The Coming of the Third Reich (55 page)

Blomberg banned officers from joining the Nazi Party, and jealously guarded the independence of the army. His loyalty to Hitler made it seem unnecessary for the Nazis to undermine the army from within. Still, they had to be sure that the army would not interfere in the violence they were now contemplating unleashing on the country. Hitler underlined his respect for the army’s neutrality in an address to senior officers on 3 February 1933. He won their approval with his promises to restore conscription, destroy Marxism and fight the Treaty of Versailles. The officers present made no objection as he held out to them the intoxicating long-term prospect of invading Eastern Europe and ‘Germanizing’ it by expelling scores of millions of native Slav inhabitants. The army’s neutrality meant, of course, its non-interference, and Hitler went out of his way to tell the officers that the ‘internal struggle’ was ‘not your business’. He was helped in his efforts to neutralize the army by the appointment, on Blomberg’s suggestion, of Colonel Walther von Reichenau, a vigorous, ambitious and much-decorated staff officer, as Blomberg’s chief assistant. Reichenau was another admirer of Hitler and was on good personal terms with him. Together with Blomberg he quickly moved to isolate the army’s commander-in-chief, General Kurt von Hammerstein, an aristocratic conservative who never tried to disguise his contempt for the Nazis. In February 1933 Hammerstein banned officers from inviting politicians to social events, as a way of trying to minimize relations with leading Nazis such as Goring, to whom he always referred snobbishly by his actual rank from pre-Nazi days, ‘captain (retired)’, except when he called him by his nickname, the ‘pilot who’s gone round the bend’. Hammerstein was a real potential threat because he reported directly to the President. Within a short space of time, however, Blomberg had succeeded in restricting Hammerstein’s access to Hindenburg to strictly military matters. On 4 April 1933 Blomberg became a member of the newly created Reich Defence Council, a political body which effectively bypassed the army leadership and put military policy in the hands of Hitler, who chaired it, and a small group of leading ministers. Through these moves, Hammerstein and his supporters were effectively neutralized. In any case, Hammerstein was too Olympian, too distant, to engage in serious political intrigue. Now that Schleicher was safely out of the way, neither he nor any of the other army leaders was capable of mobilizing opposition to the Nazis in the first half of 1933.
²⁸

With Frick and Goring at the helm, and the army relegated to the sidelines, the prospects of curbing Nazi violence were now worse than ever. Almost immediately, the Nazis capitalized on this carefully engineered situation and unleashed a campaign of political violence and terror that dwarfed anything seen so far. On 30 and 31 January the triumphant parades and processions of the SA and SS had already demonstrated their new-found confidence and power over their opponents on the streets. They had also been accompanied by incidences of violence and antisemitism. Now these quickly began to multiply. Bands of stormtroopers began attacking trade union and Communist offices and the homes of prominent left-wingers. They were helped on 4 February by a decree allowing for the detention for up to three months of those engaged in armed breaches of the peace or acts of treason, a decree that self-evidently was not going to be applied to Hitler’s, stormtroopers.
²⁹

The intensity of the violence increased considerably when Goring, acting as Prussian Minister of the Interior, ordered the Prussian police on 15-17 February to cease its surveillance of the Nazis and associated paramilitary organizations and to support what they were doing as far as they were able. On 22 February he went a step further and set up an ‘auxiliary police’ force made up from members of the SA, SS and Steel Helmets, the last-named decidedly the junior partners. This gave the stormtroopers the green light to go on the rampage without any serious interference from the formal state guardians of law and order. While the police, purged of Social Democrats since the Papen coup, pursued Communists and broke up their demonstrations, the new force, with the agreement of the police, broke into party and trade union offices, destroyed documents and expelled the occupants by force. The brunt of this violence was undoubtedly borne by the Communist Party and its members. They had already been under close police surveillance.during the Weimar Republic. The Social Democratic government in Prussia claimed in the early 1930s, for instance, that it was presented with confidential reports on secret sessions of the Communist Party’s Central Committee within a few hours of the sessions taking place. Police spies were active at every.level of the party hierarchy. Frequent clashes with the Red Front-Fighters’.League, involving injuries to police officers, sometimes fatal, had led to police investigations including searches of Communist Party premises. Documents confiscated in 1931-2. included address-lists of party officials and active members. The police were extremely well informed about the party, therefore, regarded it as an enemy after the experience of innumerable armed clashes, and from 30 January onwards put their information at the disposal of the new government. It did not hesitate to use it.
³⁰

The Social Democrats and trade unions were almost as hard hit as the Communists in the mounting Nazi repression of the second half of February 1933. The government was able to build on a wide degree of public consensus among middle-class voters in its suppression of the Communists, who had always been regarded as a threat to public order and private property. The fact that the Communists had continually increased their electoral support to a point where, early in 1933, they had 100 seats in the Reichstag, was extremely alarming to many who feared that they would repeat the violence, murder and torture that had been the hallmark of the ‘Red Terror’ in Russia in 1918-21, should they ever achieve power in Germany. But matters were very different where the Social Democrats were concerned. They were, after all, the political force that had been the mainstay of the Weimar Republic for many years. They had 121 seats in the Reichstag to the Nazis’ 196. They had formed a key element in a number of its governments. They had supplied Reich Chancellors and Prussian Minister-Presidents as well as the Republic’s first Head of State, Friedrich Ebert. They had the long-term support of millions of working-class voters, relatively few of whom had deserted them for the Nazis or the Communists, and had enjoyed the support or at least the respect, however grudging and conditional, of many Germans at various times. In 1930 the membership of their party stood at over a million.
³¹

Some units of the Social Democrats and their paramilitary affiliate, the Reichsbanner, were prepared to act; a few had managed to gather weapons and munitions, and others staged demonstrations on 30 January and the next day. Leading Social Democrats and trade unionists met in Berlin on 3 1 January to plan a nationwide general strike. But while local organizations waited, the national leadership dithered, conscious of the difficulties of staging a strike in the middle of the worst unemployment crisis the nation had ever seen. The unions feared that Nazi stormtroopers would occupy the factories in such a situation. And how could the party justify illegal action in defence of legality? ‘The Social Democrats and the entire Iron Front’, declared the party’s daily paper
Forwards
on 30 January 1933, ‘are placing themselves, in relation to this government and its threat of a putsch, with both feet firmly on the ground of the constitution and of legality. They will not take the first step away from this ground.’ In the following weeks there were some isolated actions. Thousands of socialists staged a rally in the Pleasure Gardens in Berlin on 7 February, while on 19 February a rally of 15,000 workers in Lübeck celebrated the release from custody of a leading local Social Democrat, Julius Leber, after a brief general strike in the city. But no general policy of resistance emerged from the centre.
³²

With every day that passed, the state-sponsored terror to which Social Democrats were subjected grew steadily worse. By the beginning of February 1933 local and regional authorities, acting under pressure from Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi Reich Minister of the Interior in Berlin, and his counterpart in Prussia, Hermann Goring, had already begun to impose bans on particular issues of Social Democratic newspapers. Characteristically, the Social Democrats’ reaction was to institute legal actions before the Reich Court in Leipzig to compel Frick and Goring to allow the papers to be published, a tactic that met with some success.
³³
As the month progressed, however, gangs of brownshirts began to break up Social Democratic meetings and beat up the speakers and their audiences. On 24 February Albert Grzesinski, the Social Democrat who had formerly been Prussian Minister of the Interior, was complaining that ‘several of my meetings have been broken up and a substantial number of those present had to be taken away with serious injuries’. The party’s executive committee reacted by cutting back sharply on meetings in order to avoid further casualties. Whatever police protection had been provided for meetings before 30 January had been entirely removed on the orders of the Interior Ministry.
³⁴
Nazi stormtroopers could now beat up and murder Communists and Social Democrats with impunity. On 5 February 1933, in one particularly shocking incident, a young Nazi shot dead the Social Democratic mayor of Stassfurt. A few days later, when the Social Democratic official daily Forwards condemned the killing of a Communist by stormtroopers during a street battle in Eisleben, the Police President of Berlin banned the paper for a week.
³⁵

Within a few months of Papen’s coup of 20 July 1932, the prospects for a workers’ uprising had dramatically worsened. The failure to resist Papen had deepened the sense of impotence in the labour movement already created by the Social Democrats’ passive support for Brüning and active backing for Hindenburg. The police and the army were no longer trying to hold the ring between paramilitaries of the right and the left. Encouraged by the conservatives around Hugenberg and Seldte, they had swung decisively over to the support of the former. In this situation, an armed uprising by the labour movement would have been suicidal. Moreover, despite a whole variety of local initiatives, grass-roots negotiations and formal and informal approaches at every level, the Social Democrats and the Communists were still not prepared to work together in a last-ditch defence of democracy. And even had they done so, their combined forces could never have hoped to match the numbers, the weaponry and the equipment of the army, the brownshirts, the Steel Helmets and the SS. Had an uprising been attempted, it would doubtless have met the same fate as the workers’ uprising staged in Vienna a year later against the coup
d‘état
that established the ‘clerico-fascist’ dictatorship of Engelbert Dollfuss, in which the well-equipped and well-armed socialists were crushed by the Austrian army within a few days.
³⁶
The last thing the German Social Democratic leadership wanted to do was to shed the workers’ blood, least of all in collaboration with the Communists, who they rightly thought would ruthlessly exploit any violent situation to their own advantage.
³⁷
Throughout the early months of 1933, therefore, they stuck rigidly to a legalistic approach and avoided anything that might provoke the Nazis into even more violent action against them.

III

Once more, in February 1933, Germany was in the grip of election fever. The parties were campaigning furiously for the Reichstag elections that had been one of Hitler’s conditions for accepting the office of Reich Chancellor on 30 January. The date had been fixed for 5 March. Hitler proclaimed on many occasions during the election campaign that the Nazi movement’s main enemy was ‘Marxism’. ‘Never, never will I stray from the task of stamping out Marxism ... There can only be one victor: either Marxism or the German people! And Germany will triumph!’ This referred, of course, to the Communists and the Social Democrats. Hitler’s belligerent language, in the circumstances of early 1933, was an encouragement to his stormtroopers to take the law into their own hands. But its aggressiveness extended well beyond the left to threaten other supporters, or former supporters, of Weimar democracy as well. The movement, he said on 10 February 1933, would be ‘intolerant against anyone who sins against the nation’.
³⁸
‘I repeat’, Hitler declared on 15 February, ‘that our fight against Marxism will be relentless, and that every movement which allies itself to Marxism will come to grief with it.’
³⁹

This threat was uttered in Stuttgart in a speech devoted to a furious attack on the Württemberg State President, Eugen Bolz, who had declared the new Reich government to be an enemy of freedom. Bolz, complained Hitler, had not stepped in to defend the Nazi Party’s freedom when it had been persecuted in his state during the 1920s. He went on:

Those who made no mention of our freedom for fourteen years have no right to talk about it today. As Chancellor I need only use one law for the protection of the national state, just as they made a law for the protection of the Republic back then, and then they would realize that not everything they called freedom was worthy of the name.
⁴⁰