Hitler (81 page)

With this dual goal of keeping the revolution in flux and simultaneously stabilizing it, of reining it in and giving it its head, Hitler was again following his tried and tested maxims on the nature of power. “I can lead the masses only if I can wrench them out of their apathy,” he declared. “Only the fanaticized masses are malleable. Masses that are apathetic, dull, are the greatest danger for any society.”

This effort to awaken the masses “so that they may be made the instrument of my policy,” now moved entirely into the foreground. The whipped-up fear of Communism at the time of the Reichstag fire, the parades, receptions, collections, the new semantic coinages, the leader cult, in short, the whole clever mixture of trickery and terrorism was meant to prime the nation to think and feel according to a single pattern laid down by the government. Significantly, as soon as this experiment seemed to be succeeding, the long repressed ideological fixations emerged once again. With a sharpness reminiscent of the earlier years of struggle, the figure of the Jew—as the principle of evil and ever-present menace—once again took center stage.

As early as March, 1933, SA units, acting on orders, committed the first anti-Semitic excesses. So strong was the outcry from abroad that Goebbels and Julius Streicher urged Hitler to muzzle criticism by openly increasing the pressure. They would have liked Hitler to allow his followers to stage a carnival of terror against all Jewish firms, against Jewish employers, lawyers, and officials. Hitler did not assent to this, but he gave instructions for a one-day boycott. On Saturday, April 1, armed SA squads stood guard at the doors of Jewish businesses and offices, calling out to visitors or customers not to enter. Posters urging boycott were pasted to the shop windows: “Germans, do not buy at the Jew's!” Others contained a terse:
“Juden raus!”
But at this point the nation's often ridiculed sense of order turned against the regime. The action seemed highhanded and rather shameful, and the hoped-for effect was not achieved. The populace, a later report on the mood in western Germany stated, “is rather inclined to pity the Jews... Sales figures of Jewish firms, especially in the countryside, have in no way declined.”
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The boycott was therefore not resumed. In a speech redolent of disappointment, Streicher hinted that the regime had retreated under the pressure of world Jewry. Goebbels, however, for the fraction of a second opened the door just enough to permit a glance into the future when he announced that there would be a new blow, such a one “as to annihilate German Jewry.... Let no one doubt our resolution.” Legal measures, the first of which was issued a few days after the unsuccessful boycott, banished Jews from public life in a quieter fashion, forcing them out of their social and, soon afterward, out of their business positions.

“The wonder of German unification,” as the regime phrased it in its jargon of self-praise, involved the constant effort to separate the true nation from the unwanted nation of Marxists and Jews. But even more important was the need to win the nation's applause. The failure of the boycott had taught Hitler that the public could not be swung so easily on this question. But if April 1 had proved a negative experience in community feeling, May 1, which celebrated the workers, and October 1, the day of the farmers, were each a stupendous success.

French Ambassador André François-Poncet has described the concluding ceremonies on May Day evening at Tempelhof Field in Berlin:

 

At dusk the streets of Berlin were packed with wide columns of men headed for the rally, marching behind banners, with fife and drum units and regimental bands in attendance.

Stands had been set up at one end of the field for the guests of the government, among them the diplomatic corps, compulsory spectators, bidden to be awed into respect and admiration. A forest of glittering banners provided a background for the spectacle: a grandstand, bristling with microphones, cut forward like a prow looming over a sea of human heads. Downstage, Reichswehr units stood at attention with one million civilians assembled behind them; the policing of this stupendous rally was effected by SA and SS troopers. The Nazi leaders appeared in turn as the crowd cheered. Then came Bavarian peasants, miners and fishermen from other parts of Germany, all in professional garb, then delegates from Austria and the Saar and Danzig, the last being guests of honor of the Reich. An atmosphere of good humor and general glee pervaded the assembly, there was never the slightest indication of constraint....

At eight o'clock the crowds backed up as Hitler made his appearance, standing in his car, his arm outstretched, his face stern and drawn. A protracted clamor of powerful acclaim greeted his passage. Night was now fallen; floodlights were
turned on, set at
spacious gaps, their gentle bluish light allowing for dark interjacent spaces. The perspective of this human sea stretched out to infinity, moving and palpitant, extraordinary when at once sighted in the light and divined in the darkness.

After some introductory remarks by Goebbels, Hitler took the stand. All floodlights were turned off save such as might envelop the Führer in so dazzling a nimbus that he seemed to be looming upon that magical prow over the human tide below. The crowd lapsed into a religious silence as Hitler prepared to speak.
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The foreign guests in the stands were not the only ones who carried away from the nocturnal parade of uniforms, from the play of light and the throb of the music, from the flags and the fireworks, the impression of a “really beautiful, a wonderful festival.” They were not alone in discovering an “air of reconciliation and unity throughout the Third Reich.” Such events made an even greater impression on the Germans. By the morning of May 1, 1,500,000 persons of all classes had lined up for the parade in Berlin: workers, government officials, managers, craftsmen, professors, film stars, clerks. This was the very array Hitler had conjured up the night before when he promised the end of all class differences and proclaimed the people's community of all “workers of the hand and the head.” His rallying cry, to be sure, fell into a preacherly tone that approached travesty: “We want to be active, to work and make brotherly peace with one another, to struggle together, so that some day the hour will come when we can step before Him and will have the right to ask Him: Lord, You see, we have changed; the German nation is no longer the nation of dishonor, of shame, of self-laceration, of timidity and little faith; no, Lord, the German nation has once more grown strong in spirit, strong in will, strong in persistence, strong in enduring all sacrifices. Lord, we will not swerve from You; now bless our struggle.”

These religious exhortations and indeed the whole liturgical character of the demonstrations did not fail to take effect and restored to many Germans their lost sense of belonging and their feeling of collective camaraderie. The combination of religious service and popular amusement was, precisely because of its apparently unpolitical stamp, of the widest possible appeal. Thus we would be aiming very wide of the mark—which the regime invites because of the monstrous features it later acquired—if we divided the people of the spring of 1933 into victors and vanquished. Rather, as the historian Golo Mann has trenchantly observed, many persons felt at once triumph and uncertainty, fear and shame.
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They partook both of victory and defeat. Engulfed by the hypnotic power of mass festivals, they thought they felt the touch of history itself. Memories of the long-ago days of August, 1914, flooded back, and again they experienced the intoxication of national brotherhood.

Later, those months would live on in the nation's memory as an almost incomprehensible jumble of euphoria, jingoism, a sense of rebirth, of transformation, though without a national explanation for such feelings. Hitler had the ability, in ways that are hard to analyze, to engender a kind of historical ecstasy. He had many instant conversions to his credit, particularly at this period. Yet his May 1 speech contained neither a concrete program for providing employment nor the expected statement of the principles of nationalist socialism and economic reconstruction. Nevertheless, his words reverberated with a sense of historical momentousness. The concomitant acts of terrorism were psychologically in accord with this mood. For the terror gave the events the quality of extreme, fateful seriousness. Many people felt the scruples that beset them as petty compared with the scale of the historical event.

The prevailing feeling was expressed by one of the prominent intellectuals of the time, who wrote that labor, freed from the curse of proletarian misery, had at last been made the basis of a new sense of community and that “part of the rights of man has been newly proclaimed.”
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But only a day later the surprise action against the unions exposed the other face of Hitler's familiar dual tactics. Similarly, on May 10, while the regime under “artist-statesman Adolf Hitler” was still talking in terms of a new Augustan age, there was a brutal gesture of open hostility to intellect: the burning of the books. With SA and SS bands playing “patriotic melodies,” preceded by torchlight parades and so-called fire sermons, nearly 20,000 specimens of “un-German writings” were burned in the public squares of university cities.

The take-over was thus accomplished by a combination of intoxicants and pressures. This compound had a special potency; after twelve years of the parliamentary interregnum people felt again that there was a firm hand at the helm of state. Here, in a new form, was the time-honored political style of the Hohenzollern authoritarian state. The new regime was taking off from there.

Initially, the measures for establishing psychological domination over the nation were often hit-and-miss. But they were soon developed into a system and given an administrative framework. In the covert struggle for power over this arm of the government, victory went to Joseph Goebbels. His Propaganda Ministry, divided into seven departments (propaganda, radio, press, film, theater, music, and fine arts), soon took charge of the entire intellectual and cultural realm. It saw to the establishment of the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), which in turn had seven separate divisions and embraced all persons engaged in artistic or publicist activities. Architects and art dealers, painters, stage designers, lighting technicians and newsstand operators—one and all, Goebbels declared with cynical candor, would be rescued by the new state from their “feeling of desolate emptiness.” These cultural organizations were meant both to politicize and supervise their members. Nonadmittance or expulsion meant that a person was debarred from his profession or occupation. Soon the police were following up a host of denunciations, tracking down the works of outlawed artists, or checking to make certain that the blacklist was not being violated. In December, 1933, a total of more than a thousand books and complete works of some writers, had been banned by no fewer than twenty-one bureaus, some of them in competition with one another. By the next year more than 4,000 publications had been forbidden. The revolution bowed before nothing, Goebbels declared in one of his “fundamental speeches” on culture; what mattered was “that in place of the individual person and his deification we now have the racial nation and its deification. The racial nation is the center of things.... The artist undeniably has the right to call himself non-political in a period when politics consists of nothing but shouting matches between parliamentary parties. But at this moment when politics is writing a national drama, when a world is being overthrown—in such a moment the artist cannot say: ‘That doesn't concern me.' It concerns him a great deal.” In his capacity as Reich propaganda chief of the NSDAP, Goebbels simultaneously spread a dense network of propaganda offices over the country—forty-one in all. A few years later these were raised to the status of federal bureaus.

By the spring of 1933
Gleischschaltung
of radio broadcasting was largely completed; both staff and subject matter had been “co-ordinated.” The press followed. There had been approximately 3,000 newspapers in Germany. A large number of these, chiefly local papers, were eliminated by economic pressure backed by all the powers of the state. Others were confiscated. Only a few of the major newspapers, whose prestige might make them useful tools, were allowed to survive. Some of these, such as the
Frankfurter Zeitung,
continued on into the war years. But drastic restrictions were placed upon them even in the initial phase of the seizure of power. A shower of instructions and “language rules,” usually handed down at the daily Reich press conference, established political regimentation and banished freedom of the press to whatever small space it could find between the lines. At the same time, however, Goebbels looked kindly upon all differences in form and style. In general he tried to conceal the governmental monopoly of opinion by stressing journalistic variety. He put it in a pithy slogan : the press, like culture in general, was to be “monoform in will, polyform in the outward trappings of that will.”

If we survey the whole scene, we must grant that in the cultural realm as well, “co-ordination” proceeded without a protest, without a sign of effective opposition. Only the Protestant Church was able to resist the open seizure of power in its ranks, although at the price of fission. The Catholic bishops had hitherto attacked Nazism in a series of strongly militant statements and had officially condemned it. But their will to resist was undermined by the negotiations for a concordat, already begun during the Weimar years and eagerly resumed by Hitler. Nazi promises and sham concessions knocked the ground from under their feet. Belatedly, they would find their way back to opposition, but by then they did not see clearly how to proceed. In the universities, too, what feeble resistance came to the fore was soon subdued by the tried-and-true combination of “spontaneous expressions of the people's will” from below followed by an administrative act from above.