In retrospect there can be no minimising the
importance of one historical date – 30 January
1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor
of Germany by President von Hindenburg.
Within eight years of his coming to power,
Germany had conquered continental Europe from
the Channel coast to the gates of Moscow. It was
not a conquest and occupation such as had
occurred in the Great War. In German-occupied
Europe some 10 million people, including 2 million
children, were deliberately murdered. Hitler’s
Reich was a reversion into barbarism. Racism as
such was nothing new, nor was it confined to
Germany. These doctrines attracted groups of supporters
in most of Europe, including France and
Britain, in South America and in the US. But it was
in Germany that the resources of a modern industrial
state enabled criminal leaders to murder and
enslave millions. Until the concentration camps
revealed their victims the world was inclined to
believe that a country once in the forefront of
Western culture, the Germany of Goethe, could
not so regress. This faith in civilisation was misplaced.
How was it possible? For just one of the
more easily discernible parts of the explanation we
must turn to the politics of Weimar Germany,
which failed to provide stable governments until
political democracy ceased to function altogether
after the onset of the economic crisis of 1929.
From 1920 to 1930 no party was strong
enough on its own to form a government and
enjoy the necessary majority in parliament. But
until 1928 a majority in parliament either
favoured or at least tolerated the continuation of
the parliamentary system of government. The
Communist Party was too weak in its parliamentary
representation to endanger the Republic during
the middle years of Weimar prosperity from
1924 to 1928; its strength was appreciably smaller
than that of the deputies of the moderate Socialist
Party. Indeed, the Socialists steadily gained votes
and deputies in the Reichstag. From 100 in May
1924 their representation increased to 153 in
1928. Significantly, the Communist Party fell in
the same period from 62 to 54 Reichstag deputies.
On the extreme anti-democratic right the Nazis
did even worse in parliamentary elections; in May
1924 there were 32 Nazis elected to the Reichstag
and in 1928 only 12. Even the conservatives, the
Nationalist Party, who formed the opposition for
most of the time from 1918 to 1930, declined in
number from 95 to 73.
Weimar Germany appeared to gain in strength.
This was not really so. The Nazis were winning
adherents wherever there was distress. Even during
the years of comparative prosperity, many of the
farmers did not share the benefits of industrial
expansion. Then governments were discredited by
their short life-spans – on average only eight
months. Parties appeared to be locked in purely
selfish battles of personal advantage. The Social
Democratic Party must share in the blame for the
instability of the Weimar coalition governments.
It preferred to stay in opposition and not to
participate in the business of ruling the country.
The difficulties of any party with socialist aspirations
joining a coalition were genuinely great.
Coalition meant compromise on policy. In any
coalition with the centre and moderate right the
Social Democrats could not hope to pass socialist
measures and they were afraid that cooperation
with the ‘bourgeois’ parties would discredit them
with their electoral base, which consisted mainly of
urban workers and trade unionists. From an electoral
party point of view these tactics appeared to
pay off as their increasing representation in the
Reichstag shows. But the price paid was the discrediting
of parliamentary government, for the
exclusion from government of both the Nationalists
and the Communists and the absence of the
Socialists meant that the coalitions of the centre
and mainly moderate right were minority governments
at the mercy of the Socialists.
In government there was thus a permanent
sense of crisis, the coalition partners who formed
the governments, especially the smaller parties,
becoming more concerned about how the unpopularity
of a particular government policy might
affect their own supporters than about the stability
of government as a whole. This situation
imperilled the standing of the whole parliamentary
democratic system. After 1925 there seemed
to be only one method by which the parties of
the centre and moderate right, saddled with the
responsibility of government, could logically
attain stability and a majority, and that was to
move further to the right. So its right wing came
to predominate the Centre Party, enabling the
conservatives, the Nationalist Party, to join coalition
cabinets with them. The coalition cabinets
were also very much cabinets of ‘personalities’
relying on presidential backing and only loosely
connected with, and dependent on, the backing
of the Reichstag parties.
When in 1928 the Socialists at last joined a
broad coalition excluding the more extreme right
they seemed to be remedying their earlier mistaken
policy; but it was very late in the history of
the parliamentary Republic. The coalition partners,
especially the Centre Party, had already
moved so far to the right that they now felt ill at
ease working with the Socialists under a Socialist
chancellor. This so-called grand coalition had the
utmost difficulty holding together for the two
years (1928–30) the government lasted, plunging
from one internal crisis to the next. The influence
of the brilliantly successful foreign minister,
Gustav Stresemann, just managed to keep the
right wing of the coalition in government. To
carry through his diplomacy of persuading the
Allies to relax their grip on Germany, he needed
a stable government behind him. But the coalition
did not survive his death in October 1929.
The three years from 1928 to 1930 were
critical in the decline of Weimar Germany.
Economic distress was becoming severe among
the small farmers. Then followed the Wall Street
Crash and its chain reaction in Europe. Industrial
output contracted and unemployment soared.
The Nazis were able to capitalise on the grievances
of the small farmers and then as the depression
widened and deepened they exploited the resentments
of the lower-middle classes, the shopkeepers
and white-collar workers who were facing
uncertainties and financial hardships and who
feared a Bolshevik revolution from the unemployed
industrial workers. On the political scene,
the conservative Nationalist Party was excluded
from power by the ‘grand coalition’ which in
1928 supported a broader-based government.
The Nationalists in that year had fallen under the
leadership of a wealthy industrialist and publisher,
Alfred Hugenberg, who hated Weimar democracy
and socialism equally. The Nationalists had not
done well in the elections of 1928. The effect
of their setback was to encourage Hugenberg
to look to the more extreme right for votes. In
the wings, the small, violent and racialist Nazi
Party stood on the threshold of achieving mass
support.
The first opportunity for the Nazis to make a
significant electoral impact in the Reichstag elections
came in 1930. The economic crisis had broken
up the Socialist-led grand coalition. The
partners of that coalition could not agree whether
employers or the workers should suffer from the
government’s only remedy to the crisis, the cutting
back of expenditure. Like the majority of the
Labour Party in Britain, the Social Democrats
could not remain in a government that reduced
unemployment benefits. President von Hindenburg
now called on the leader of the Centre Party,
Heinrich Brüning, to lead a new government.
There were threats that the president would dispense
with the Reichstag’s approval and resort to
emergency decrees provided for in the constitution
if it rejected Brüning’s savage deflation. This happened
within a few weeks and Brüning now staked
his future on dissolving the Reichstag and on a new
election. Its unexpected result and its political consequences
ushered in the final phase of Weimar
democracy. The vote of the Nazis increased from
some 810,000 in 1928 to nearly 6.5 million in the
September 1930 election. They increased their
representation from 12 to 107, just behind the
Socialists, who had 143, and nudged ahead of the
Communists, who had 77, to become the secondlargest
party. The conservative Nationalists lost
half their support.
It would still, perhaps, have been just possible
to stabilise the political fortunes of Weimar, but
Brüning’s financial ‘cures’ killed any chance of this
happening. Confidence throughout the country in
the ability of the politicians to solve the crisis
ebbed away. Economists of the Keynesian school
of thought met with complete rejection in the
Brüning era. (The Nazis lent them a more ready
ear.) There was an alternative policy of expansion
and of credit and of state help to put the unemployed
to work. Financially the country was sliding
into a position where administrators felt that
something had to be done. In parliament, the
Social Democrats, under the great shock of the
National Socialist landslide, backed the minority
Brüning government from the benches of the
opposition as far as they could. Brüning’s preference
was for authoritarian, austere government,
and with Hindenburg’s backing he governed by
emergency presidential decrees.
Hindenburg did not want Hitler to come to
power. He felt a strong antipathy for the
‘Bohemian corporal’ (he was actually a Bavarian
corporal), a violent uncouth Austrian who shared
none of Hindenburg’s own Prussian Junker qualities.
When Hindenburg was elected president in
1925 by a narrow margin over the candidate of
the Socialists and Centre, the spectacle of an
avowed monarchist and legendary war hero, the
most decorated and honoured of the kaiser’s
field marshals, heading a republic seemed incongruous
indeed. But the 77-year-old symbol of
past glories did his job decently enough, even
raising the respectability of the Republic by consenting
to serve as its head. But all his life he had
been trained to believe in command and leadership,
and the spectacle of parliamentary bickering
and the musical chairs the politicians were playing
in and out of government appeared to him a travesty
of what Germany needed.
Nevertheless, the field marshal could be relied
on to honour his oath to the republican constitution.
This gave him the constitutional right to act
in an emergency, and he believed, not without justification,
that the destructive behaviour of the
political parties during the economic crisis of 1929
to 1930 had created a crisis of government. The
Young Plan, which fixed the total amount of reparations
at 121 thousand million marks to be paid
in instalments over fifty-nine years, was assailed by
the Nazis and the right. In 1932, however, at
Lausanne, the amount was reduced to 3,000 million
marks. Brüning’s attempt to court Nationalist
opinion and aid the stricken economy by announcing
an Austro-German customs union in 1931
failed because the Allies declared that it broke the
Versailles Treaty, which prohibited the union of
Austria and Germany. Thus, dissatisfied, German
nationalism was further increased. The army now
enjoyed great influence and the attention of historians
has been especially focused on the few men,
including Hindenburg’s son, who increasingly
gained the old gentleman’s confidence and influenced
his decisions.
Brüning governed with austere authority,
integrity and disastrous results. Raising taxes and
reducing salaries was naturally unpopular, all the
more so as the economic crisis deepened.
Unemployment rose from 2.25 million in 1930
to over 6 million in 1932. Brüning in April 1932
tried to curb street violence by banning all the
private armies such as the SA, the SS and the
Stahlhelm. His intentions were good but this
measure, too, was largely ineffectual as the organisations
survived without openly wearing uniforms.
At the depth of the crisis in 1932 the
presidential term of office expired. Hindenburg
was deeply chagrined not to be re-elected unopposed.
Hitler chose to stand against him and lost,
but more significant than his failure was the fact
that more than 13 million had voted for him.
Hindenburg had secured over 19 million votes
but was so old that he could not last much longer.
Shortly after the presidential elections in May
1932 Hindenburg dropped Brüning. Franz von
Papen became chancellor, enjoying no support in
the Reichstag or the country. Less than a year was
left before Hitler assumed power over Germany.
How had he, a complete unknown only eleven
years earlier, achieved this transformation?
Fewer than three out of every hundred
Germans voted for the Nazis at the national election
of 1928 and that was after seven years of
unceasing Nazi propaganda. But the Nazis had
built an organisational base and increased the
party’s membership significantly. Nazi ideology
was no consistent or logically developed theory
such as Marxism claimed to be. There was
nothing original about any of its aspects. It incorporated
the arrogant nationalistic and race ideas
of the nineteenth century, specifically the anti-
Semitic doctrines and the belief in German
uniqueness and Germany’s world mission,
together with elements of fascism and socialism,
for in its early days the National Socialist Workers’
Party wooed the urban worker.
The National Socialists, or Nazis for short, had
grown out of one of the many small racialist and
nationalist groups already flourishing in Germany
– one organised in Munich by a man called Anton
Drexler. His name would have remained insignificant
but for Hitler’s association with the group.
Under Hitler’s leadership from July 1921
onwards, the party was opportunistic, seeking to
grow strong on all the resentments felt by differ-
ent sections of the German people: the small
farmers, who suffered from the agricultural
depression and, later, inflation; the middle class,
whose status was threatened and whose savings
had been wiped out; unemployed workers; those
industrialists at the other end of the scale who
were the declared enemies of socialism even in its
mildest form; theologians, mainly Protestant, who
saw in Nazism a spiritual revival against Weimar
materialism. The extreme nationalism of the
Nazis made a strong appeal.
Few of those who were early supporters
accepted all the disparate objectives that Nazism
purported to stand for, but every group of supporters
was prepared to discount, overlook or
accept as the ‘lesser evil’ those things it inwardly
disapproved of. They saw in Hitler and his movement
what they wished to see. This same attitude
also accounts for the view that there was a ‘good
Hitler’ who cured unemployment and unified
Germany, and a ‘bad Hitler’ who persecuted the
Jews, made war and ignored justice when dealing
with individuals and minority groups. That attitude
assumes that one does not have to judge the
‘whole’ but can accept the evils for the sake of
the benefits.
Nazism exploited the backward-looking conservatism
that flourished in Germany after the disillusionment
of defeat in 1918. Paradoxically
Hitler imposed a revolution of values and attitudes
that plunged German society into accelerating
change after 1933. But what some of those
Germans who supported him saw in Hitler in the
1920s was a return to an old virtuous Germany,
a simpler Germany that had never existed. Hitler’s
emphasis on the need for a healthy people to
live close to the land has a history dating back
to well before 1914. It was erroneously argued
that modern Germany lacked land and space for
a ‘healthy’ expansion of the people. Hence the
obsession with gaining Lebensraum, and Hitler’s
plans for satisfying these ‘needs’ in the east.
Hitler, too, dwelt obsessively on the medieval
image of the Jew as an alien, a parasite, who produced
nothing but lived off the work of others.
‘Work’ was ploughing the land, the sweat of the
brow, not sitting in banks and lending money.
Yet, he also had sound instincts which led him to
accept some modern economic concepts as a way
out of the miseries of the last Weimar years. The
discredited race doctrines of the nineteenth
century were reinforced and amplified in the
study of a new race biology. The ideology of race
lent a spurious cohesion to Nazi policies.
This was a turning back on the age of reason.
Numerous organisations from the large veteran
association, the Stahlhelm, to small so-called
völkisch groups embraced strident nationalism and
a mystical Teutonic secular faith. None saw in
Weimar’s parliamentary democracy anything but
a shameful subordination of the German nation
to alien foreign domination. It was identified also
with the Jews, who played a small but distinguished
role in its constitutional, administrative,
economic and artistic life, although they formed
only 1 per cent of the nation’s population. They
were besmirched by Nazi calumnies that they
were war profiteers and corrupters. More significant
than the slanders themselves is the wide credence
that these lies won in Germany.
The counterpart to this support for right-wing
extremism in its various forms was the lack of
positive support and understanding by the majority
of Germans for the spirit of parliamentary
democracy. In the 1920s anti-democratic ideas
were not only propagated by the communists and
by the ignorant and ill-educated, but found
strong support among the better-off, middle-class
youth, especially within the student unions and
universities. Stresemann’s success in dismantling
the punitive aspects of Versailles won no acclaim
because his methods were peaceful and conciliatory,
as they had to be if they were to succeed in
the years immediately after the war. The notion
that a democracy tolerates different ideas and different
approaches to solving problems was,
instead, condemned as disunity, as the strife and
chaos of parties. The parties themselves – apart
from the totalitarian-oriented Nazi and Communist
Parties – rarely understood that they had
to place the well-being of the whole nation before
narrow party interests, that even while they
attacked each other they had to acknowledge a
common framework and defend above all parliamentary
democracy itself. Democracy was
regarded as representing the lowest common
denominator of politics, the rule of the masses.
Fascism and Nazism also appealed to the elitists,
who saw themselves as leading the masses.
The educated and better-off followers feared
above everything ‘social revolution’; they preferred
the Nazi promise of ‘national revolution’
which would, they thought, enhance their career
opportunities. What made the Nazis so successful
was precisely the combination of physical force
in the streets, which was welcomed by anticommunists,
and the support of the ‘professionals’
in the army, civil service, the churches and education.
They, the supposedly educated elite, had
helped to undermine Weimar democracy even
in the years of prosperity, and made Nazism
respectable. In the absence of strong positive
support, democracy – and with it the rule of law –
is dangerously exposed. It could not survive the
economic blizzard of 1929 to 1932, which was
not the root cause of its downfall but more the
final blow. Nevertheless, there were regions of
Germany that did not succumb to the tidal wave
of Nazism even in 1933; this is true of the strongly
Catholic Rhineland and Bavaria. In the big industrial
cities, too, such as Berlin and Hamburg, most
factory workers in the beginning continued to
support the Social Democrats and the Communists.
The rise of the Nazis to power was not the
inevitable consequence of the lost war, of inflation
and depression. It was not automatic, the result of
the inexorable working out of the disadvantages
besetting Germany after 1918. Hitler succeeded
because a sufficient mass of German people,
including many in leading positions of society,
chose to support what he stood for. While he did
not reveal all his aims, he did reveal enough to be
rejected by anyone believing in democracy and
basic human rights. Among mainly young Nazi
thugs there were many political and warped idealists.
Other supporters were opportunists joining a
bandwagon for reasons of personal gain. Many
saw in Hitler a saviour who would end Germany’s
‘humiliation’ and the ‘injustices’ of Versailles.
No preparation for power was stranger or more
unlikely than Adolf Hitler’s. He lived for fifty-six
years, from his birth in the small Austrian town
of Braunau on 20 April 1889 until his suicide on
30 April 1945 in his bunker under the Reich
chancellery in Berlin. During the last twelve years
of his life he dominated first Germany and then
most of continental Europe. His impact on the
lives of millions was immense, responsible as he
was for immeasurable human misery. He believed
mankind to be engaged in a colossal struggle
between good and evil and he made this hysterical
fantasy come true more nearly than any single
man had done before. Yet nothing in the first
thirty years of his life pointed to the terrible
impact he would make on history.
Mein Kampf, ‘My Struggle’, which Hitler
wrote during his short spell of imprisonment in
1924, glamorised his past. Hitler suffered no hardship
other than the consequences of his own early
restless way of life. His father was a conscientious
customs official who died when he was fourteen
years old; his mother was devoted and did her
best for her son, whose attachment to her was
deep. But Hitler could not accustom himself to
regular work, even during his secondary school
days. Supported financially by his mother, he
drifted into a lonely way of life, avoiding all regular
work, aspiring to be an artist. He attempted to
gain entrance to the Academy of Fine Arts in
Vienna but was rejected, as were the majority of
applicants. Nevertheless, in his nineteenth year he
moved to the Habsburg capital. His mother had
recently died from cancer; Hitler had cared for her
during the final traumatic phase, aided by a Jewish
doctor to whom he expressed his gratitude and
presented one of his watercolours.
For the next two years the money left to him
by his parents and an orphan’s pension provided
him with an adequate income. He could indulge
his fancies; he read a great deal and impractically
designed grandiose buildings in the backroom of
his lodgings. He continued in this lonely and
irregular lifestyle; soon all the money he had
inherited was spent.
There is little reliable information about his
next two years. He disappeared from view, living in
poverty without attempting regular work, relying
on charity and boarding in cheap hostels. It would
seem probable that he still dreamt of becoming an
architect and, more importantly, imbibed the
crude anti-Semitic and racialist ideas current in
Vienna at that time. In May 1913, in his twentyfourth
year, he moved to Munich, Bavaria’s artistic
capital. He lived there by selling sketches and
watercolours, executed with care and photographic
accuracy, pleasing pictures of no great
artistic merit. He could, then, be fairly described as
self-educated but without discipline, with sufficient
artistic skill to have earned his living as an engraver
or poster designer had he desired regular work. He
was essentially a loner, who had established no
deep relationships, and he was already filled with
resentments and hatreds which came to be centred
more and more on the Jews.
He later regarded the outbreak of the Great
War as the turning point in his life. He volunteered
for the Bavarian army with enthusiasm. He
already saw himself as a pan-German, and not a
loyal subject of the multinational Habsburgs,
whom he detested. During the war he was
wounded and awarded the Iron Cross First Class;
he served as a dispatch messenger, though in
those days communications were passed mainly on
foot along the small distances from trench to
trench or from one command post to another. It
is notable that he was never promoted beyond the
rank of corporal, despite the desperate need for
NCOs, a reflection of his superior’s view that
Corporal Hitler was not a suitable leader of men.
When he returned to Munich after the war at the
age of twenty-nine, his lack of formal qualification
and education was typical of millions for whom
the future looked grim. But it is from this point on
that his hitherto insignificant and unsuccessful life
took a fantastic new turn.
For a start, his interest in politics and loyalty
commended him to the new Reichswehr. The
army retained him in a division for ‘military education’.
One of his tasks was to investigate and
infiltrate dubious, possibly left-wing, political
groups. In this way he came to join Drexler’s
small German Workers’ Party, more a beer hall
debating society than a genuine party. The transformation
of Hitler now began. As a political agitator
and an orator who could move his audiences
to emotion and hysteria with the violence of his
language, Hitler discovered a new vocation. He
did not of course see himself as the leader of
Germany at this stage, but rather as the propagandist
who would help to power the extreme
nationalists – men like Ludendorff who would
rescue Germany from ‘Bolshevism’ and the Jews
and who would break the shackles of Versailles.
Hitler fulminated against the world Jewish
conspiracy, Wall Street and ‘Bolshevism’, and
against the injustices of Versailles, until out of
Drexler’s debating club a real party emerged with
55,000 supporters by 1923. From 1921 Hitler
led that party, renamed the National Socialist
German Workers’ Party (or by its German initials
NSDAP). Hitler the rabid rabble-rousing politician
had arrived, a fact made possible only by the
totally chaotic political condition of Bavaria where
a disparate right had bloodily defeated an equally
disparate left. In November 1923 Hitler misjudged
the situation and sought to seize power for
the forces of the right in much the same way as
Lenin had seized control of Petrograd with a few
devoted revolutionaries. His attempted Munich
Putsch ended ignominiously, Hitler fleeing when
the police opened fire. Ludendorff alone, with
more courage than good sense, marched through
the cordon of police. Hitler had expected that
he would seize power without bloodshed and
that the police and army would rally to the
Ludendorff–Hitler alliance. Later he recognised
that failure had saved him. Had he succeeded in
gaining control and marched on ‘Red Berlin’ as he
intended, the government would not have capitulated
to a fanatic and extremist. Nor, as the army
high command knew, would the French, who had
entered the Ruhr, have tolerated for a moment a
coup led by a man who so stridently denounced
the Versailles Treaty; the French, moreover, still
possessed the strength and determination to prevent
such a coup. Hitler would then have been finished
for good.
Hitler turned his trial for treason, conducted
in Bavaria by judges who sympathised with his
cause, into a personal propaganda triumph.
Sentenced to the minimum term of five years’
imprisonment, he actually only served a few
months. While in prison he started writing Mein
Kampf and after his release he began to rebuild
the party that was to carry him to power. The
Munich Putsch had convinced him that the
Nationalist right could not be trusted and was too
feeble. He would be the leader, not they. From
1925 to 1928 there were two important developments:
a steady but slow growth of membership
of the Nazi Party and continuing bitter
internal disputes among the leaders, notably
Joseph Goebbels, Julius Streicher and the Strasser
brothers, Gregor and Otto. Hitler was handicapped
by a ban on his making public speeches
until May 1928, and he did not dare defy it for
fear of being deported from Germany as an
Austrian citizen. He nevertheless sought to create
a tight, national Nazi organisation, insisting on
absolute obedience to himself. Right up to the
final triumph of 30 January 1933, when he
became chancellor, there was a real threat of
defections from the Nazi Party he led.
In 1925 Hitler judged that the established
government was too strong to be seized by force.
He changed his tactics. He would follow the
legal, constitutional road by entering Reichstag
elections to gain a majority, and only then establish
his dictatorship. He never showed anything
but contempt for the Reichstag and, though
leader of the party, would never himself take part
in its proceedings. He advised his followers ‘to
hold their nose’ when in the Reichstag. During
the period from 1925 to 1928 he built up his
party as a virulent propaganda machine, insisted
that he alone should lead it, without requiring the
advice of leading party personalities, for it was an
essential element of his plans to cultivate the cult
of the Führer or Leader. The party membership
reached 97,000 in 1929. Was the economic crisis
then not the real cause of this sudden success?
The economic crisis which overtook the world is
usually dated from the time of the Wall Street
Crash in 1929. But this is misleading. By the
winter of 1927–8 distress was already felt in
Germany among the small agricultural farmers
and workers in north-west Germany and by artisans
and small shopkeepers especially. The Nazi
party made considerable headway in rural districts
in local and state elections in 1929 at the expense
of the traditional Conservative and Nationalist
Parties.
In that same year with the economic crisis deepening,
the conservative Nationalist, Hugenberg,
hoped to gain power by forming a broad alliance of
the right and using Hitler to win the support of
those masses which the conservatives had failed to
attract. A vicious campaign was launched against
the Young reparations plan of 1929. The reparations
and the politicians of Weimar were blamed
for Germany’s economic ills. The economic and
Nationalist assault proved explosive. But the
German electorate’s reaction in the Reichstag election
of September 1930 was not what Hugenberg
expected: the Nationalists lost heavily and the
Nazis made their first breakthrough at the level of
national elections, winning 107 seats to become
the second-largest party after the Socialists. In a little
more than two years their electoral support had
increased from 810,000 to 6.5 million.
The period from 1930 to the end of January
1933 was in many ways the most testing for
Hitler. Industrialists, however, began to hedge
their bets and substantial financial contributions
began flowing into Nazi funds. The propaganda
campaign against Weimar became ever more
vicious. Support among the industrial workers in
the big cities could not be won over; the Catholic
south remained largely immune too. Although
originating in Bavaria, the Nazis gained the greatest
following in rural northern Germany. The
white-collar workers, the rural voters and elements
of what is rather unsatisfactorily labelled
the middle class, especially those threatened by
Brüning’s financial measures with a drop in their
standard of living, were the new Nazi voters. The
Nazis and Nationalists did all in their power to
discredit Weimar democracy. Papen, the new
chancellor in June 1932, hoped to gain Hitler’s
sympathetic support by lifting the ban on the
SA (Sturm Abteilung, or storm troopers) and, in
July, by illegally ousting the socialist government
of Prussia.
Papen’s Cabinet of ‘Barons’, as it became
known from the titled nonentities of which it was
composed, enjoyed no support in the Reichstag.
The effect of the two elections that Papen induced
Hindenburg to call in July and November 1932 in
an unsuccessful attempt to secure some support in
the country and parliament were the coffin nails of
democracy, for those parties that were determined
to destroy the Weimar Republic between them
won a comfortable majority in the Reichstag. The
Nazis in July won 230 seats and 37 per cent of the
vote, becoming the largest single party; in the
election of November 1932 they held on to 33 per
cent of the electorate, saw their seats drop to 196,
but remained the largest party; the Nationalists
secured almost 9 per cent, and the Communists
17 per cent (100 seats) – nor did the three antidemocratic
parties have any scruples about acting
together. The Socialists slipped from 133 seats to
121. Papen had gambled on making the Nazis
more amenable by inflicting an electoral defeat on
them. The Nazis did indeed suffer a setback in
November 1932. Papen was pleased, but Hitler
had lost only a battle, not a war. On 17 November
Papen resigned. Hitler thought his moment had
come. Summoned to Hindenburg, he was told by
the field marshal that he would be considered as
chancellor only if he could show that a parliamentary
majority backed him and that, unlike Papen,
he could govern without special presidential
decrees. Such conditions, Hindenburg and Hitler
perfectly well knew, could not be met. They
amounted to a rejection of Hitler.
Hindenburg wanted his favourite, Papen, back.
Papen planned to prorogue the Reichstag and
change the constitution. However, General Kurt
von Schleicher, who represented the right of
the army high command and who had played
an influential political role behind the scenes,
persuaded Hindenburg that Papen’s plans would
lead to civil war and that the army had lost confidence
in Papen’s ability to control the situation.
With obvious reluctance Hindenburg appointed
Schleicher on 2 December 1932 to head the last
pre-Hitler government. Schleicher’s own solution
was to try to split the Nazi Party and to win the
support of Gregor Strasser and his more left-wing
section of the party. Strasser, who was very influential
as the head of the party’s political organisation,
had become disillusioned with Hitler’s
tactics of demanding total power and his adamant
refusal to share power with coalition partners.
Despite evidence of falling Nazi support in the
November 1932 election, Hitler won. Strasser
made the task easier for him by resigning from the
party in early December 1932 after bitterly quarrelling
with Hitler, who accused him of treachery.
Hindenburg’s opposition and internal disputes
made many Nazis feel that their chance of gaining
power was ebbing away. But Hitler was proved
right only a few weeks later. Schleicher announced
his government’s programme for relieving unemployment
and distress; wages and benefits were
raised, but even so the divided Reichstag was
united on one issue alone – to refuse Schleicher
their backing. Papen, meanwhile, ensured that the
only outcome of Schleicher’s failure would be a
new coalition ostensibly led by Hitler but which
Papen expected to control.
Hindenburg was cajoled into concluding that
the parliamentary crisis could be ended only by
offering the chancellorship to Hitler, the leader of
the largest party, even though Hitler had not set
foot in the Reichstag as a parliamentary leader. The
ins and outs of the final intrigues that overcame
Hindenburg’s obvious reluctance are still debated
by historians. Papen and the conservative and
nationalist right totally misjudged and underestimated
Hitler. They believed they could tame
him, that he would have to rely on their skills of
government. Instead, Hitler ended the parliamentary
crisis in short order by doing what he said he
would do, that is by crushing the spirit of the
Weimar constitution and setting up a totalitarian
state. But Papen’s intrigues were merely the final
blow to the already undermined structure of
Weimar’s democracy; it cannot be overlooked that
Hitler, whose party had openly proclaimed that it
stood for the destruction of Weimar, had won onethird
of the votes in November 1932; this meant a
higher proportion of electors supported the Nazi
Party than had supported any other single party at
previous post-1920 Reichstag elections. Given the
multiplicity of parties and the system of proportional
representation, a greater electoral victory
than the Nazis achieved is difficult to conceive. It
was not backstairs diplomacy alone then that
brought Hitler to power, but the votes of millions
of people which made his party the largest in the
Reichstag by far. In November 1932 the Nazis had
polled 11,737,000 votes against 7,248,000 of the
second-largest party, the Social Democrats.
There is a strong contrast between the long wait
for power and the speed with which Hitler
silenced and neutralised all opposition to establish
a totalitarian regime. The destruction of
Weimar democracy, and the civic rights that were
guaranteed to all German citizens was accomplished
behind a legal façade which stilled consciences
of all those in the state who should have
resisted. The reasons for the lack of opposition
had their roots in the past. The elites who led the
German state – the majority of administrators,
civil servants, the army, the churches too – had
followed a long tradition of defaming democracy;
Hitler’s anti-Semitism and his attacks on minorities
were nothing new in their thinking. All the
more honour to the minority who refused to
accept the changes and actively resisted or left the
country. Almost half the German electorate was
prepared to support Hitler in the hope of better
times, to be brought about by a ‘national revolution’
and an end to Weimar and disunity.
The Nazis occupied only three posts in the
coalition Cabinet. Hitler was chancellor; Hermann
Göring was placed in charge of Prussia as minister
without portfolio and Prussian minister of the
interior under vice-chancellor Papen; and Wilhelm
Frick was minister of the interior. The government
posts had been carefully arranged so that the army
and the Foreign Ministry, as well as other key ministries,
were not under Nazi control. Papen and the
Nationalists soon discovered that Hitler was not
inhibited from exercising control by the constitutional
niceties that had been devised to restrain
him. This was no Weimar coalition government!
The easy, almost effortless path to total dictatorial
power makes melancholy reading. The
setting alight of the Reichstag on 27 February
1933, probably by the unbalanced Dutchman van
der Lubbe alone – though there can be no certainty
– became the pretext for an emergency
decree signed by Hindenburg suspending personal
liberties and political rights.
Hitler had insisted on new elections as a condition
of accepting office, intending to gain an
absolute majority, and he meant to make sure of
it. Accordingly, despite Papen’s supposed seniority,
Göring seized control of Prussia, which comprised
two-thirds of Germany, and under cover of
the emergency decree terrorised the opponents of
the Nazis. After an electoral campaign of unparalleled
violence and intimidation, with Joseph
Goebbels manipulating press and radio to help
secure a Nazi victory, the Nazis just failed to
gain the expected overall majority. Their votes
rose to over 17 million; the Socialists held on to
over 7 million votes and the Communists, despite
the Nazi campaign, polled 4.8 million votes; the
Centre Party secured nearly 4.5 million and the
Nationalists (DNVP) a disappointing 3.1 million.
But, together with the Nationalists, the Nazis
could muster a majority against all other parties,
sufficient to govern with the support of the
Reichstag. This was obviously not Hitler’s aim.
He sought dictatorial power and a change of the
constitution, but this required a two-thirds
majority and shrewdly he wished to proceed in a
pseudo-legal way to assure himself of the support
of the country afterwards.
Not a single communist deputy of the 81
elected could take his seat. All were already in the
hands of the Gestapo or being hunted down.
More than twenty of the Socialists also were
under arrest or prevented from attending. Still
Hitler needed the support of the Nationalists
and so to reassure them and the army and the
president, he staged an opening ceremony of
the Reichstag in the shrine of monarchical
Junkerdom, the old garrison church of Potsdam
where Frederick the Great lay buried. But even
with the communists prevented from voting and
the Nationalists voting on his side, Hitler still
lacked the two-thirds majority he needed. It will
always be to the shame of the members of the
once great Centre Party that they tempered their
principles and threw in their lot with Hitler, and
agreed to vote for his dictatorial law. They lost
the will to resist, and the leadership later came to
an agreement to secure Catholic interests. It was
left to the Socialist Party alone to vote against
Hitler’s so-called Enabling Law, which acquired
its two-thirds majority on 23 March 1933 with
the storm troopers howling vengeance outside
the Reichstag on anyone who dared to oppose
Hitler’s will.
Now Hitler was able to put his aims into practice
with far less restraint. Under the sinister application
of the term Gleischaltung (coordination
or, literally, a switch used to bring one current in
line with another), a vague all-embracing aim
was set out forcibly to subordinate all the activities
of German society – government, administration,
the free press and trade unions – to Nazi bodies
set up specially to supervise them. Thus while in
some cases the old institutions remained, they
were subject to new Nazi controls. The whole
process was haphazard and new Nazi organisations
proliferated, frequently in rivalry with each
other as well. Hitler in the final resort would
decide between conflicting authorities. Until he
did so there was the inevitable chaos and infighting.
For a time he might decide it best not to
interfere too much in a particular administrative
branch or, for example, leave the high
command of the army intact. The complete
process of Gleischaltung would be applied later to
the army also. Hitler insisted on his own final say,
on maintaining some of the traditional structures
as long as he thought this tactically necessary to
overcome misgivings among broad sections of the
German people or powerful groups such as the
army. His revolution would be complete but
gradual. The Nazi state was thus no efficient
monolith. Within the overall framework of acceptance
of the Führer as leader, rivalries flourished
and independent policies were still pursued for
short periods. During the early years there were
even islands of legality and normality to confuse
opinion at home and abroad.
Among the first steps that Hitler took was to
abolish the independent powers of the federal
states in March 1933. In April a decree purged
the civil service of Jews and those of Jewish
descent, and of anyone whom the Nazis deemed
to oppose the regime’s aims. In Prussia a quarter
of the higher civil service was dismissed, including
judges who were supposed to be irremovable.
The Supreme Court in Leipzig secretly debated
whether they should make a protest at this unconstitutional
act, and decided on discretion. No
wonder the German public was misled by the
seeming legality of these new ‘laws’. During the
course of the summer of 1933, the remaining
independent parties were disbanded. The communist
leaders were already in the new concentration
camps. The Vatican now decided to
conclude a treaty – the Concordat – with Hitler
in a misguided effort to protect Catholic interests.
The independent trade unions were quickly
brought to heel and suppressed, and the workers
enrolled in the Nazi Labour Front. The press and
broadcasting were placed under Goebbels’ direction.
The universities did not put up any real
resistance either. There were famous professors
such as the philosopher Martin Heidegger who,
at least for a short time, gave public support to
the Nazi movement. Some became ardent Nazis
out of conviction; many, for the sake of their
careers.
Academics participated in the famous burning
of the books by Jewish and anti-Nazi authors.
Many of Germany’s internationally known scientists,
writers and artists joined the ‘national revolution’
of the Nazis. Nor were theologians
immune from the Nazi corruption: Christ became
an Aryan. The dismissed Jews, such as Albert
Einstein, began to leave the country. So did a few
Christian Germans, including the Nobel Prizewinning
writer Thomas Mann. Germany’s other
literary giant, who had also won the Nobel Prize
for literature, Gerhart Hauptmann, remained in
Nazi Germany, adorning the new regime.
Hitler was sensitive to German public opinion.
The German people, he understood, would need
to be ‘educated’ to accept the harshness and final
brutality in stages. So, when Jews were dismissed
from the civil service, some were granted their
state pensions provided they had completed at
least ten years of service. Those Jews who had
fought in the First World War or whose sons or
fathers had died in the war were temporarily
exempted from dismissal at Hindenburg’s
request. Terror was exercised against specific
opponents. Dachau was the first concentration
camp, established near Munich in 1933 by
Heinrich Himmler, head of the Bavarian Political
Police. It became the model for others, and by
the summer of 1933 some 30,000 Germans were
held in concentration camps. Himmler soon
advanced to become the Reichsführer of the SS
(Schutzstaffel) and head of the police throughout
the Reich. The courts and police also continued
to function.
Germany was left as a mosaic where the normal
process of law and administration continued to
function fairly in some instances. In other areas
the Nazis or the terror arm of the SS were
supreme, and no appeal to the courts was possible.
Jewish students were for a time permitted to continue
their university studies on a quota system.
Until 1938, some Jewish businesses continued to
trade, a few even later, though many went bankrupt.
‘I always go as far as I dare and never farther’,
Hitler told a meeting of party leaders in April
1937. So Hitler, at the same time as he breached
the vital principles of basic civic rights, gave the
outward appearance of acting mildly and reasonably,
and always in conformity with proper ‘laws’.
And did not the person of President Hindenburg
guarantee decency? The German people did not
realise how the president was losing power to
Hitler. But knowledge of the concentration camps
was a deterrent to any thought of opposition from
all except the most courageous.
Hitler was especially careful to appease the
army. He assured it of an independent status and
of its position as the sole armed force in the state.
The army wished to draw on the young storm
troopers whom it would train as a large armed
force that could quickly augment the regular army
in time of crisis. This meant the subordination of
the SA to the needs of the army. The head of the
storm troopers, Ernst Röhm, had entirely different
ideas. The storm troopers were not only a
separate army in the state, but he saw them under
his command as the untainted force which would
carry through the complete Nazi revolution in
opposition to Hitler, who appeared willing to
compromise with the old elements of power, the
army and industrialists. Hitler reacted ruthlessly
and, with the help of the Reichswehr during what
became known as the Night of the Long Knives
on 30 June 1934, had Röhm and many senior
officers of the SA murdered. The same opportunity
was taken to murder General von Schleicher,
Gregor Strasser and two of Papen’s close associates,
as a warning to Papen’s nationalist ‘allies’.
Hitler, with the connivance of the army, had now
openly set himself above the law.
On 2 August 1934, Hindenburg, the one man
more revered than Hitler, died. He was buried at
an impressive funeral ceremony and for the last
time Hitler took a back seat. With Hindenburg
were laid to rest symbolically the last vestiges of
the Prussian Junker and military traditions of
honour and service. The moment Hindenburg
died Hitler took another important step towards
supreme power. A plebiscite merged the offices of
president and chancellor: Hitler, who now
became the Führer and Reich chancellor. The
Reichswehr generals, believing that they would
still control all military decisions, did not oppose
Hitler’s demand that the army should swear a personal
oath of loyalty to him as head of state.
Enormous power was now concentrated in
Hitler’s hands. But still he moved with caution,
step by step, accepting that he would need time
to achieve his goals.
The year 1934 also witnessed the belated small
beginnings of protest against the implications of
Nazi anti-Semitism though only as far as it
affected the Church’s own administration, and
the largely unsuccessful attempts by Hitler to subordinate
the Protestant Church. That Hitler did
not choose immediately to crush the opposition
of the Confessional Protestant Church movement
and other protests, however, was due not to moderation,
as people mistakenly thought, but to his
caution, his wish to dominate only gradually all
spheres of German life. He bided his time.
Hitler had a clear view of priorities. At home
the most important issue was unemployment. If
he could get the out-of-work back into factories
and construction, enable the small businesses to
become sufficiently profitable again, and provide
security and promotion opportunities for civil servants
and army officers, their support for him
would be sure. If he failed on the economic front,
he would be likely to fail all along the line. That
is why Hitler was prepared to tolerate the continuation
of Jewish businesses, to allow Jewish
salesmen to remain prominent in the export trade
until 1938, and to make use of unorthodox financial
management to achieve a rapid reduction of
the unemployed; real incomes would cease to fall.
Between March 1933 and March 1934 unemployment
fell by over 2 million in part but not
wholly due to the ending of recession. Able men
served Hitler, including the brilliant financial
expert, Hjalmar Schacht, whom the Führer
appointed president of the Reichsbank. Plans
worked out in advance by Hitler’s economic
advisers were now put into action. With guaranteed
prices for their produce, farmers recovered
during the first three years of the regime; small
businesses were helped with state spending; taxes
were reduced; grants were made to industry to
install new machinery; work was created in slum
clearance and housing and Autobahn construction.
The economy was stimulated out of recession.
Though wages did not rise in real terms,
security of employment was a greater benefit for
the wage-earners. The pursuit of autarky or selfsufficiency
helped the construction, chemical, coal
and iron and steel industries. The industrialists
welcomed the opportunities for expansion and
increased profit and applauded the destruction of
free trade unions. But industry lost its independence
as its barons became dependent on state
orders and state allocation of resources. The First
and Second Four-Year Plans imposed state controls
severely limiting the capitalist economy.
Armament expenditure remained relatively low
from 1933 to 1935, but from then on was rapidly
increased, putting Germany on a war footing and
eliminating unemployment. Belts had to be tightened,
– ‘guns before butter’ – but it was too late
for any opposition to loosen the Nazi hold on
power; there was in any case no opposition that
could any longer command a mass following.
By 1934 Hitler’s regime had established a sufficient
base of power and secured enough willing
cooperation of ‘experts’ in the administration,
business and industry, as well as the army, for his
Nazi state to function, though often with much
confusion. The Nazi ideologues and fanatics had
formed an alliance with the educated and skilled
who served them. Without them the Nazis could
not have ruled Germany. What German history of
this period shows is that parliamentary democracy
and the rule of law, once established, will not
inevitably continue. If they are not defended, they
can be destroyed – not only by violent revolution,
but more subtly by determined and ruthless men
adopting pseudo-legal tactics.
And what of the outside world – they, too, not
only gave Hitler the concessions he demanded or
unilaterally took by breaking treaties but in 1936
handed him the spectacular triumph of holding
the Olympic Games, dedicated to freedom and
democracy, in Berlin.
World History
