Читать книгу A History of Germany 1918 - 2020 - Mary Fulbrook - Страница 24

Hitler became Chancellor on 30 January 1933; but he had by no means actually ‘seized power’, as the myth of the Machtergreifung (seizure of power), supported by the celebrations and propaganda of the Nazis themselves at the time, would suggest. He still had much to do to consolidate his hold over German administration, government and people; indeed, at this time many still felt that he could be harnessed and restrained, and his popular support co-opted and redirected.

However, in the course of 1933–4 Hitler systematically pursued a policy of so-called Gleichschaltung (literally, putting everyone ‘into the same gear’; coordinating, or bringing into line), in order to consolidate his hold on German politics and society. Even then, however, Hitler’s power was by no means absolute. His state was a complex system, riddled with rivalries among competing centres of power and influence, in which the notion of a charismatic Führer, above the fray, played a key role in maintaining a degree of cohesion. Equally important was the extent to which this system was, almost to the last, sustained by key elite groups (particularly in the army and industry) who, while not necessarily themselves ‘Nazi’, must bear a large degree of responsibility for the functioning and consequences of the regime.

Hitler had declared that the elections following his appointment as Chancellor would be the last free elections in a parliamentary state. In the event, the elections of 5 March 1933 were less than ‘free’. On 27 February 1933 the Reichstag was set on fire. While uncertainty still surrounds the circumstances of the arson attack, there is no doubt that it was the Nazis who obtained the utmost benefit from the consequences of the fire. It was used as the pretext for an emergency decree on 28 February, which suspended most civil liberties and legitimized mass arrests of Communists and Social Democrats. In conditions of mounting tension, with rising violence on the streets, and left-wingers no longer able to express their opinions freely, the elections of 5 March were held under highly intimidating conditions. Nevertheless, Hitler and the NSDAP still failed to gain an overall majority: with 43.9% of the vote, the Nazis won 288 seats, while the Left gained over 30% of the vote (128 votes for the SDP and 81 for the KPD) and the Centre (73 seats) and Liberals together won 18% of the vote. Even with the votes for the right-wing DNVP the Nazi-dominated ‘government of national concentration’ could only barely command an absolute majority and could not achieve the two-thirds necessary to pass an Enabling Law (Ermächtigungsgesetz) to alter the constitution and ‘legalize’ the destruction of democracy. Yet by 23 March this had become possible.

On 21 March the Reichstag was formally opened in the Garrison Church at Potsdam. Much was made of this carefully stage-managed ‘Day of Potsdam’ by the Nazis, who attempted to emphasize continuities between Frederick the Great, Hindenburg and Hitler, with the great traditions of German and Prussian history culminating in the figure of Hitler. Somewhat relieved by these appearances, the Bavarian People’s Party, the German State Party and the Centre Party were prepared to consider voting for the Enabling Law. The Catholics in particular were rather reassured by Hitler’s insistence that the position of Christianity would be untouched in the future; and Centre Party politicians also felt that their willingness to ally with the Nazis might help to moderate the government – as had their former cooperation with Social Democrats in 1919, although in a rather different direction. The Communist Deputies were prevented from attending the Reichstag vote, as were twenty-one of the Social Democrats. In the event, when the Reichstag convened in the Kroll Opera on the evening of 23 March, the only members courageous enough to vote against the Enabling Act were the Social Democrats. Otto Wels read out their reply to Hitler, in which he stated: ‘At this historical hour, we German Social Democrats pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and Socialism. No Enabling Law can give you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible…’¹ But this protest was ultimately to no avail.

With the passage of this law, Hitler was able – with all the appearance of legality – to overthrow the remnants of any form of parliamentary democracy. He no longer needed to pay attention to the views of most of the nationalist members of the government, nor did he need President Hindenburg’s signature for the passage of legislation. Henceforth, ‘law’ could be used to justify any arbitrary act of the regime. But this garb of legality, while reassuring to moderate, middle-class Germans, did not preclude the use of violence and terror; it simply accompanied it.

Map 4.1 The Reichstag elections, 5 March 1933.

From spring 1933 the Nazis engaged in a series of moves to extend and consolidate their power. Initial measures were taken to purge the civil service in the ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ of 7 April 1933. Having survived the transition from Imperial Germany to the Weimar Republic relatively unscathed, the German professional civil service found itself under stronger attack in this new revolutionary upheaval. Jews were removed from positions in the civil service and related state professions (under the broad German categorization of state servants, or Beamten), as were political opponents of the regime. The purge was, however, by no means as thorough as many NSDAP members would have liked, since considerations of administrative efficiency in some cases outweighed Nazi credentials. Furthermore, some civil servants who harboured misgivings about the Nazi regime justified their decision to stay as ‘preventing something worse’. Yet the overall record of civil servants in the Third Reich remains one of compromise rather than subversion of the regime. Recent exhaustive works by independent historians’ commissions tasked with researching the involvement of Reich ministries in the Nazi regime have demonstrated the extent to which they were not merely depressingly compliant but actively complicit in furthering Nazi goals across a wide range of areas, including racial discrimination and persecution in both peacetime and during the war.

At the same time, the traditional decentralization of the relatively recently unified Germany was attacked – a continuation of tendencies already evident towards the end of the Weimar Republic. The powers of the Länder were reduced by the Nazi seizure of power in the regional states in March 1933. (The takeover of Prussia the previous summer, with the installation of a Reich Commissioner in place of the elected government, had provided a useful precedent.) On 7 April 1933 10 so-called Reichsstatthalter (Reich governors) were appointed, usually the senior Gauleiter of each state, except in the cases of Bavaria (Ritter von Epp) and Prussia (Hitler). The takeover was by no means smooth: as at national level, there were perpetual tensions between party and state. Frictions varied from place to place, depending on preexisting political configurations and circumstances. Curiously, the heavy-handed actions of local party officials were often dissociated in people’s minds from the regime as a whole, and the person of Hitler in particular: people frequently asserted that ‘if only the Führer knew’, things would not be allowed to go on in the way they were locally.

While the Nazis made strenuous efforts to woo economic elites – many of whom had been belatedly persuaded to give financial support to the Nazi election campaign in the spring of 1933 – they had no such tender consideration for the bulk of the German people, and notably the workers. Giving the appearance of populism by proclaiming 1 May a national holiday on full pay, the Nazis rapidly proceeded to dismantle and destroy the autonomous workers’ organizations. Trade unions were wound up and replaced by a body spuriously claiming to represent the interests of all German workers in the new ‘national community’, the German Labour Front (DAF) under Robert Ley. Walther Darré took control of the Reich Food Estate (Reichsnährstand), dealing with the peasantry and agriculture, while small traders were organized into the HAGO (Handwerks-, Handelsund Gewerbe-Organisation). While in appearance developing a form of corporatism, in practice this was a coercive system in which none of the Nazi organizations actually represented the real interests of their ‘members’.

At the same time, there was an assault on political parties. In the course of spring and summer 1933 these were either outlawed (starting with the KPD) or they dissolved themselves (the Centre Party formally dissolved itself on 5 July 1933). With the ‘Law Against the Formation of New Parties’ of 14 July 1933 a one-party state was formally established. No longer was there any legal parliamentary opposition: the sole function of the Reichstag was to acclaim the decisions of the Nazi government. Yet this government itself became progressively more chaotic in nature: cabinet meetings were less and less frequent, eventually being so rare that they ceased to fulfill any governmental function; and political decision-making processes became more and more a matter of gaining direct access to the Führer – an increasingly difficult task as he spent more time in his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden and became less interested in the minutiae of most aspects of domestic policy.

On 30 January 1934, one year after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Reichsrat, or upper chamber of the Reichstag, was abolished and the federal system was effectively terminated by removing independent authority from the states. Perhaps the final major event in terms of initial constitutional change came with the death of President Hindenburg on 2 August 1934. Hitler made use of the occasion to merge the offices of President and Chancellor and to take personal command of the armed forces. Abolishing Hindenburg’s title of Reich President, Hitler now styled himself ‘Führer and Reich Chancellor’. The army and public officials had to swear personal oaths of obedience to Hitler – oaths that subsequently proved for many to be a moral obstacle to resistance against Hitler’s regime.

The army was able to ignore or surmount its potential misgivings about Hitler in August 1934 for a number of reasons. For one thing, Hitler had made no secret of his intention to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, revising the much-hated Treaty of Versailles. Hitler’s whipping-up of resentment against Versailles, and his sharp denunciations of the Jews and Bolsheviks whom he held to be the ‘November Criminals’ responsible for Germany’s national humiliation, had been constant themes prior to his coming to power. After becoming Chancellor Hitler had lost little time in setting revisionist policies in motion: on 8 February 1933 Hitler informed ministers that unemployment was to be reduced by rearmament; in July 1933 Krupp’s euphemistically named ‘agricultural tractor programme’ started the production of tanks; and by 1934 explosives, ships and aircraft were in production – all contrary to the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, but greeted with approval by the army itself.

Furthermore, Hitler had just resolved a potential source of friction in relation to the traditional armed forces. The SA, under its leader Ernst Röhm, had become a large and rather unruly organization, propagating unwelcome notions of the need for a ‘second revolution’ and developing into a rival not only for the elite SS but also for the army proper. Hitler decided that the support of the latter two groups was more important to him than was the SA, so he instigated the so-called Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934, during which the leaders of the SA were murdered along with other individuals with whom Hitler had fallen out, including Gregor Strasser, Gustav Kahr (who had been state commissioner for Bavaria at the time of the abortive putsch of 1923) and General von Schleicher. There were also a few cases of mistaken identity. Retroactively this mass murder – which continued for three days, entailing 77 officially admitted deaths, although the true figure was much higher – was ‘legalized’ on 3 July 1934, when a law was passed simply stating that ‘the measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July to strike down the treasonous attacks are justifiable acts of self-defence by the state’.² Although few can have been genuinely taken in by the Nazi version of the terror, which they represented as a nipping in the bud of a treacherous plot against the regime, the garb of legality helped to allay disquiet in many circles; and many were also to an extent relieved that the more radical, unruly elements in the Nazi Party appeared to be being put in their place. In any event, the purge certainly helped in the co-option of the army by Hitler.

Meanwhile, the Nazi regime was bolstered by an elaborate apparatus of terror. The first concentration camp for political opponents of the regime was opened at Dachau, near Munich, with considerable fanfare and publicity in March 1933. In subsequent years, well before the radicalization of the wartime period, a network of concentration camps was set up across Germany. These camps made use of prisoners as forced labour, sending labour gangs to Aussenlager or subsidiary camps, in the vicinity. Gangs of concentration camp inmates were marched through surrounding towns and villages to work long hours under inhumane conditions with very little food. Within the camps, brutality and violence were the norm. While certain methods of torture and execution were employed, these camps were not intended primarily for the physical destruction of their inmates (as were the extermination camps in the East that functioned from 1942). The SS, under the command of Heinrich Himmler, was able to arrest, detain, imprison, torture and murder, with little respect for any rule of law or putative notion of justice. Himmler, who between 1934 and 1936 took over the police powers of the Reich and State Ministries of the Interior, became on 17 June 1936 ‘Reichsführer-SS und Chef der deutschen Polizei im Reichministerium des Innerns’, thus effectively controlling the means of terror in the Third Reich. Fear of arrest, and fear of informers, led to public conformity and the leading of a double life for many Germans, who withheld their real views and feelings for expression only in complete privacy in the company of family and close friends.

The Nazis attempted to promote a great display of power and unity under the national Führer. The mass parades, the battalions marching past Hitler, the apparently adoring populace, hands raised in the Heil salute, fostered the image of a strong leader and a united people – as encapsulated in the slogan of ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!’ (‘one people, one empire, one leader’) – and indeed the myth of the Führer, above all the petty everyday conflicts and frictions, constituted a powerful element of cohesion in the Third Reich. But to a certain extent the Nazis’ self-promotion has been misleading. The myth of a strong leader in a one-party state, with a single official ideology and the back-up of force, fed into the concept of totalitarianism – a concept that proved particularly useful in the Cold War period after the Second World War when dictatorships of the Left and Right, communist and fascist, were simplistically equated. But it has become increasingly clear to serious analysts of the Third Reich that the monolithic image does not correspond to a more complex reality.

While the Nazis clearly took over the government of Germany, they never entirely took over the state: the tendency was rather to create new parallel party agencies, with spheres of competence and jurisdiction overlapping or competing with those of the existing administration, and armed with plenipotentiary powers directly dependent on the Führer’s will. In this ‘dual state’ there was no rational means of adjudicating between the rival claims of competing agencies to represent the undisputed fount of authority on a given issue – and there were, in addition to conflicts between party and state, also disputes between different party agencies. In the final resort, recourse had to be had to the Führer, and the ‘Führer’s will’ became the ultimate source of authority to resolve all disputes. The ‘Hitler state’, with the Führer often remaining the only final source of arbitration, was to some extent a structural result of this relative administrative chaos.

Since Hitler often stood aside from the fray, only to enter at the last moment to side with the emerging winner, historians such as Hans Mommsen have been inclined to see him as a ‘weak dictator’. However, as many others have rightly pointed out, when it mattered to Hitler he made sure his own views were predominant.³ The degree to which Hitler was able to realize given aims, or intervene in detailed policymaking, varied with respect to economic, foreign and racial policy in both the peacetime and wartime years. German society also proved somewhat resistant to its own reformation into a harmonious ‘national community’.