The Coming of the Third Reich (60 page)

Conditions in the concentration camps and detention centres of the SA and SS in March and April have been aptly described as ‘a makeshift sadistic anarchy’.
⁹⁶
SA and SS violence seldom involved the refined, inventive kind of torture later practised by secret policemen in regimes like the military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile or Greece in the 1970s. What they vented on their prisoners was often barely controlled anger. Nothing much more sophisticated was involved in the torture than fists, jackboots, and rubber truncheons. On some occasions the police, now freed from any constraints they might have felt applied under the Weimar Republic, joined in, looked on, or employed their brownshirt auxiliaries to beat confessions out of their prisoners. The Communist worker Friedrich Schlotterbeck, arrested in 1933, reported later how he was interrogated at police headquarters by a group of SS men. They punched him in the face, beat him with rubber truncheons, tied him up, hit him over the head with a wooden bar, kicked him when he fell to the floor, and threw water over him when he lost consciousness. A police officer fired questions at him in the quieter moments, and intervened only when one of the SS men, enraged at Schlotterbeck’s vigorous physical resistance, pulled a revolver and threatened to shoot the prisoner. Having failed to confess, he was taken back to his cell, sore, covered in cuts and bruises, blood streaming down his face, and barely able to walk. Schlotterbeck was treated kindly by the warders, who none the less had to inform him that they had to keep the light on in his cell and check on him regularly in case he tried to kill himself. He was to spend the next decade and more in penitentiaries and concentration camps.
⁹⁷
His experience was not untypical of that of the committed Communist who refused to give in.

Social Democrats fared no better at the hands of the stormtroopers, who made no distinction of sex in their violent assaults on representatives of the left. One of many Social Democratic women who were attacked was Marie Jankowski, a city councillor for the Köpenick district in Berlin, who was arrested, beaten with rubber truncheons, hit in the face, and made to sign a document promising not to take part in politics again.
⁹⁸
The lack of any detailed central co-ordination of such activities, which were spread unevenly all across Germany, makes any precise estimation of their extent impossible. But available figures for formally registered arrests demonstrated beyond doubt that this was violence on a vast and unprecedented scale. Official reports indicated at least 25,000 arrests in Prussia alone in the course of March and April, though this figure omitted Berlin and did not count ‘wild’ arrests by brownshirts that were not reported to the authorities. Arrests carried out in Bavaria already numbered around 10,000 by the end of April, and twice as many by the end of June. Moreover, many of those arrested were imprisoned for only a few days or weeks before being released: in the Oranienburg camp, for instance, 35 per cent of the inmates were kept inside for between one and four weeks, and less than 0.4 per cent stayed for over a year.
⁹⁹
The 27,000 persons registered as being in protective custody across Germany at the end of July 1933 were thus, by and large, not the same people who had been in protective custody three or four months before, so that the total number of people who passed through the camps was far higher than this.
¹⁰⁰
In addition, by no means all the Nazis’ Social Democratic and, especially, Communist opponents had been taken off to the camps; many thousands more had been put in state prisons and police cells across the Reich.

The sheer scale of the repression can be gauged by the fact that the Communist Party leadership reported that 130,000 party members had been arrested and imprisoned by the end of 1933, and 2,500 had been murdered. These figures were probably something of an exaggeration, but they did not deceive when it came to estimating the impact of the repression on the party’s organization. In the Ruhr area, for example, almost half the entire party membership was taken into custody. As early as the end of March, the Prussian police reported that some 20,000 Communists had been seized and put into gaol.
¹⁰¹
Even the most conservative, quasi-official reckoning put the total number of political arrests in Germany in 1933 at over 100,000, and the number of deaths in custody at nearly 600.
¹⁰²
This was violence and murder on a staggering level, not seen in Germany since the early days of the Weimar Republic.

This massive, brutal and murderous assault on the Nazis’ opponents was formally sanctioned by the Reichstag fire decree, which, however, was based on the idea that the Communists had been attempting a revolutionary uprising, and had nothing to say about the Social Democrats. The idea that the Social Democrats sympathized with or supported the Communists’ preparations for an uprising was even more absurd than the claim that the Communists had been about to stage one. Yet many middle-class Germans appear to have accepted that the regime was justified in its violent repression of ‘Marxism’, of whatever variety. Years of beatings and killings and clashes on the streets had inured people to political violence and blunted their sensibilities. Those who had their doubts could not have failed to notice what the police and their Nazi stormtrooper auxiliaries were doing to the Nazis’ opponents in these weeks. Many of them must have paused for thought before voicing their disquiet. Anyone who was alarmed by the extent of the disorder may well have been reassured by Hitler’s public denunciation on 10 March 1933 of acts of violence against foreigners, which he blamed on Communist infiltrators in the SA, and his exhortation to the stormtroopers to stop ‘harassment of individuals, the obstruction of cars, and disruptions to business’.

However, Hitler went on to tell the brownshirts, they must ‘never let yourselves be distracted for one second from our watchword, which is the destruction of Marxism’. ‘The national uprising will continue to be carried out methodically and under control from above,’ he said, and only ‘when these orders meet with resistance’ should they act to ensure that ‘this resistance be immediately and thoroughly broken’. This last qualification was of course licence enough to continue the violence unabated and, indeed, escalate it still further.
¹⁰³
When a leading Nationalist protested to Hitler on 10 March about the destruction of the legal order, followed by a phone call to the same effect by Papen on 19 March, Hitler angrily accused them of trying ‘to put a stop to the nationalist revolution’. The ‘November criminals’ of 1918 and those who had tried to suppress the Nazi Party during the Weimar period had been far worse, he said. Praising the ‘phenomenal discipline’ of the stormtroopers, he condemned at the same time the ‘weakness and cowardice of our bourgeois world in proceeding with kid gloves instead of the iron fist’ and warned that he would not let anyone stop him from the ‘annihilation and extirpation of Marxism’.
¹⁰⁴

Germany was well on the way to becoming a dictatorship even before the Reichstag fire decree and the elections of 5 March 1933. But these two events undoubtedly speeded it up and provided it with the appearance, however threadbare, of legal and political legitimation. After his election victory, Hitler told the cabinet on 7 March that he would seek a further legal sanction in the form of an amendment to the constitution that would allow the cabinet to bypass both the Reichstag and the President and promulgate laws on its own. Such a measure had precedents in aspects of emergency legislation under the Weimar Republic. Nevertheless, it would clearly go much further than anything seen before. Hitler had long dreamed of introducing it.
¹⁰⁵
This Enabling Act would set the seal on the hated democracy of the Weimar Republic and complete the work of what the Nazis had begun on 30 January 1933 by calling into being a ‘government of nationalist concentration’. It was not long before Goebbels and the other leading Nazis had renamed it a ‘government of the nationalist uprising’. By early March it had become simply a ‘nationalist revolution’, emphasizing that far more than the actions of mere cabinet government was involved. Soon it was to be the ‘National Socialist Revolution’, finally consigning Hitler’s non-Nazi coalition partners to political oblivion.
¹⁰⁶

DEMOCRACY DESTROYED

I

Revolutionary rhetoric and unbridled violence on the streets were not exactly what Papen and Hitler’s other cabinet allies had been expecting when they had agreed to Hitler’s becoming Reich Chancellor two months before, for all their approval of the police crackdown on the left. They had rather expected that bringing the Nazis into government would put a stop to all this. For worried conservatives and traditionalists, including Reich President Hindenburg, who after all still possessed at least the formal power to sack Hitler and replace him with someone else, the Nazis therefore staged a reassuring ceremony to mark the state opening of the newly elected Reichstag. Given the unavailability of the gutted and ruined Reichstag building, the ceremony had to take place elsewhere. Hitler and his conservative allies agreed to hold it in the garrison church at Potsdam, the symbolic locus of the Prussian monarchy, on 21 March 1933, the exact anniversary of the day on which the inaugural Reichstag had met after Bismarck’s founding of the Second Reich. The elaborate ceremony was planned down to the last detail by Goebbels as a propaganda demonstration of the unity of the old Reich and the new. Hindenburg stood next to the Kaiser’s vacant throne, dressed in the uniform of a Prussian Field-Marshal, to receive the obeisance of the frock-coated Hitler, who bowed and shook his hand. The Reich Chancellor gave a speech notable for its studied moderation, praising Hindenburg for his historical role in entrusting the fate of Germany to a new generation. Wreaths were laid on the tombs of the Prussian kings, and Hindenburg then reviewed a massive parade of the paramilitaries and the army.

The ritual was more important for the visual images it conveyed than for the speeches that were delivered. Here was Hitler appearing as a soberly dressed civilian statesman, humbly acknowledging the supremacy of the Prussian military tradition. Here were flags in the imperial colours of black, white and red, that had already officially replaced the black, red and gold of the Weimar Republic on 12 March. Here were the Prussian military grandees in their sometimes outlandish uniforms redolent of monarchist tradition. Here was the Protestant church, implicitly reasserting its supremacy alongside that of the army and the throne. Here was the restoration of the old Germany, wiping history clean of the tainted memory of Weimar democracy.
¹⁰⁷
Not surprisingly, the Social Democrats declined the invitation to attend. In a further piece of symbolism, Hitler for his part refused to go to a service at the Catholic parish church in Potsdam on the grounds that Catholic priests, still loyal to the Centre Party and critical of what they regarded as the Nazis’ godless ways, had barred some leading Nazis from receiving the sacraments. This was a clear warning to the Church that it was time to fall into line.
¹⁰⁸

Two days later, in the Kroll Opera House, designated as the temporary home of the Reichstag, Hitler, now dressed, like the other Nazi deputies, in a brownshirt paramilitary uniform, spoke to the Reichstag in a very different atmosphere. Standing beneath a huge swastika banner, he introduced the long-planned measure that would enable the Reich Chancellor to prepare laws that deviated from the constitution without the approval of the Reichstag and without reference to the President. This ‘Enabling Act’ would have to be renewed after four years, and the existence of the Reichstag itself, the upper legislative chamber representing the federated states, and the position of the Reich President, was not to be affected. What it meant, however, was that the Weimar constitution would be a dead letter, and the Reichstag would be shut out of the legislative process altogether. The passage of the Enabling Act was by no means assured: 94 out of the 120 elected Social Democrats were still able to vote - of those absent, some were in prison, some were ill, and some stayed away because they feared for their lives. Hitler knew in any case that he would not get the Social Democrats’ support. An amendment of the Weimar constitution required both a two-thirds quorum and a two-thirds majority of those present. Hermann Goring, as the Reichstag’s presiding officer, reduced the quorum from 432 to 378 by not counting the Communist deputies, even though they had all been legally elected. This was a high-handed decision that had no legitimacy in law whatsoever.
¹⁰⁹
Yet even after this illegal manoeuvre, the Nazis still needed the votes of the Centre Party to push the measure through.

By this point in its history, the party had long since ceased to be a supporter of democracy. Following the general trend of political Catholicism in interwar Europe, it had come to support the principles of authoritarianism and dictatorship out of fear of Bolshevism and revolution. True, what seemed to be shaping up in Germany was not quite the kind of ‘clerico-fascist’ regime to which Catholic politicians were soon to lend their support in Austria and Spain. But in 1929 the Catholic Church had safeguarded its position in Italy through a Concordat with Mussolini, and the prospect of a similar arrangement was now held out to it in Germany as well. The escalating terror to which Catholics and their political representatives, newspapers, speakers and local officials had been subjected since the middle of February made the Centre Party look anxiously for guarantees that the Church would survive. Now, under stronger clerical influence than ever before, and led by a Catholic priest, Prelate Ludwig Kaas, the party was reassured in two days of discussions with Hitler that the rights of the Church would not be affected by the Enabling Act. The doubts of Heinrich Brüning and his close advisers were assuaged. The federated states, bastions of Catholicism in the south, would remain intact, despite their takeover by Reich Commissioners appointed from Berlin, and the judiciary would stay independent. These promises, combined with heavy pressure from the Vatican, proved sufficient to win the Centre Party deputies over to supporting the measure that in the long run was bound to mean their own political demise.
¹¹⁰