An Honourable Defeat (2 page)

Part One - 1933-1938

A Nazi bigwig on holiday in Switzerland asked what a certain official building was. ‘That’s our Admiralty,’ his Swiss companion told him. The Nazi laughed mockingly. ‘You mean to say you have an Admiralty — you, with your two or three ships?’ The Swiss gave him a straight look and said, ‘In that case you’d better tell me what you Germans want with a Ministry of Justice.’

Chapter One – The End of the Republic

On 30 January 1933 Paul von Hindenburg made Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. Hindenburg was in his eighty-sixth year, a hero of the First World War who had come out of retirement to take on the Presidency of the ailing Weimar Republic in obedience to his sense of duty. He was a confirmed monarchist himself, and had even asked the exiled former Kaiser’s permission to assume the office. The old soldier had been at his post for eight years now, having defeated Hitler in the presidential elections of 1932, and he was tired. His was not a political temperament, and now his mind was giving way to old age. It is hard to imagine with what feelings he conferred the Chancellorship on Hitler, a man whom only four days earlier he had referred to contemptuously as ‘the Austrian corporal’, and declared that he would never give him even the Ministry of Posts. But his advisers, his own son among them, had told him that this peevish and insecure forty-three-year-old, with his rasping peasant accent and uncouth manners, who only very recently had become a naturalised German, was the only hope for his country. The quick succession of shaky coalition governments which had marked the last few years had brought the country to the brink of economic collapse, and Germany was in danger of coming apart at the seams: above all, there loomed the spectre of Bolshevism. A strong hand was needed on the wheel of state.

For Hitler, quiet and reserved for once, his brown uniform ex-changed for a morning coat, the day marked the culmination of a decade of struggle. His first attempt to seize power, in November 1923, had misfired disastrously, but the German government had neither repatriated him to Austria nor imposed a long prison sentence on him. He turned the twelve months in Landsberg fortress to good effect, living in relative comfort, writing
Mein
Kampf
, and, by his own account, collecting and ordering his thoughts and emotions. On his release, he returned to his work with a will, and found Germany not at all an unsympathetic place to be. He developed the small political party he had joined and then taken over with great speed and remorseless energy. At the same time, he was careful to remain within the bounds of the law, earning him the nickname among his opponents of Adolphe Légalité. Even after his assumption of power he paid lip service to the Constitution, though he never subsequently pretended to be curbed or controlled by it. Others, particularly the Social Democrats, found it comfortable, for the short time left to them, to believe that he was.

The truth was that Hitler was a brutal powermonger who disposed of anything he disagreed with, and anyone who got in his way, with utter ruthlessness. His very crudeness and his disregard for any accepted political or diplomatic rules caught his opponents, both at home and abroad, wrong-footed. His initial successes blinded people to his immorality, and his criminal megalomania was mistaken for strength of purpose. Above all, his supporters on the conservative right in Germany, and those who were to become his opponents in the Army, thought they could control him. By the time they realised they could not, it was too late. His chief political rivals, the Social Democrats and the Communists, made the mistake of regarding each other, and not the Nazis, as the most dangerous enemy. Instead of banding together against the threat of National Socialism, they dissipated their energy in fighting each other; and though violent street battles between Communists and Nazis typified the Berlin of the early thirties, the two parties were briefly allied during a public transport strike in the capital in 1932.

Not that Germany wasn’t forewarned. The thuggishness of the National Socialist Party’s private army, the Sturmabteilung (SA), or brownshirts,
[5]
was well-known before Hitler came to power. Once he had power, he barely troubled to camouflage his intentions. Thousands of brownshirts marched throughout Berlin in triumphant torchlit processions on the night Hitler was declared Chancellor.

One reaction to him was simple disbelief; another, that such a man could not possibly last a year. Part of Hitler’s initial success was due to the fact that enough powerful people did not take him seriously, and part was due to the related fact that they did not see him for what he really was. One man under no illusions was the eminent painter Max Liebermann, born in the same year as Hindenburg. When he saw the torchlight processions cross Pariser Platz under the Brandenburg Gate, he closed the shutters of his flat windows. ‘There comes a time when you can’t eat as much as you want to throw up,’ he remarked to journalists. He died two years later. He had never reopened his shutters.

Hitler was also a brilliant opportunist, with a famous sixth sense for personal danger which helped preserve him more than any of his considerable security measures. His indecisiveness, his habit of changing his plans at the last minute, and of not attending a given meeting or function at the appointed time, also hamstrung attempts to kill him. It is not hard to imagine Hitler living out his life as a kind of dream — a fantasy-fulfilment which even he could hardly have imagined possible. At each new step he may have asked himself, ‘Am I going to be able to carry this one off too?’ And as time progressed, and his success continued, so he might well have come to believe in his own infallibility. He never so far lost his grip of reality, however, as to neglect matters regarding his own safety.

Hitler was under no illusions about the dissident elements in the Army, especially in the General Staff, and always regarded the Army with suspicion, even after he had ‘tamed’ it. In 1933 the Army, traditionally above politics, was prepared to go along with what it perceived as a strong new leader who was committed to rearmament (in the interests of defence) and the re-establishment of Germany’s place in the world. They were prepared to turn a blind eye to the bully-boy tactics of his minions; but in any case senior officers had no love or respect for the democratic tradition as demonstrated by the Weimar Republic, and they feared the influence of Bolshevism in a country where the Communist Party had always been extremely powerful. This is not to say that some senior members of the Army were not opposed to Hitler from the very first. There was even a plot to topple Hitler on the eve of his appointment to the Chancellorship; but this, headed by the last Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Major-General Kurt von Schleicher, a career soldier with political ambitions who had managed to hold on to his position for only a matter of months, had more to do with a power struggle between the National Socialists and the old-guard conservatives than with disapproval of Hitler’s policies. Indeed, the worst of these were yet to emerge, although he had made no secret of his plans in
Mein
Kampf
.

For his part, Hitler was not yet secure enough in his position to attempt to muzzle or otherwise curb the Army’s power. True, the SA, under his long-time comrade-in-arms, Ernst Röhm, was a powerful force itself. With several million members it far outnumbered the Army; but the SA, despite Röhm’s ambitions for it, was not a disciplined force, and in the course of the next year Röhm would fly fatally close to the sun. When the chips were down, it didn’t matter that Röhm was Hitler’s oldest friend, the only man he was on the familiar ‘Du’ terms with;
[6]
when the Führer felt threatened, he struck hard — and his accurate political instincts ensured that he never missed his mark.

The Nazis had yet to build up their organisation of terror, too. The dreaded secret police network which was to spread all over Germany and the countries it conquered, which was to employ six million agents, was still in its infancy. This is not a history of Nazi administration,
[7]
but it is worth pointing out that the complexity already alluded to did not lead to efficiency. The Gestapo was never subtle in its methods and its field agents were not always intelligent, though of course the system threw up evil geniuses in the upper ranks like Reinhard Heydrich and Walter Schellenberg. They relied on a system of informers and on denunciation, not detection, to make their arrests. They tapped telephones and infiltrated suspect groups as fifth columnists and
agents
provocateurs
. Once arrested, a victim might well have information tortured out of him — increasingly so as the regime progressed — or he might be thrown into a concentration camp for a few years. Dachau was opened as early as March 1933 for political undesirables.

Those arrested in the early days by the regular courts might find themselves acquitted or sent to an ordinary prison for a short term, only to be picked up by the Gestapo on their release and summarily ‘disappeared’ into the camps. One lawyer was arrested because his name — he was located by the Gestapo through the expedient of looking him up in the telephone book — was the same as that given to the man they were really after in a recently published
roman
-
à
-
clef
.

Another example of early Gestapo methods, which borders on black farce (as do many matters in the history of the Third Reich), is given by Hans Bernd Gisevius, the civil servant who joined the Gestapo as a lawyer as part of his normal career structure, but who became one of the earliest and most dedicated members of the Resistance. It deals with the fate of a petty criminal, Rall, who was implicated in the murder of the notorious early Nazi, Horst Wessel, himself a pimp and small-time crook, who was elevated to the Nazi pantheon by Goebbels after his death:

After it [the hearing] was over, the prisoner was taken out of the police lock-up by night, stripped of all his clothes except his shirt, and driven out of the city. The car stopped at what seemed to be a favourable spot. The rest of the story was eloquently told to me by one of the murderers, a man named Reineking, who later ended in a concentration camp for knowing too much and talking too loosely. Near a small forest they saw an open field, and nearby there was a bench. They forced Rall to sit down on this bench, and then they choked him to death. According to Reineking’s story, it took ages before their victim died; at any rate, the murderers felt that each minute was an hour.

Then they left the body sitting on the bench and set about digging a grave in the field. But imagine their horror when they suddenly heard a noise, turned around, and saw their ‘corpse’ running away. The sight of this dead man racing along in the bright moonlight, his shirt fluttering behind him, was terrifying even to these hard-boiled SA [sic — the two men have previously been referred to as Gestapo] killers.

But the murderers’ dread that they would be discovered out-weighed their terror. They rushed after the corpse, and this time really choked him to death. Then they hastily buried him. We can easily believe Reineking when he reported that he and his accomplice were very uneasy when they were called to account about the matter by the following noon.

There are certain impressions one never forgets. This description of Rall’s murder is one of those for me. Although, in later days, I heard thousands of more horrible tales, this ghostly scene repeatedly rises before my eyes: the automobile roaring through the countryside, the moonlit night, the man in the shirt...the ghastliness of the whole story is so vivid that I feel it a chronicler’s duty to recount it...’
[8]

The SA barely bothered to arrest people, though they had their own system of barracks and semi-official prisons, where brutal torture of opponents took place, usually Communists and other left-wingers in the very early days. One infamous incident occurred in the Silesian village of Potempa in August 1932. Konrad Pietzuch was a Communist sympathiser, and when five of his workmates who were members of the SA took exception to this, they kicked him to death in front of his mother. The perpetrators were variously sentenced to death and to life imprisonment, but Hitler sent them a personal telegram expressing his solidarity with them, and the Nazi Party newspaper, the
Volkischer
Beobachter
, echoed his support. These were violent times, but this endorsement of lawlessness and the callous murder of a political opponent opened the eyes of some Germans at least to what they might expect if the Nazis came to power. Unfortunately Hitler’s early success brought him popular support which never absolutely deserted him; and on the other hand the various elements of the Resistance could never show a united front. In the case of the Army, which had the only real means of toppling the regime, the number of people recruited to the conspiracy had to remain relatively small for reasons of security. Within the Army, too, there was disunity, and very few generals with real executive power could be persuaded to join the Resistance. Nevertheless, given the frankness with which Army conspirators made approaches to their colleagues, there was remarkably little betrayal.

Hitler never wholly liked or trusted the Army. To him the generals were a bunch of monocled snobs who embodied old Prussian values and traditions, which he, coming from a lower-middle-class Austrian background, feared, resented and failed to understand. Hitler himself was an inverted snob of the worst kind, and it is central to his character that he hated what he longed to be part of, but which rejected him, from art school to German high society, and consequently wished to destroy it. He surrounded himself with kindred spirits — all the leading Nazis were, in their way, malcontents from petty bourgeois or lower-middle-class backgrounds — backgrounds in which resentment and prejudice flourished in those days like maggots in an apple. Only a small percentage of German aristocrats joined the SS or the SA — a notable and prominent example being the old Kaiser’s fourth son, August-Wilhelm.