Hitler (77 page)

The fact was that co-ordination—
Gleichschaltung
—was the peculiar form in which the Nazi revolution was carried to completion. In the preceding years Hitler had repeatedly decried old-fashioned and sentimental revolutionaries who saw in revolution “a spectacle for the masses.” “We aren't wild-eyed revolutionaries who are counting on the lumpenproletariat.” The revolution Hitler had in mind was not a matter of rioting but of directed confusion, not anarchy but the triumph of orderly violence. He therefore noted with distinct displeasure the acts of terrorism that erupted immediately after the election, committed by SA men additionally inflamed by the noisy slogans of victory. Such acts disturbed him not because they were violent, but because they were undirected. In the Chemnitz district of Saxony five Communists were murdered within two days, and the editor of a Social Democratic newspaper was shot down. In Gleiwitz a hand grenade was thrown through the window of a Center deputy. In Düsseldorf armed storm troopers forced their way into a meeting being held by the mayor and lashed one of the participants with a whip. In Dresden the SA broke up a concert by the conductor Fritz Busch. In Kiel they killed a Social Democratic lawyer. They harassed Jewish businesses, released party members from prison, occupied banks, forced the dismissal of politically unpalatable officials. The number of deaths within the first few months has been reckoned at between 500 and 600; the number of those swept off to the abject concentration camps—the establishment of which was announced by Frick as early as March 8—has been estimated at about 100,000.

As always in Nazi behavior, the motive forces are a tangle of political elements, personal spite, and cold calculation. This is apparent from the names of some of the victims. Alongside the anarchist poet Erich Mühsam, we find, in the list of the murdered, the theatrical agent Rotter and his wife; the former Nazi deputy Schäfer, who had given the Boxheim Papers to the authorities; the professional clairvoyant Hanussen; Major Hunglinger of the Bavarian police, who had opposed Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller on November 9, 1923; the former SS leader Erhard Heiden; and, finally, one Ali Höhler, who happened to be the killer of Horst Wessel.

Yet Hitler assumed a sharp and injured tone when reproved by his bourgeois partners for the mounting “rule of the streets.” He told Papen that in fact he admired “the incredible discipline” of his SA and SS men. “Some day the judgment of history will not spare us a reproach because in a historic hour, ourselves perhaps already sicklied o'er by the weakness and cowardice of our bourgeois world, we proceeded with kid gloves instead of with an iron fist.” He would not let anyone deter him from his mission of exterminating Marxism, he said, and therefore “most insistently” requested Papen “henceforth no longer to bring up these complaints.”

Nevertheless, on March 10 he told the SA and SS “to see to it that the nationalist revolution of 1933 will never be compared with the revolution of knapsack Spartacists in 1918.”
⁷

The SA men took such restraints in bad part. They had always assumed that coming to power would entitle them to the open use of force without having to account to anyone. Their brutalities, in fact, were meant in part to “give the revolution its true tone.” For years they had been promised that after victory Germany would belong to them. Was this pledge to turn into a mere figure of speech? To their minds, very specific things went with it; they were counting on being made officers and administrative chiefs, on receiving sinecures and pensions. But Hitler's plan merely envisaged—at least in its first phase—sufficient pressure to bring about a complete change of personnel in key positions. As for the great mass of smaller bureaucrats, Hitler counted on their being tricked or frightened into co-operation. But the storm troopers had to be mollified as well. “The hour for smashing the Communists is coming!” he promised them as early as the beginning of February.

The disappointments of the SA constituted the hopes of the bourgeoisie. That class had looked to the brown pretorians to restore order, not to make things worse by excesses, killings, and the establishment of sinister concentration camps. They were therefore pleased to see that the SA was being set to such harmless activities as going around with collection boxes or marching in a body to church services. The deceptive notion of a moderate Hitler, the guardian of law and order, forever trying to subdue his radical followers—this notion so necessary for his good repute came into being in this early period.

In addition Nazi propaganda had coined a “second magic phrase” that immensely assisted the process of legal revolution. This phrase was the “National Rising.” It could serve as camouflage for the most brazen behavior on the part of the Nazis and as a cloak for a good many acts of violence. Moreover, it offered a slogan full of reverberations to a country still suffering from national inferiority feelings. By such creative use of language the Nazis were able to accomplish their aims and paralyze a broad sector of the public, from their conservative colleagues in the cabinet to the ordinary bourgeois citizen. They encountered no resistance. On the contrary, their seizure of power was actually hailed as a “nonpartisan” breakthrough.

Such was the pattern of thought and feeling that was imposed upon the nation and from which there was henceforth no escape. At its center, subject to innumerable and sometimes grotesque variations, stood the propaganda creation known as the
Volkskanzler,
the populist Chancellor remote from partisan disputes and petty selfish interests, concerned only with the law and the good of the nation. Goebbels personally now assumed the task of constructing and cultivating this image. On March 13 Hindenburg had signed the measure installing Goebbels in the post planned for him from the start but so far postponed out of consideration for the other partners in the coalition, the post of Reich Minister for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda. In establishing the Propaganda Ministry Hitler was riding roughshod over his previous pledge- that the composition of the cabinet would be unalterable.

The new minister snatched sizable administrative areas from his colleagues. But at the same time he adopted a manner of courteous urbanity that contrasted favorably with the victory-drunk, “slap-in-the-face” tone taken by most of the Nazi leaders. In his first speech to the press, in which he outlined his program, he stated that “in instituting the new Ministry the government is carrying out its plan of no longer neglecting the people. This government is a people's government.... The new Ministry will enlighten the people concerning the plans of the administration, with the aim of establishing political coordination [
Gleichschaltung
] between the people and the government.”

Hitler had had to justify the establishment of the new ministry to the rest of the cabinet; he did so on the most innocent grounds, though with a good measure of irony. He made a great point, for example, of the need to prepare the people for what was going to be done about the oil and fats problem. And in fact his explanation was accepted without demur. It testifies to Hitler's tact and magnetism that within a few weeks the conservatives had entirely forgotten their intention of “taming” him. Papen showed himself abjectly accommodating; Blomberg had succumbed all too readily when Hitler laid on the charm; Hugenberg muttered a bit under his breath, but that was all. The others scarcely counted. The task for which Goebbels was actually appointed, and into which he flung himself without delay, consisted in preparing the new government's first public function, which was intended to pave the way psychologically for the planned Enabling Act. Of course, Hitler could have put across this law—which was meant as a “death blow” to the parliamentary system—by invoking the Reichstag fire decree and on the basis of
that
arresting enough deputies of the Left parties until he had attained the requisite two-thirds majority. As a matter of fact, Frick presented this possibility to the cabinet, citing figures, and it was discussed.
⁸
But Hitler could also choose a formally correct course and attempt to win the consent of the Center parties. It is characteristic of his tactical style that Hitler used both approaches.

While the deputies of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party were intimidated, and many of them arrested, Hitler courted the bourgeois parties in the most ostentatious fashion—though not without reminding them, too, of the powers given him by the Reichstag fire emergency decree of February 28. His pronounced nationalistic pose of that period, his evocations of Christian morality, his bows to tradition, and in general the civil, statesmanlike, controlled manner he adopted were a part of the sham. His courtship of the bourgeoisie reached its apogee on the day of Potsdam.

That day was also the first test for the new Propaganda Minister, and he passed it brilliantly. Just as he had declared election day, March 5, the “Day of the Awakening Nation,” he now declared March 21, when the first Reichstag session of the Third Reich was to be held, the “Day of the National Rising.” A solemn state function in the Potsdam Garrison Church, above the tomb of Frederick the Great, was to mark the opening of the Reichstag. Potsdam, the soberly graceful residence of the Prussian kings, was linked in many ways to the sense of national pride, and so was the date. March 21 was not only the first day of spring but also the day on which Bismarck in 1871 had opened the first German Reichstag, thus celebrating a turning point in history.

Goebbels had directed every phase of the ceremony, and Hitler approved every detail of the script. The scenes that later seemed so overwhelming or so moving—the precise order of the marching columns, the child with a bunch of flowers by the roadside, the guns firing salutes, the sight of white-bearded veterans of the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1871, the troops presenting arms, the organ music—all this compelling mixture of tight precision and loose sentimentality was the product of cool planning and a remarkable instinct for theater. Goebbels had gone to have a look at the site beforehand and had noted: “With such great state ceremonies, the smallest touches matter.”

 

Significantly, the festive day began with services in the Protestant Nikolaikirche. Shortly after ten o'clock the first columns of automobiles arrived from Berlin and made their way slowly through streets jammed with people. In the cars sat Hindenburg, Göring, Papen, Frick, Reichstag deputies, SA leaders, generals: the old and the new Germany. Along the façades of the buildings hung garlands and bright tapestries; everywhere flags were festooned, the black-white-red alternating with the swastika flags, in a striking symbol of the new order. Hindenburg in his old field marshal's uniform—he now more and more preferred it to the civilian black tailcoat—entered the church. After the service he was driven around the city. The Center deputies attended the Catholic services at the church of St. Peter and Paul. Hitler and Goebbels stayed away “because of the hostile attitude of the Catholic episcopate.” But then, among the others absent from this “people's festival of national unity” were the Communists and Social Democrats, some of whom—as Frick had boldly announced on March 14—were detained “by urgent and more useful work... in the concentration camps.”

Shortly before twelve o'clock Hindenburg and Hitler met on the steps of the Garrison Church and exchanged that handshake which was subsequently reproduced a millionfold on postcards and posters. It symbolized the longing of the nation for reconciliation. Without “the old gentleman's blessing,” Hitler had said, he would not have wanted to take power. Now the blessing had been bestowed. The choir and gallery of the church were filled with generals of the imperial army and the present Reichswehr, with diplomats and dignitaries. Members of the government had taken their seats in the nave. Behind them, brown-shirted, were the Nazi deputies, flanked by the representatives of the Center parties. The Kaiser's seat had been left empty, but behind it the Crown Prince sat in full-dress uniform. As Hindenburg moved slowly to his seat in the nave, he paused for a moment before the Kaiser's box and raised his marshal's baton in salute. Respectfully, in a black cutaway coat, wearing the parvenu's air of embarrassment, Hitler followed the sorrowful-looking old man. Behind them a sea of uniforms. Then the organ sounded the choral that the entire victorious army of Frederick the Great had sung after the Battle of Leuthen, which regained Silesia for the Prussians;
Nun danket alle Gott.

Hindenburg's address was brief. He pointed to the confidence that he and the people had come to feel in the new regime, so that a “constitutional basis for its work exists.” He appealed to the deputies to support the government in its difficult task, and invoked the “old spirit of this shrine” as a bulwark against “selfishness and party strife... and a blessing upon a free, proud Germany united within herself.” Hitler's speech was pitched on the same note of moderate, deeply felt solemnity. He looked back upon the greatness and downfall of the nation and then declared his faith in the “eternal foundations” of its life, the traditions of its history and culture. After a stirring tribute to Hindenburg, whose “greathearted decision” had made possible this union “between the symbols of old greatness and youthful strength,” he asked Providence for “that courage and that perseverance which we feel around us in this room sacred to every German, as men struggling for our nation's freedom and greatness at the feet of the bier of the country's greatest king.”

Goebbels noted:

 

At the end everyone is profoundly moved. I am sitting close to Hindenburg and see tears filling his eyes. All rise from their seats and jubilantly pay homage to the gray-haired Field Marshal who is extending his hand to the young Chancellor. A historic moment. The shield of German honor is once again washed clean. The standards with our eagles rise high. Hindenburg places laurel wreaths on the tombs of the great Prussian kings. Outside, the cannon thunder. Now the trumpets sound; the President of the Reich stands upon a podium, Field Marshal's baton in hand, and salutes the Reichswehr, the SA, SS and Stahlhelm, which march past him. He stands and salutes....