An Honourable Defeat (3 page)

Nazis disliked universities (which, curiously, supported the Party on the whole), intellectuals, the Church — both Evangelical and Roman Catholic; indeed the long-term plan was to de-Christianise Germany after the ‘final victory’ — and the old ruling class. The key word for Hitler was
Gleichschaltung
— one of many German words that took on a special significance in Nazi-speak.
Gleichschaltung
meant the conformity and subservience of everything to the Party line. There was to be no law but Hitler, and ultimately no god but Hitler. The identities of the country and the Führer were to be fused. This led to reckless iconoclasm, part of the reason for which may be sought in the relative youth of the Nazis. In 1933, Hitler celebrated his forty-fourth birthday, but Göring was forty, and Goebbels only thirty-six. Himmler was born in 1900, and Heydrich in 1904. By the time war broke out in 1939, the young soldiers going to fight had reached maturity knowing only Nazi rule. The police state was the norm.

Hitler was Chancellor, but the National Socialist Party did not hold a majority of Cabinet posts. The National Conservatives, who had helped Hitler to power, thus thought they could direct this ‘new broom’ with which they hoped to sweep away the debris of the Weimar Republic (though still acting constitutionally). Their plans to replace it varied — ranging from, in its most liberal aspect, a restored but constitutional monarchy, through benign oligarchy, to military dictatorship. At the back of their minds was the old German ideal of the father figure and leader — Bismarck, Wilhelm I, even the deposed Kaiser. President Hindenburg, a link with Imperial Germany, filled the role; but he was old, and gave no leadership any more. And Hitler, with all the warped romanticism that coloured his view of ‘Germania’, the old empire of the German-speaking peoples which he saw as the cradle of civilisation and the natural source of world leadership, aspired to the part. With far less excuse than the Kaiser, he did not perceive that power had passed from Central Europe, from Berlin, London and Paris, to Washington and Moscow. He was an anachronism, a nineteenth-century throwback disastrously active out of his time.

But he was still — just — Adolphe Légalité. Though fierce enemies, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists held a total percentage of the vote which outstripped that of the National Socialists. The gap had narrowed steadily since 1930, but in the elections of November 1932 the Nazis had dropped 4 per cent. They had only 33.1 per cent of the vote when Hitler became Chancellor, against the Communists’ 16.9 per cent and the SPD’s 20.4 per cent. Despite its smaller showing, the Communist Party was far more vociferous than the SPD, which was largely discredited as the leading spirit behind the Weimar Republic, and in such volatile times, with unemployment spiralling and the economy in chaos, the people’s support was polarising. It was one of the triumphs of the Nazi Party, whose full name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, that it managed to capture the imagination, the hopes and the loyalty of the masses; though it never had a clear majority of the vote, despite hugely energetic electioneering and heavy funding from industry.

Hitler badly needed to hang on to the power he had gained, to crush the Communists and to make his power absolute. Already the SA was employing brutal terror tactics — in the face of a supine (when not actively sympathetic) police force and legal system
[9]
— and coercing those who disagreed with the Nazi government to toe the line. The Social Democrats continued to delude themselves that Hitler could be combated by legal means, but the Communists, who bore the brunt of the SA’s attack, saw early on which way the wind was blowing, though they were hampered in their reactions by having to obey directives from Moscow. In any case they were shortly to be outlawed. The way Hitler chose to do this was both drastic and simple.

On the night of 27 February 1933 the Reichstag — the German parliament building — burnt down. The fire was started deliberately, and it was patently the work of the Nazis themselves, but a scapegoat was found in the shape of a young Dutch Communist drifter called Marinus van der Lubbe. As it was clear that a fire of such size could not have been planned and carried out by one man alone, four others were implicated: Ernst Torgler, the Communist Party’s parliamentary leader, and three Bulgarian Communist emigrés, Vassil Taneff, Blagoy Poppoff and Georgi Dimitroff.
[10]
It was put about that van der Lubbe was simple-minded, but the apathy and lethargy he displayed at the show trial in September of the same year were more likely to have been induced by drugs and beatings. Of the other defendants, Torgler proved to be a man of straw. He was acquitted, and later became a Nazi henchman. Dimitroff was the only one of the Bulgarians who could speak German, and as he was able to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that he had been in Munich at the time of the fire-setting, he used the trial as a soap-box, despite the efforts of the presiding judge to gag him. The future Bulgarian leader was even able to make a fool of Göring in court, goading him into making wild statements about Russia’s inability to pay her debts — statements for which the humiliated Prussian Interior Minister (as he then was) was obliged to apologise in the press the following day. Nevertheless, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a young officer and lawyer who became a leading figure in the military Resistance and survived by a miracle, remembers witnessing Göring slapping his thigh and laughing with triumph as he told Hitler of the success of the Reichstag fire.
[11]

A parade of witnesses was produced and, through a new law specially introduced and having retroactive effect, van der Lubbe — the only one of the five to be convicted — was condemned to death on 23 December 1933 and executed immediately after Christmas.

But there was another victim of the Nazi cover-up. Walter Gempp, head of the Berlin Fire Department, refused to prevaricate. He stated publicly that the Fire Brigade had arrived in good time, that they had encountered SA men at the scene, and furthermore that Göring had expressly forbidden Gempp from giving the fire the highest level of priority and from calling in all available fire engines. He also stated that after the fire enough incendiary material was found in undamaged rooms within the Reichstag to fill a lorry, suggesting a degree of organisation which the Communists would not have had the means to set up. As a result, Gempp was dismissed from his post. At that time, the Nazis had not yet muzzled the press. A major Berlin liberal newspaper, the
Vossische
Zeitung
, reported his sacking on 25 March 1933 in the following terms: ‘We are in ignorance of the circumstances under which the State Commissar [Göring] has found it necessary to give notice to the respected head of the Berlin Fire Department, who has been in the service of the city for twenty-seven years. We can however state that Gempp, who is in his fifty-fifth year, has made the Fire Brigade into the protector of the city’s population. Many thousands of foreigners have visited our city to study and envy the firefighting techniques Gempp has developed.’

Walter Gempp was arrested in 1937 and found strangled in his cell on 2 May 1939. He was among the first to pay the price of personal integrity, and one of tens of thousands of good men and women whose service was of value to Germany to be liquidated because they spoke out.

The Reichstag fire enabled Hitler to conjure up the bogeyman of Foreign Bolshevism at Work in the Fatherland. As was his habit, he moved quickly. The following day an Emergency Measure was enacted in the interests of State and Public Security, forbidding rallies and marches by the Communist and Social Democratic Parties. By this action the Nazis clearly hoped to stifle the opposition expected at the national elections due to take place on 5 March. Yet, despite the Emergency Measure, despite the continuing enmity between the Communists and the Social Democrats, and despite further intimidation of opponents by the SA, the election results (the last a united Germany was to see for nearly sixty years) were 18.3 per cent to the Social Democrats, 12.1 per cent to the Communists, and 43.9 per cent ‘to the National Socialists. The Nazis could not have been very confident of success, for Fabian von Schlabrendorff learnt of confidential plans to falsify the polls if necessary.
[12]
Ninety per cent of the electorate turned out to vote, but Hitler was not going to be dislodged now. His first move to consolidate his position was to woo the Army. In doing so he showed a cynical, contemptuous, but accurate, knowledge of what can only be called his victim. Very few of the High Command were not taken in.

The new parliament was inaugurated on 21 March at a ceremony in Potsdam. Potsdam, a little town just to the south-west of Berlin, was the heart of Old Prussia, with its long military, tradition and its connection with Frederick the Great, the enlightened eighteenth-century monarch affectionately known as ‘Old Fritz’ who is the father of modern Germany and its greatest hero. The Garrison Church at Potsdam is the
sanctum
sanctorum
of these associations, and it was here, once again modestly garbed in a morning coat, that Hitler paid court to the Army. The ceremony was the first and last of the Third Reich to be presided over by a Christian priest, and at it the Chancellor — still officially the twenty-first Chancellor of the Weimar Republic — strove to identify National Socialism with the Prussian tradition, and to present himself as the true heir of Frederick. President Hindenburg, resplendent in his uniform, was present to add the right touch of gravitas to the occasion. A symbolic empty chair was placed. for Kaiser Wilhelm II.

It was a highly successful
coup
de
théâtre
, and though Hitler’s physical appearance cuts a ridiculous figure to us today, we should not forget that the toothbrush moustache and the famous forelock were not stock images then, nor that he clearly had great personal charisma, and the ability to instil fear and respect in those around him. It is also worth remembering that, although he had an uncontrollable temper, Hitler was not the carpet-chewing maniac sometimes presented to us. The reactions of Germans to their new rulers were crucial. There were those who were active supporters of Nazism; there was a very small number who actively opposed the regime; but the vast majority simply accepted the status quo. The most popular way of letting off steam against the regime was the joke; Goebbels even sanctioned certain cabarets critical of National Socialism until the mid-thirties — though some of the most famous comics ended up in the concentration camps. Christabel Bielenberg, an Englishwoman married to a German with strong Resistance contacts, who lived in Germany throughout the Third Reich, remembers one such joke:

The story goes that at Hitler’s birth three good fairies came to give him their good wishes, and the first wished for him that every German should be honest, the second that every German should be intelligent, and the third that every German should be a National Socialist. An uplifting thought. But then came the bad fairy, and she stipulated that every German could only possess two of those attributes. She left the Führer then with intelligent Nazis who were not honest, honest Nazis who had no brains, and intelligent, honest citizens who were not Nazis. A funny little story, perhaps, but one not too far from the truth; for it seemed to me that those three categories of Germans did indeed live and work together side by side, unable, because of the nature of the regime, to maintain more than the most superficial contact with each other.
[13]

Two days after Potsdam, at a session of parliament held in the Kroll Opera House, which was standing in for the damaged Reichstag, Hitler struck his first serious official blow against democratic freedom. The Communists had been banned soon after the elections of 5 March, and could do nothing to oppose it. The opera house was filled with SS and SA men, the swastika flag — at that time only the Party flag, not yet the National flag — dominated the auditorium. The atmosphere was that of a Nazi mass meeting, not a parliamentary session. The subject under debate was the Enabling Act, which, if passed, would give Hitler complete power in the question of making laws. He was still within the law — just. Rule by decree was permissible under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution in times of national emergency and for a limited number of years. In fact, the Nazi government even bothered to renew the Enabling Act twice during its lifetime, although effectively, once passed, it had served its purpose and Hitler treated its true legal sense with as little respect as he treated anything which had served its purpose. Only seven laws were passed by the Reichstag during the twelve years of the Third Reich. In 1933 alone under the Enabling Act, Hitler issued 218 decrees. No one objected. Franz Gartner, the Minister of Justice, and not himself a Party member, expressed satisfaction when Göring stated that ‘justice and the will of the Führer are one and the same thing’. The
Juridical
Review
published in an editorial the view that ‘the Führer cannot work against the law, for he is the supreme lawgiver...’ Between 1933 and 1939 the ordinary courts sentenced 225,000 people to a total of 600,000 years’ imprisonment for political offences. Between 1933 and 1945 three million Germans were held at one time or another in prison or in the concentration camps on political grounds, or for active Resistance.
[14]
Further comment is superfluous.

Of the other parties still with a notional say in the Reichstag, only the Social Democrats raised their voice against the Enabling Act. Loudly supported by his followers, and just as loudly shouted down by the Nazis, the stocky moustachioed figure of Otto Wels, the SPD leader, spoke strongly and eloquently:

No Enabling Act gives you the power to destroy ideas which are invincible and everlasting. You yourselves [the Nazis] have demonstrated your recognition of the principles of Socialism...Social Democracy will not be beaten by persecution, but draw new strength from it. We greet those of our colleagues who have already been persecuted and oppressed. We salute our friends in the Reich. Your steadfastness and loyalty deserve our admiration. Your courage and your unshakeable confidence [National Socialist laughter; Social Democrat cheers] guarantee a brighter future.