were ultimately convicted), Goebbels said jokingly: “I regard this oath [of Hitler's] as a brilliant move in the chess game. Now what can they possibly do to us? They were only waiting for the chance to strike. Now we're strictly on the up and up.”

The very uncertainty about Hitler's intentions, his continual veering between oaths of loyalty to the Constitution and threats against it, served his cause in many ways—which was precisely what he intended. The general public was reassured, but there was always that edge of uneasiness which produces deserters and renegades. As for those who guarded the doors to power, above all Hindenburg and the army, Hitler was on the one hand making an offer of alliance, on the other hand warning them that they had better meet him halfway. Finally, the ambiguity was directed to those among his followers who were still expecting a march on Berlin. To them he seemed to be winking the message that the Führer would know how to trick every imaginable adversary. From all these angles, then, Hitler's testimony under oath at Leipzig was enormously effective.

Viewed as a whole, however, Hitler's tactics of leaving doors open on all sides reveal something more than clever calculation. They also reveal his character; for such tactics conformed to the deeply rooted indecisiveness of his nature. There are paradoxes here, for such tactics were also extremely risky; they required a keen sense of balance and therefore also satisfied his craving for risks. If he failed, there remained only a premature and all but hopeless attempt at a putsch, or withdrawal from politics.

The SA was a living example of the idea underlying Hitler's tactics and illustrated the risks and difficulties inherent in them. For by Hitler's complicated principle, the party's brown-shirted army was to combine a formal respect for the law with the romanticism of insurgency. The men were supposed to abjure weapons but keep up the spirit of armed conflict. Pfeffer had been unable to slant things along these paradoxical lines. Early in 1931 Ernst Röhm took office as chief of staff of the SA, and immediately shifted the stress back toward the military model. The territory of the Reich was divided into five supergroups (
Obergruppen
) and eighteen groups (
Gruppen
). Standards (
Standarten
)—which corresponded to regiments—were assigned the numbers of former regiments of the imperial army, and a system of special units, such as the air storm troops, the naval, engineering and medical storm troops, further stressed the military structure.

Pfeffer had issued a vast number of isolated orders that added up to a highly complicated system. Röhm now had these summed up in an SA service manual. As if under some mechanical compulsion, all his measures continually reverted to the old idea of an army for civil war. This time, unlike 1925, Hitler gave him the green light. One reason for this was Hitler's greater confidence in his own authority; but more important, Röhm's idea suited his deliberate policy of ambiguity. If we examine the reforms put through after the replacement of Pfeffer, we see all the traits of Hitlerian sham reforms. Instead of a decision made on basic principles, a few of the leading personalities were changed. Oaths of loyalty were taken, and a competing institution was created. For in view of his continuing difficulties with the SA, Hitler began cautiously to expand the SS, which, as a kind of elite and “inner party police,” had played a shadowy role and by 1929 numbered only 280 men, and to give it increasing independence of Röhm. Moreover, the whole thing was to end in a manner characteristically Hitler's: the inevitable conflicts arising from contradictory tendencies would be resolved by a bloody and disproportionately violent coup.

Under Röhm the SA began its development into a mass army. Thanks to the new chief of staff's outstanding organizational gifts, by the end of 1932 his army had swollen to more than half a million men. Attracted by the SA homes and the SA kitchens, vast numbers of the out-of-work poured into the brown-shirt formations. The bitterness of the unemployed combined with the hatreds of the adventurous activists into a high charge of aggressiveness.

One of Röhm's first acts was to oust Pfeifer's Frontbann officers and replace them with his own homosexual friends. Behind them, a sizable and notorious company moved in; word went around that Röhm was building a “private army within the private army.” Soon there were noisy protests. Hitler replied to these in a message that was to become famous. He rejected the reports on the morally culpable behavior of the supreme SA leadership “fundamentally and with all sharpness.” The SA, he declared, was “an association of men for a political purpose... not an ethical institution for the education of gentlewomen.” What counted was whether or not the individual did his duty. “The men's private lives can be the object of examination only if they run contrary to essential principles of National Socialist ideology.”

This message constituted a charter for the lawless elements within the SA. In spite of all the pledges of legality, Hitler's army was soon creating a wave of paralysis and terror which in turn increased the demand for a dictatorship. According to reports of the police, the arms stores of the SA contained all the classic weapons of criminals: blackjacks, brass knuckles and rubber truncheons. In tight situations, they had their “molls” carry the hand guns. Their jargon also had an underworld ring. In Munich a pistol was called a “lighter” and the rubber truncheon an “eraser.” The Berlin SA, in the manner of gangs, adopted nicknames that gave the lie to their allegedly revolutionary spirit. One SA “storm” in Wedding called itself the Robber Storm, while many troopers assumed various desperado names—Potshot Muller or Pistol Packer. The typical mixture of assertive proletarianism, love of violence, and threadbare ideology can be seen in the Berlin SA song, which ran:

 

We are the hungry toilers,
A strong courageous band,
We grip our rifles firmly
In sooty, callused hand.

 

The Storm Troops stand at ready
The racial fight to lead,
Until the Jews are bleeding
We know we are not freed.

 

But that was the frightening reverse of the coin, flashes of which appeared only now and then. The other side was marked by the austere regularity of marching columns, by uniforms and sharp cries of command—those military noises so familiar to the nation as symbols of order. Germany, Hitler later commented, thirsted for order during those years of chaos and wanted it restored at any price. More and more often, behind flags and brass bands, the brown columns turned into strangely stilled streets. They paraded with an air of self-assurance, their discipline contrasting in what seemed a significant manner with the dismal gray processions of the Communists. For the latter straggled along in uncertain order behind the provocative nasal sound of a woodwind ensemble, raising clenched fists and intoning the slogan “Hunger!”—a pathetic sight whose effect was to make the poor conscious of their misery but never give them anything to hope for.