The Coming of the Third Reich (66 page)

This massive purge was given legal form by the promulgation on 7 April of one of the new regime’s most fundamental decrees, the so-called Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service. Its title appealed to the corporate spirit of conservative civil servants and contained more than an implied criticism of the attempts of Weimar governments, especially in Prussia, to bring committed democrats in from outside the civil service to serve in senior posts. The first aim of the new decree was to regularize and impose centralized order on the widespread forcible ejection of civil servants and officials from their offices by local and regional brownshirt and Party actions. The law provided for the dismissal of untrained officials appointed after 9 November 1918, of ‘non-Aryan’ civil servants (defined on 11 April as having one or more ‘non-Aryan’, in other words, Jewish grandparent, and on 30 June as including any civil servant married to a non-Aryan), and of anyone whose previous political activity did not guarantee political reliability, or acting in the interests of the nationalist state, as the law put it. Only those with war service in 1914-18 were exempt.
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Justifying the Law on 25 April 1933, Hermann Goring criticized ‘time-servers’ in the civil service:

It had repelled and disgusted him to see how in his Ministry, whose body of civil servants notoriously consisted of up to 60 per cent of Severing-adherents, swastika badges were already sprouting from the earth like mushrooms after a few days, and how already after four days the clicking of heels and the raising high of hands were already a general sight on the corridors.
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Many civil servants did indeed rush to preserve their jobs by becoming members of the Nazi Party, joining the army of those who quickly became known mockingly as the ‘March Fallen’, after the democrats who lost their lives in the March disturbances of the 1848 Revolution. Between 30 January and 1 May 1933, 1.6 million people joined the Nazi Party, dwarfing the existing Party membership, a Gadarene rush that illustrated as few other things did the degree of the opportunism and sauve
qui peut
that were gripping the German population. Up to 80 per cent of Party members in Catholic areas such as Koblenz-Trier and Cologne-Aachen in the summer of 1933 had only joined within the previous few months. Indeed, Hitler became worried that this massive influx was changing the character of the Party by making it too bourgeois. But within the short term, at least, it meant the allegiance of the overwhelming majority of civil servants to the new regime.
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In fact, about 12.5 per cent of senior civil servants in Prussia and around 4.5 per cent elsewhere were dismissed as a result of the law. Further clauses allowed the demotion of civil servants or their compulsory retirement in the interests of administrative simplification; the numbers affected here were roughly similar. Altogether the Law affected between 1 and 2 per cent of the entire professional civil service. The dismissals and demotions had the incidental, and far from unintended effect, of reducing government expenditure as well as imposing racial and political conformity. Meanwhile, on 17 July 1933 Goring issued a decree reserving the right to appoint senior civil servants, university professors and judicial officials in Prussia to himself.
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Particularly important within the vast and diverse world of state employees were the judiciary and the prosecution service. There was a distinct threat that Nazi violence, intimidation and murder would run foul of the law. A large number of prosecutions, indeed, were begun by lawyers who did not share the new regime’s politically instrumental view of justice. But it was already clear that the majority of judges and lawyers were not going to make any trouble. Out of around 45,000 judges, state prosecutors and judicial officials in Prussia in 1933, only some 300 were dismissed or transferred to other duties on political grounds, despite the fact that very few state lawyers belonged to the Nazi Party at the time of Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January. Adding on Jewish lawyers and judges dismissed (whatever their political position) on grounds of race made a total of 586. A similarly tiny proportion of the legal profession was dismissed in other German states. No serious objections were raised from the legal profession to these actions. Collective protest became in any case well-nigh impossible when the professional associations of judges, lawyers and notaries were forcibly merged with the League of National Socialist Lawyers into the Front of German Law, headed by Hans Frank, who was appointed Reich Commissioner for the ‘Co-ordination of the Judicial System in the States and for the Renewal of the Legal Order’ on 22 April. The reservations of the German Judges’ League had already been disposed of, as Hitler mentioned the ‘irremovability of judges’ in a speech on 23 March, and promises were made by the Justice Ministry to improve judges’ pay and prestige. Soon, lawyers were falling over themselves to join the Nazi Party, as the state Justice Ministers began to make it clear that promotion and career prospects would be harmed if they did not.
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Between this point and early 1934, 2,250 prosecutions against SA members and 420 against SS men were suspended or abandoned, not least under pressure from local stormtrooper bands themselves.
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These measures were part of a massive and wide-ranging purge of German social institutions in the spring and early summer of 1933. Economic pressure-groups and associations of all kinds were quickly brought into line. Despite the fact that agriculture was nominally in the hands of Hitler’s coalition partner Alfred Hugenberg, it was the leader of the Nazi Party’s farmers’ organization, Walther Darré, who made the running here, forcing a merger of agricultural interest groups into a single Nazi organization well before Hugenberg was eventually obliged to resign his post in the cabinet. Many groups and institutions reacted by trying to pre-empt such forcible co-ordination. In the business sector, employers’ associations and pressure-groups such as the Reich Association of German Industry incorporated Nazis onto their boards, declared their loyalty to the regime, and merged with other industrial pressure-groups to form the unitary Reich Corporation of German Industry. By making such a move unprompted, the industrialists sought to ensure that they could ward off the most intrusive attentions of the new regime. At one point, the Nazi functionary Otto Wagener had forcibly occupied the headquarters of the Reich Association of German Industry, with the clear intention of closing it down. Following the voluntary co-ordination of the Association by itself, he was displaced as Hitler’s Commissioner for Economic Questions by Wilhelm Keppler, a long-term intermediary between the Nazis and big business who, unlike Wagener, was trusted by both sides.

On 1 June 1933 business took another step to try and secure its position. Leading businessmen and corporations founded the Adolf Hitler Donation of the German Economy. This was supposed to bring an end to the frequent, sometimes intimidatory extortions exacted from businesses by local SA and Party groups by instituting a regular and proportional system of payments by industrialists to Nazi Party funds. It steered 30 million Reichsmarks into the Party’s coffers in the following twelve months. But it failed to secure its primary objective, for its foundation did nothing all the same to prevent lesser Party and SA bosses from continuing to extort smaller sums from businesses at a local level. However, big business was not too worried. Hitler had gone out of his way to reassure its representatives on 23 March that he was not going to interfere with their property and their profits, or indulge in any of the eccentric currency experiments with which the Party had toyed under the influence of Gottfried Feder in the early 1920s.
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With the trade unions smashed, socialism off the agenda in any form, and new arms and munitions contracts already looming over the horizon, big business could feel satisfied that the concessions it had made to the new regime had largely been worth it.

Voluntary co-ordination was an option open to a whole variety of associations and institutions provided they could get their act together quickly enough. As often as not, however, organizations that had been living a relatively secure and undisturbed existence for decades were confused, divided and overtaken by events. A characteristic example was the Federation of German Women’s Associations, the umbrella organization of the moderate German feminists and the German equivalent of the National Councils of Women familiar for many years in other countries. Founded nearly forty years previously, it was a vast and elaborate confederation of many kinds of women’s societies, including professional associations like that of the women teachers. Overwhelmingly middle-class in composition, the Federation was deeply divided by the rise of the Nazis, a party for which most of its members were probably voting by 1932. Some senior figures wanted to fight the ‘masculinity drunk with victory’ that they saw triumphing in the Nazi movement, while others insisted on maintaining the Federation’s traditional party-political neutrality. As discussions dragged on, the Nazis resolved the issue for them.

On 27 April 1933 the Baden provincial chapter of the Federation was sent a curt note by the leader of the Nazi women’s organization in the province, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, informing it that it was dissolved. The central leadership of the Federation wrote to the Reich Interior Minister asking in some puzzlement what the legal grounds were for such a peremptory act, and assuring him that the Baden chapter was far from being a danger to public safety. The national leader of the Nazi Women’s Front, Lydia Gottschewski, declared somewhat airily that the Baden chapter had been dissolved on the basis of the law of the revolution, and enclosed a form for signature by the Federation’s President, in which she was invited to submit the Federation unconditionally to the direction of Adolf Hitler, to expel all its Jewish members, to elect Nazi women to top positions and to join the Nazi Women’s Front by 16 May. In vain the Federation pointed out to Gottschewski that it supported the ‘national revolution’, welcomed the eugenic measures being proposed by the regime and wanted to play its part in the Third Reich. On 15 May, faced with the fact that many of its member associations had already been co-ordinated into one Nazi institution or another, it voted formally to dissolve itself altogether, since its constitution made it impossible for it to belong to another organization.
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III

The Nazi ‘co-ordination’ of German society did not stop at political parties, state institutions, local and regional authorities, professions, arid economic pressure-groups. Just how far it went is perhaps best illustrated by returning to the example of the small north German town of Northeim, long dominated by a coalition of liberals and conservatives with a strong Social Democratic movement and a much smaller branch of the Communist Party in opposition. The local Nazis had already managed to manipulate the municipal elections held on 12 March by running as the ‘National Unity List’ and freezing the other parties out. The Nazi leader in the town, Ernst Girmann, promised the end of Social Democratic corruption, and the end of parliamentarism. Despite all this, the Social Democrats held their own in the local and regional elections, and the Nazis, though they took over the town council, failed to do better than they had in July 1932. The new council met in public, with uniformed brownshirts lining the walls, SS men assisting the police, and chants of ‘Hail Hitler!’ punctuating the proceedings, in a local version of the intimidation that accompanied the passage of the Enabling Act through the Reichstag. The four Social Democratic councillors were refused permission to sit on any of the committees and not allowed to speak. As they walked out of the meeting, stormtroopers lined up to spit on them as they passed. Two of them resigned shortly afterwards, the other two went in June.

After the last Social Democrat had resigned, Northeim’s town council was used purely for announcing measures taken by Girmann; there was no discussion, and the members listened in absolute silence. By this time, some 45 council employees, mostly Social Democrats, had been dismissed from the gas works, the brewery, the swimming pool, the health insurance office and other local institutions under the civil service law of 7 April 1933. Including accountants and administrators, they made up about a quarter of the council’s employees. Easing out the town’s mayor, a conservative who had held the office since 1903, proved more difficult, since he resisted all attempts to persuade him to go, and stood up to a considerable degree of harassment. In the end, when he went on vacation, the Nazified town council passed a vote of no confidence in him and declared the local Nazi leader Ernst Girmann mayor instead.

By this time, the leading local Communists in Northeim had been arrested, together with a number of Social Democrats, and the main regional newspaper read in the town had started to run stories not only on the concentration camp at Dachau but also on one much closer to Northeim, at Moringen, which had over 300 prisoners by the end of April, many of them from other political groupings besides the main body of inmates, the Communists. At least two dozen of the SS camp guards were local men from around Northeim, and many prisoners were released after a short period in the camp, so that what went on there must have been well known to the townspeople. The local town newspaper, formely liberal in its allegiance, now frequently reported the arrest and imprisonment of citizens for trivial offences such as spreading rumours and making abusive statements about National Socialism. People knew that more serious opposition would meet with more serious repression. Opponents of the regime were dealt with in other ways, too; active Social Democrats were dismissed from their jobs, subjected to house searches, or beaten up if they refused to give the Hitler salute. Pressure was put on their landlords to evict them from their homes. The brownshirts subjected the local Social Democratic party leader’s shop to a boycott. Constant petty harassment was henceforth his lot, and that of other former prominent figures in the local labour movement, even if they abstained from all political activity.