The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (41 page)

The date chosen for the ceremonial opening of the first Reichstag of the Third Reich, March 21, was significant too, for it fell on the anniversary of the day on which Bismarck had opened the first Reichstag of the Second Reich in 1871. As the old field marshals, generals and admirals from imperial times gathered in their resplendent uniforms in the Garrison Church, led by the former Crown Prince and Field Marshal von Mackensen in the imposing dress and headgear of the Death’s-Head Hussars, the shades of Frederick the Great and the Iron Chancellor hovered over the assembly.

Hindenburg was visibly moved, and at one point in the ceremony Goebbels, who was staging the performance and directing the broadcasting of it to the nation, observed—and noted in his diary—that the old Field Marshal had tears in his eyes. Flanked by Hitler, who appeared ill at ease in his formal cutaway morning coat, the President, attired in field-gray uniform with the grand cordon of the Black Eagle, and carrying a spiked helmet in one hand and his marshal’s baton in the other, had marched slowly down the aisle, paused to salute the empty seat of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the imperial gallery, and then in front of the altar had read a brief speech giving his blessings to the new Hitler government.

   Hitler’s reply was shrewdly designed to play on the sympathies and enlist the confidence of the Old Order so glitteringly represented.

   And then, turning to Hindenburg, who sat stiffly in his chair a few feet in front of him:

Hitler, with a show of deep humility toward the President he intended to rob of his political power before the week was up, stepped down, bowed low to Hindenburg and gripped his hand. There in the flashing lights of camera bulbs and amid the clicking of movie cameras, which Goebbels had placed along with microphones at strategic spots, was recorded for the nation and the world to see, and to hear described, the solemn handclasp of the German Field Marshal and the Austrian corporal uniting the new Germany with the old.

“After the dazzling pledge made by Hitler at Potsdam,” the French ambassador, who was present at the scene, later wrote, “how could such men—Hindenburg and his friends, the
Junkers
and monarchist barons,
Hugenberg
and his German Nationalists, the officers of the Reichswehr—how could they fail to dismiss the apprehension with which they had begun to view the excesses and abuses of his party? Could they now hesitate to grant him their entire confidence, to meet all his requests, to concede the full powers he claimed?”
¹²

The answer was given two days later, on March 23, in the
Kroll Opera House
in Berlin, where the Reichstag convened. Before the house was the so-called Enabling Act—the “Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich (
Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich
),” as it was officially called. Its five brief paragraphs took the power of legislation, including control of the Reich budget, approval of treaties with foreign states and the initiating of constitutional amendments, away from Parliament and handed it over to the Reich cabinet for a period of four years. Moreover, the act stipulated that the laws enacted by the cabinet were to be drafted by the Chancellor and “might deviate from the constitution.” No laws were to “affect the position of the Reichstag”—surely the cruelest joke of all—and the powers of the President remained “undisturbed.”
¹³

Hitler reiterated these last two points in a speech of unexpected restraint to the deputies assembled in the ornate opera house, which had long specialized in the lighter operatic works and whose aisles were now lined with brown-shirted storm troopers, whose scarred bully faces indicated that no nonsense would be tolerated from the representatives of the people.

The fiery Nazi leader sounded quite moderate and almost modest; it was too early in the life of the Third Reich for even the opposition members to know full well the value of Hitler’s promises. Yet one of them, Otto Wells, leader of the Social Democrats, a dozen of whose deputies had
been “detained” by the police, rose—amid the roar of the storm troopers outside yelling, “Full powers, or else!”—to defy the would-be dictator. Speaking quietly and with great dignity, Wells declared that the government might strip the Socialists of their power but it could never strip them of their honor.

   Furious, Hitler jumped to his feet, and now the assembly received a real taste of the man.

   The Social Democrats, who bore a heavy responsibility for the weakening of the Republic, would at least stick to their principles and go down—this one time—defiantly. But not the
Center Party
, which once had successfully defied the Iron Chancellor in the Kulturkampf.
Monsignor Kaas
, the party leader, had demanded a written promise from Hitler that he would respect the President’s power of veto. But though promised before the voting, it was never given. Nevertheless the Center leader rose to announce that his party would vote for the bill. Bruening remained silent. The vote was soon taken: 441 for, and 84 (all Social Democrats) against. The Nazi deputies sprang to their feet shouting and stamping deliriously and then, joined by the storm troopers, burst into the
Horst Wessel song
, which soon would take its place alongside “Deutschland ueber Alles” as one of the two national anthems:

Thus was parliamentary democracy finally interred in Germany. Except for the arrests of the Communists and some of the Social Democratic deputies, it was all done quite legally, though accompanied by terror. Parliament had turned over its constitutional authority to Hitler and thereby committed suicide, though its body lingered on in an embalmed state to the very end of the Third Reich, serving infrequently as a sounding board for some of Hitler’s thunderous pronunciamentos, its members henceforth hand-picked by the Nazi Party, for there were to be no more real elections. It was this Enabling Act alone which formed the legal basis for Hitler’s dictatorship. From March 23, 1933, on, Hitler was the
dictator of the Reich, freed of any restraint by Parliament or, for all practical purposes, by the weary old President. To be sure, much remained to be done to bring the entire nation and all its institutions completely under the Nazi heel, though, as we shall see, this also was accomplished with breathless speed and with crudeness, trickery and brutality.

“The street gangs,” in the words of Alan Bullock, “had seized control of the resources of a great modern State, the gutter had come to power.” But—as Hitler never ceased to boast—“legally,” by an overwhelming vote of Parliament. The Germans had no one to blame but themselves.

   One by one, Germany’s most powerful institutions now began to surrender to Hitler and to pass quietly, unprotestingly out of existence.

The states, which had stubbornly maintained their separate powers throughout German history, were the first to fall. On the evening of March 9, two weeks before the passage of the Enabling Act, General von Epp, on orders from Hitler and Frick and with the help of a few storm troopers, turned out the government of Bavaria and set up a Nazi regime. Within a week Reich Commissars were appointed to take over in the other states, with the exception of Prussia, where Goering was already firmly in the saddle. On March 31, Hitler and Frick, using the Enabling Act for the first time, promulgated a law dissolving the diets of all states except Prussia and ordering them reconstituted on the basis of the votes cast in the last Reichstag election. Communist seats were not to be filled. But this solution lasted only a week. The Chancellor, working at feverish haste, issued a new law on April 7, appointing
Reich Governors
(
Reichs-staathaelter
) in all the states and empowering them to appoint and remove local governments, dissolve the diets, and appoint and dismiss state officials and judges. Each of the new governors was a Nazi and they were “required” to carry out “the general policy laid down by the Reich Chancellor.”

Thus, within a fortnight of receiving full powers from the Reichstag, Hitler had achieved what Bismarck, Wilhelm II and the Weimar Republic had never dared to attempt: he had abolished the separate powers of the historic states and made them subject to the central authority of the Reich, which was in his hands. He had, for the first time in German history, really unified the Reich by destroying its age-old federal character. On January 30, 1934, the first anniversary of his becoming Chancellor, Hitler would formally complete the task by means of a
Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich
. “Popular assemblies” of the states were abolished, the sovereign powers of the states were transferred to the Reich, all state governments were placed under the Reich government and the state governors put under the administration of the Reich Minister of the Interior.
¹⁴
As this Minister, Frick, explained it, “The state governments from now on are merely administrative bodies of the Reich.”

The preamble to the law of January 30, 1934, proclaimed that it was “promulgated with the unanimous vote of the Reichstag.” This was true,
for by this time all the political parties of Germany except the Nazis had been quickly eliminated.

It cannot be said that they went down fighting. On May 19, 1933, the Social Democrats—those who were not in jail or in exile—voted in the Reichstag without a dissenting voice to approve Hitler’s foreign policy. Nine days before, Goering’s police had seized the party’s buildings and newspapers and confiscated its property. Nevertheless, the Socialists still tried to appease Hitler. They denounced their comrades abroad who were attacking the Fuehrer. On June 19 they elected a new party committee, but three days later Frick put an end to their attempts to compromise by dissolving the Social Democratic Party as “subversive and inimical to the State.” Paul Lobe, the surviving leader, and several of his party members in the Reichstag were arrested. The Communists, of course, had already been suppressed.

This left the middle-class parties, but not for long. The Catholic
Bavarian People’s Party
, whose government had been kicked out of office by the Nazi coup on March 9, announced its own dissolution on July 4, and its ally, the
Center Party
, which had defied Bismarck so strenuously and been a bulwark of the Republic, followed suit the next day, leaving Germany for the first time in the modern era without a Catholic political party—a fact which did not discourage the
Vatican
from signing a concordat with Hitler’s government a fortnight later. Stresemann’s old party, the People’s Party, committed hara-kiri on the Fourth of July; the Democrats (
Staatspartei
) had already done so a week before.

And what of Hitler’s partner in government, the German National Party, without whose support the former Austrian corporal could never have come legally to power? Despite its closeness to Hindenburg, the Army, the
Junkers
and big business and the debt owed to it by Hitler, it went the way of all other parties and with the same meekness. On June 21 the police and the storm troopers took over its offices throughout the country, and on June 29
Hugenberg
, the bristling party leader, who had helped boost Hitler into the Chancellery but six months before, resigned from the government and his aides “voluntarily” dissolved the party.

The Nazi Party alone remained, and on July 14 a law decreed:

The one-party totalitarian State had been achieved with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance, and within four months after the Reichstag had abdicated its democratic responsibilities.

The free
trade unions
, which, as we have seen, once had crushed the
fascist
Kapp putsch
by the simple means of declaring a general strike, were disposed of as easily as the political parties and the states—though not until an elaborate piece, of trickery had been practiced on them. For half a century May Day had been the traditional day of celebration for the German—and European—worker. To lull the workers and their leaders before it struck, the Nazi government proclaimed May Day, 1933, as a national holiday, officially named it the “Day of National Labor” and prepared to celebrate it as it had never been celebrated before. The trade-union leaders were taken in by this surprising display of friendliness toward the working class by the Nazis and enthusiastically co-operated with the government and the party in making the day a success. Labor leaders were flown to Berlin from all parts of Germany, thousands of banners were unfurled acclaiming the Nazi regime’s solidarity with the worker, and out at
Tempelhof Field
Goebbels prepared to stage the greatest mass demonstration Germany had ever seen. Before the massive rally, Hitler himself received the workers’ delegates, declaring, “You will see how untrue and unjust is the statement that the revolution is directed against the German workers. On the contrary.” Later in his speech to more than 100,000 workers at the airfield Hitler pronounced the motto, “Honor work and respect the worker!” and promised that May Day would be celebrated in honor of German labor “throughout the centuries.”