Search results for the tag, "Nazis"
May 14th, 2004
Hitler’s foreign policy was just that—Hitler’s foreign policy. The emphasis on structural determinants is an intellectual game played by scholars who deny the obvious in a quest for novelty. Discuss.
Was Hitler an ideologue or an opportunist? Did certain well-defined, coherent goals unwaveringly guide his policies, or did he act purely pragmatically to exploit any opportunity to enhance his own hegemony?
On one hand, H.R. Trevor-Roper argues that by 1923 at the latest, Hitler acted and thought “with absolute clarity and logic.” This “program” thesis focuses on Hitler’s insistence that Germany could secure its future neither by economic development nor by overseas colonization, but only by the conquest of living space (Lebensraum) in Eastern Europe. Having originally redacted this view in Mein Kampf, Hitler elaborated two years later in his so-called Zweites Buch, and repeated his explicit aims continuously in private.
On the other hand, A.J.P. Taylor maintains that “Hitler did not make plans—for world conquest or for anything else. He assumed that others would provide opportunities and he would seize them.” This “expansion-without-object” thesis distinguishes between Hitler’s actions and rhetoric, between his fantasies and fanaticism. In this view, as Alan Bullock writes, Hitler was “an astute and cynical politician who took advantage of the mistakes and illusions of others.”
The truth, as with most polarized debates, which assume a false dichotomy, is that Hitler was both an ideologue and an opportunist—“both fanatical and cynical; unyielding in his assertion of willpower and cunning in calculation; convinced of his role as a man of destiny and prepared to use all the actor’s arts in playing it.” He “combined consistency of aim with complete opportunism in method and tactics.”
Moreover, as he repeatedly avowed, politics was a Hobbesian struggle. Guile was a matter of principle. As he declared at the Hossbach conference, “The German question can be solved only way of force.”
In 1925, Hitler published the first volume of his autobiography. In 1929, the Germans Workers’ Party (the predecessor to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) published its manifesto. Whereas Taylor’s ilk interpret these documents as speculative ranting for propaganda—much like Hitler’s boasts about a “1,000-year Reich” and his denunciations of Bolsheviks with whom he later signed a nonaggression pact—Trevor-Roper’s ilk see them as blueprints for Lebensraum, world war, and the Holocaust. After all, given that Hitler’s success lay largely in his ability to let the world underestimate him, in retrospect we should take him at his word. Of course, deeds speak louder than words, and dictators always exaggerate; Saddam Hussein swore that he would make the First Gulf War the “mother of all battles.”
But the deeds soon came. In 1933, Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations and accelerated rearmament. After all, what good are unilateral policies without autonomy and what good are demands without armed forces to back them up? Fifteen months later, he denounced the Treaty of Versailles and reinstated conscription. A year later, he remilitarized the Rhineland, and six months after that (September 1936), he informed his top officials that the army needed to be operational and the economy ready for war within four years.
In light of what we now know, it is implausible that all this was just opportunism—armed diplomacy to threaten war and reap quick gains without waging war. To be sure, Hitler was an improviser, whose flexibility allowed him to keep his options open; but he was clearly planning for something that would require great force.
Similarly, on November 5, 1937, Hitler met with his top military advisors in the chancellery to lay out, in case of his death, “his fundamental ideas” on Germany’s foreign policy. His adjutant, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, recorded the minutes in what historians call the Hossbach Memorandum. According to Hossbach, Hitler’s study of history led him to conclude that to be successful, an empire must both control significant territory and culturally assimilate the people outside its original borders.
The Hossbach Memorandum is the smoking gun. The way Hitler describes the various outcomes of the war evinces a scheme. And his resolve to solve Germany’s problem of space by 1943–1945 evinces a timetable. But, again, Hitler remained flexible; he was too shrewd a politician not to.
The exploitation of favorable situations, however, does not make one an opportunist. What makes one an opportunist is annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia in a manner different from what one laid down in the Hossbach conference. Anticipating that his threat of war would back down the British and French, Hitler merely acted on preexisting conditions and twisted them toward his ends. He had no fixed idea how events would unfold, only that they would. His policies were premeditated in principle, but practiced pragmatically. While adhering to an underlying set of ideas, he adjusted his approach as circumstances dictated and his execution as opportunities arose. In short, he had a vision, not a plan.
And yet there is the irrational attack against the Soviets, the counterproductive economic policies in the conquered East, and the unprecedented Holocaust. Here, ideology unequivocally—suicidally—trumps opportunism. William Shirer observes: “No comprehensive blueprint for the New Order was ever drawn up, but it is clear from the captured documents and from what took place that Hitler knew very well what he wanted it to be: a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people would be made the slaves of the German master race and whose ‘undesirable elements’—above all, the Jews, but also many Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them—would be exterminated.”
Indeed, more than an ideologue, or an opportunist, the New Order evinces Hitler to be a dreamer and a gambler. He dismissed those who disagreed with him, who tried to reason with him about the reality of defeat, of the practicality of surrender, of the necessity to exploit instead of exterminate. Surely, if Germany’s foreign policy were not Hitler’s foreign policy, in the early years, the Nazis would have stopped to smell the roses; in the middle years, they would have refused to take so many risks; and in the later years, they would have cut their losses.
Footnotes
[1] Huge R. Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk (London, 1953), pp. xvii, xxxv.
[2] As quoted in <http://stonebooks.com/archives/990615.shtml>. As quoted in A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War. As quoted in Howard J. Langer (ed.), World War II: An Encyclopedia of Quotations (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999).
[3] Alan Bullock, “Hitler and the Origins of the Second World War,” in Henry A. Turner Jr. (ed.), Nazism and the Third Reich (Franklin Watts: New York, 1972), p. 221.
[4] Alan Bullock, “Hitler and the Origins of the Second World War,” in Henry A. Turner Jr. (ed.), Nazism and the Third Reich (Franklin Watts: New York, 1972), p. 222.
[5] As quoted in Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz, Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich (Lexington and Toronto: D.C. Heath: 1992), p. 345.
[6] As quoted in Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz, Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich (Lexington and Toronto: D.C. Heath: 1992), p. 341.
[7] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Simon and Schuster), p. 937.
Notes
* “So little did he take his own professions seriously that he actually concluded a [nonag-gression] pact with the Bolsheviks whom he had denounced.”[8]
* To what extent did fortuitous circumstances facilitate the expansion of the Reich?
* curves situations to his advantage rather then creating them; exploits situations he did not cultivate.
* Once his regime was consolidated, Hitler preferred to focus on foreign policy.
* Inconsistent in his approach, consistent in his aims.
* This evinces not a timetable, but a sense of urgency.
[8] Alan Bullock, “Hitler and the Origins of the Second World War,” in Henry A. Turner Jr. (ed.), Nazism and the Third Reich (Franklin Watts: New York, 1972), p. 222.
May 7th, 2004
In 1994, the American Political Science Association awarded Daniel Jonah Goldhagen an award for the best dissertation in comparative politics. Two years later, when Goldhagen expanded his Harvard dissertation into a 600-page book, the dominant reaction from scholars seemed to be, “What were Harvard and the A.P.S.A. thinking?” From book reviews to symposia to books about the book, critics reprehended Goldhagen’s tome as hyperbolic and racist pseudoscholarship, by the young son of a Harvard professor out to make a name for himself.
Indeed, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Knopf, 1996) polarizes much of a half-century of research and study on the extermination of European Jewry during the Nazi era. Goldhagen largely dismisses the conclusions of several generations of eminent scholars, and proclaims their interpretations “deficient” (8), “marred by a poor understanding and undertheorizing” (7), or marked by “grave error” (14).[1] As passionately as he disdains qualifications and subtleties, Goldhagen repeatedly asserts his originality. What, then, does he have to say, and does his work, as his publisher declares on the book’s front flap, “radically transform[] our understanding of the Holocaust and of Germany during the Nazi period”?
Hitler’s Willing Executioners rests on the conviction that a unique mindset peculiar to the German people, embedded in the very fabric of German society and culture, made possible the murder of six million Jews. Anti-Semitism, in this view, is the sole necessary and sufficient cause explaining the Holocaust, for the quality and capacity of ordinary Germans to become genocidal killers existed long before the Nazis seized power; Hitler and his gang had only to tickle a “disastrous potentiality” lying dormant within the German soul (15). In this way, the Jew as a foil and the enemy was always the glue amalgamating the Nazis’ contradictory and ambiguous ideology,
What made German anti-Semitism unique? Goldhagen argues that the Germans carried the Christian anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages continuously to the nineteenth century, mixed it with social Darwinism and the concept of “race” to make it appear “scientific,” and transmitted this national phobia to the twentieth century. Anti-Semitism thus defined what it meant to be German, and so Germans sought to amputate the Jewish presence from the fatherland. Such “eliminationist” anti-Semitism became the Germans’ “common sense” (77) and their normal way of thinking, what Goldhagen terms their “cognitive model” (46). To then mobilize people from eliminationist to “exterminationist” anti-Semitism was the logical, easy part. Inverting Voltaire’s observation, people who commit atrocities believe absurdities.
* * *
In any work of huge, bold, and categoric declarations, we should heed punctiliously the author’s evidence. Goldhagen catalogues his into 150 pages of endnotes and appendices (though, curiously, he omits a bibliography). Yet by his own admission, the evidence is scant and suspect. “Contemporary documents which illuminate in sufficient detail the perpetrators’ actions, or anything at all about their motivations, barely exist.” Regarding the Police Battalions, the work camps, and the death marches, “virtually no contemporary documents of any kind have survived. Therefore, the primary material for this study has been drawn mainly from materials amassed during the Federal Republic of Germany’s postwar legal investigations of Nazi crimes” (466). And yet these investigations are themselves problematic. The “testimony [of the perpetrators] is replete with omissions, half-truths, and lies.” With the exception of lies, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, as a whole, suffers from similar one-sidedness.
One byproduct of one-sidedness is overselectivity. Indeed, it appears that Hitler and the Nazi leadership were less confident in the ubiquity of eliminationist and exterminationist anti-Semitism in their country than Goldhagen is certain of it. For instance, in the decisive campaigns from 1930 to 1932, which brought the breakthrough of the N.S.D.A.P. as a party of the masses, anti-Semitic agitation proved to be counterproductive, and so the Nazis’ campaigns deliberately deemphasized it. To be sure, once in power the Nazis milked anti-Semitism; but anti-Semitism failed to sweep Hitler into office. Likewise, the Nazis’ propaganda machinery and surveillance organizations took many precautionary measures to keep the Holocaust secret and to monitor the people and their attitudes. Indeed, the Gespato doubted that the Germans would think “correctly” about the Final Solution.
For further overselectivity, consider Goldhagen’s brief discussion of the first nationally organized boycott of Jewish businesses and professional people, on April 1, 1933. After acknowledging the recollection of one person “that a few Germans defiantly expressed their solidarity with the beleaguered Jews,” Goldhagen ties the “general attitude of the public” to an incident also cited by a sole observer: a German woman, accompanied by two uninformed Nazis, returned goods she had purchased earlier to a chemist because she did not know he was a Jew (90). But there is another side to the story, which Goldhagen omits. The Nazis initially planned the boycott for a week, but for several reasons—including lack of public support—Hitler limited it to one day. For Goldhagen, however, the boycott expressed the collective will of the Volk.
Another byproduct of one-sidedness is overgeneralizing. Consider Police Battalion 101, one of Goldhagen’s three focuses. From N.S.D.A.P. and S.S. files and the Berlin Document Center, Goldhagen establishes the ages of 517 members, the occupations of 291, and the martial status of 96. The only other specific information he is able to glean is that 179 were party members and 21 were S.S. members. On the strength of these data, which he admits are “scanty, so only a partial portrait of the battalion can be drawn” (206), Goldhagen not only draws a profile of the “overall character” of the battalion, but also projects that profile onto the entire German populace (402).
But we know nothing of the educational backgrounds of these men, their religious affiliations, their income, their memberships in social clubs, their political views or any of a dozen other pieces of biological information requisite for a representative profile. Seemingly, Goldhagen agrees, observing that the weekly Regimental Orders covering health, recreational, social and other matters, from which he draws extended conclusions about the “fullness” of the lives the battalion members led, are “paltry in volume and variety in comparison to the reality of the stream of Germans’ daily actions while on duty or at leisure” (266). Apparently, however, these data about 550 Germans are not so paltry as to deter Goldhagen from equating them to the views, attitudes, motives, and biases of some 80 million of their countrymen.
Why such extravagant overgeneralizing? As an out-and-out intentionalist, Goldhagen argues that Germany was a “qualitatively unique” nation-state pursuing a special path (Sonderweg). As such, however else they differed in education, religion, class and politics, all Germans shared one characteristic—a worldview Goldhagen labels “eliminationist” anti-Semitism. Whereas in 1992, historian Christopher Browning acknowledged that unique pomp and circumstances facilitated the evil of Ordinary Men, Goldhagen prefers overwhelming dependence on a single cause, which facilitated the evil of Ordinary Germans. “Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews . . . induced ordinary Germans to kill . . . systematically and without pity” (9).
For instance, owing to the elderliness of its members, Police Battalion 101 was sparred massive indoctrination. But Goldhagen argues that because these reservists had so internalized eliminationist anti-Semitism, even though they were given ample opportunity to forgo killing, and to do so without punishment, they mass murdered with pride and “for pleasure” (451). And they tortured their victims—innocent children and adolescents, defenseless mothers and fathers, harmless grandmothers and grandfathers—beforehand, not as sadists, but as Germans.
* * *
Arguing against those who believe everything the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand said is Truth, social theorist Chris Matthew Sciabarra remarked: “Serious scholars use an intellectual scalpel, rather than an ideological bludgeon.”[2] As such, a theory of responsibility—especially one that seeks to criminate an entire nation-state—must be contextual; it must (1) probe all credible explanations, (2) draw distinctions among different types and degrees of guilt, and (3) compare itself to the most similar cases.
Goldhagen scorns all this as “moral alibis” (383), but we may use his words to question his theory. One explanation is that of coercion; “[p]ut a gun to anyone’s head . . . and he will shoot others to save himself” (11). A second explanation holds the Germans were just “following orders,” the “result of Hitler’s charisma,” or “because of a particularly German reverence for and propensity to obey authority” (12). Third, the perpetrators were subject to “tremendous social psychological pressure” (12). Fourth, the perpetrators were “petty bureaucrats, or soulless technocrats,” who were advancing their careers (12). Fifth, “because the tasks were so fragmented, [and] the perpetrators could not understand what the real nature of their action was; they could not comprehend that their small assignments were actually part of a global extermination program” (12).
To Goldhagen, these explanations absolve the perpetrators of accountability; they treat them “as if they had been people lacking a moral sense, lacking the ability to make decisions and take stances. They do not conceive of the actors as human agents, as people with wills, but as beings moved solely by external forces or by transhistorical and invariant psychological propensities” (13). No account of the Holocaust is therefore plausible without an appreciation that the vast majority of Germans believed killing Jews was just. Moreover, if the perpetrators did not act from ideology alone, why did they continue to murder the Jews when they could have exploited them for labor as it became clear Germany would lose the war? Absent significant evidence of moral outrage or public dissent, should we not hold the Germans guilty for the Holocaust?
While Goldhagen’s case for the affirmative is persuasive, I, and I suspect he, have never seen firsthand anyone executed on the whim of a police officer, and with the sanction of the state. I have always been free to express my political views, however radical and opposed to state policy they are. The only peer pressure my melting-pot country has exerted on me is to garb myself in name brands. I have also never lived hand-to-mouth. In short, my life has always been very safe—which makes me uncomfortable in describing a totalitarian Germany and then blaming its citizens for not behaving as though they lived in a democratic America. Why did the Volk not rise up? Because, as the essayist Clive James writes, “you had to be a hero to do so.”
Still, as is often the case, the truth lies somewhere between the extremes. That the executioners acted, in one way or another, out of volition is indisputable; only an individual can pull a trigger. That they “did not want to say ‘no’” (13) is disputable. After all, twelve years of an exceptionally sophisticated system of state-run propaganda dehumanizing der Jude and six years of world wartime brutalization is not circumstantial, but necessary to make men monsters. Material interests, as always, also had their role. As Hans Mommsen, Professor of Archaeological Science at the Rheini Friedrich William University Bonn, notes: “Many of the avowed executioners like Adolf Eichmann and Theodor Dannecker first became reckless and fanatical anti-Semites in the course of their careers in the S.S., which let them forget an unfavorable vocational situation in civil life.”
We also cannot disentangle the Holocaust from the extraordinarily complex historical conditions in which it evolved—what Professor Roland Wagner has called “a multivariate nexus of factors operative at a unique juncture of German history.” Wagner cites the following: Germany’s defeat in World War One, the punitiveness of the Versailles treaty; French postbellum ambitions for territorial acquisitions; Germany’s wounded national pride; the Great Depression and political collapse, social turmoil, and economic ruination of the middle class; polarization between the extreme Left and the Right; fear of rampant Communism looming from the East; the association of the Jews with Bolshevism in the popular mind; the vulnerability of a population to seek scapegoats during periods of rapid social change; and, yes, a widespread historical tradition of anti-Semitism throughout Europe. To marginalize the above in toto decontextualizes a crucible in which context is crucial.
Furthermore, by Goldhagen’s own account, eliminationist anti-Semitism included two courses. Whereas some Germans sought to kill the Jews (genocide), others were content with limiting or denying them rights (discrimination). Contrary to the Nazis’ conception of the Volksgemeinschaft, the German people were not a monolith; like any “ism,” anti-Semitism comes in varying intensities. But Goldhagen, as Clive James puts it, “wants all the grades of anti-Semitism, from the enthusiasm of nutty pamphleteers down to the mild distaste of the Kleinbürgertum at their dinner tables, to add up to just one thing: the eliminationist fervor that led to extermination as soon as it got its chance.”
We should similarly distinguish between “Germans,” people of German descent, and “the Germans,” a whole people. For not even a “vast majority” of Germans wholeheartedly, or even actively, supported the Holocaust. Yet by attacking such a caricature, Goldhagen commits the fallacies of undifferentially upholding the most iniquitous or vocal Germans, and then reifying them as the whole. In this way, he blames the Holocaust, not on the Nazi regime, but on the German national character. Given this focus, although Goldhagen never expressly uses the term, “Germans” well assumes a “collective-guilt” dimension.
But, in fact, while this is a book about “willing executioners,” if we ask the most immediate question—how many such people were there in the Third Reich?—Goldhagen alternates among “tens of thousands” (4, 24), “hundreds of thousands” (8, 166), “over 100,000” (167), “500,000 or more” (167), and the millions (167). Ultimately, just as the number of anti-Semitic Germans “cannot be ascertained” (75), the number of executioners is “unknown” (11).
Finally, Goldhagen asserts that it “strains credibility” to think “ordinary Danes or Italians” could have been Hitler’s willing executioners (408). This of course ignores that ordinary Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles and Ukrainians were just that—and sometimes much more, informing on concealed Jews and slaughtering them in lockstep with the Nazis. Goldhagen dismisses a comparative approach, both with other countries and with other genocides. This sore thumb of such a scholarly staple makes Hitler’s Willing Executioners methodologically unsound.
This is unfortunate because, overall, Goldhagen’s book is a welcome addition to Holocaust studies. Though it does not “radically transform[] our understanding,” it solidifies it. How? In response to the Allies’ refusal to check the Holocaust—to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz, to accept European Jews fleeing by boat—the Jews coined a motto: “Never forget.” Above all, Goldhagen deserves credit for keeping my generation, whose closest idea to genocide, horrible as it was, is 3,000 New Yorkers instantaneously killed in less than two hours, alive to the horror that Jews call the Shoah, and through his vivid descriptions for reminding us never to forget those years of infamy. The author also deserves credit for reinvigorating the intentionalist-functionalist debate, and for his courage in retackling and embracing the provocative former.
* * *
The history of Hitler, the historian Michael Stürmer wrote, is largely the history of how mankind has underestimated him. Hitler himself recognized this, when in 1939, before invading Poland, he told his commanding officers, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” [1] Indeed, studying the Third Reich has convinced me of the thin patina of civilization, that wretched circumstances can unleash “The horror! The horror!” in even the most civilized of human beings. To this end, Goldhagen has shown that murderous anti-Semitism was far more prevalent among the German people than we may want to believe. (His book would have fared far better with this thesis, instead of criminating what historian Alfred Kelly calls “the bad Germans.”) As the philosopher Richard Rorty has said, someday, someone will write the book exonerating Hitler. Someday, there might even be another Shoah, of Israelis. Most of us trust that neither will ever occur, but after reading Hitler’s Willing Executioners, I will not be altogether astounded if they do.
Footnotes
[1] Similarly, according to a tape captured by rebels, and later obtained by Human Rights Watch, Ali Hassan al-Majid, who led the Iraqi campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s, told members of Iraq’s ruling Baath Party: “I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!”
April 21st, 2004
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. He assumed that office constitutionally but not as a result of the democratically expressed choice of the German people. In fact, in the last national election before Hitler’s appointment, held in November 1932, the N.S.D.A.P.’s vote dropped by two million, a loss that reduced its seats in the Reichstag from 230 to 196. Two out of every three voters had cast their ballots for other parties in this last fully free election before the imposition of the Nazi dictatorship. Nor did Hitler’s appointment flow from normal parliamentary coalition politics. Instead, a backroom intrigue jobbed him into office, as a cabal of conspirators overcame the doubts of aged President Hinderburg. And yet, even the chancellorship did not satisfy this megalomaniacal dreamer—he was not yet dictator—and so in February 1933 the Nazis resolved that if the electorate would not come to them, they would go after it, Machiavellian style.
By a godsend, in late February 1933 there was in Berlin a feebleminded Dutch communist, whose passion for arson coincided with a Nazi conspiracy to burn the Reichstag building, Germany’s symbol, if not actual center, of democracy. Accordingly, Marinus van der Lubbe spent February 27 lurking around the Reichstag, before breaking in at night and, using his shirt as a torch, lighting small fires. Simultaneously, though unknown to van der Lubbe, Karl Ernest was leading a small detachment of S.A. troopers through an underground, central heating passage connecting the Reichstag President’s Palace to a cellar in the Reichstag. Two and a half minutes after van der Lubbe entered, the great hall was fiercely burning, the efforts not of a half-wit with only his shirt as tinder, but of considerable and scattered gasoline and self-igniting chemicals.
The “deep red glow”[1] caught the eyes of President Hindenburg and Vice Chancellor Papen, who were dining at an exclusive club around the corner from the Reichstag. Hitler was with the Nazis’ propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, dining en famille at the latter’s home, also in Berlin. All four rushed to the scene, where they met a hysterical Goering. “[T]his is a Communist crime against the new government,” Goering screamed. “We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up.”[2] Likewise, in his characteristic monomania, Hitler added that the government would “crush” the Social Democrats and the Reichsbanner with an “iron fist.”
Having then so assigned guilt—and after the Führer came to a decision, afterthoughts were tantamount to treason—Hitler met with Nazi leaders, and then with Goebbels repaired to the editorial offices of their party paper, the Völkischer Beobachter. Invoking as evidence propaganda pamphlets Goering’s police had seized days earlier from the Karl Liebknecht Haus, the Communist headquarters in Berlin, the Nazis wasted no time and announced that the Bolshevik terroristic revolution was imminent. Consequently, at a cabinet meeting the next morning, Hitler “explained that a merciless struggle against the K.P.D. was now urgent. The psychologically correct moment for the struggle had now come.”[3]
The term “psychologically correct” is apt. First, it meant exploiting memories of Communist uprisings during the Weimar republic, so to “throw millions of the middle class and the peasantry into a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for National Socialism at the elections a week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over.”[4] Second, the term meant prevailing, that evening, upon the half-senile Hinderburg to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State.” As with his previous appeals to the President, Hitler pitched his decree as a lesser evil than a military state of emergency.
Of course, the ensuing civil state of emergency was severely militant, as the Nazis almost immediately initiated a wave of terror that cowed thousands of their political rivals. Moreover, as a self-described “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence, endangering the state,” this so-called Reichstag Fire Decree suspended, effectively ending the seven sections of the Constitution that guaranteed individual and civil rights. In place of free speech and the rights of assembly and association, the decree authorized “violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, [and] orders for confiscations.” The decree also imposed capital punishment for armed and “serious disturbances of the peace,” and empowered the Reich government to commandeer the federal governments when “necessary.”
Consequently, the Nazis began to coordinate their party and the state. Signally reversing their own adherence to the Constitution and Germany’s venerable tradition of federalism, the decree effectively centralized the Reich government and put all its resources, most notably of Prussia, at the Nazis’ disposal. This Gleicschaltung thus capacitated S.A. violence, so that Goering could legally replace senior policemen with his own thugs. This gave Germans their first taste of Nazis using the Constitution for in-your-face coercion, so that S.A. troops could place Communist officials, Social Democrat and liberal leaders—even members of the Reichstag, who were legally immune from arrest—into “protective custody,” that is, into S.A. barracks. Combined with the Nazis’ corresponding, unprecedented propaganda campaign, the result, as William Shirer describes it, was that the German “street, bedecked with swastika flags, echoed to the tramp of the storm troopers.”[5]
Lost in the sound and fury was the courageous opposition of former Chancellor Brüning, who proclaimed that his Catholic Center Party would resist any overthrow of the Constitution and demanded an investigation of the suspicious Reichstag fire. The German electorate similarly remained skeptical, and in the promised election on March 5, they refused the Nazis a parliamentary majority, albeit by only six percent. Nonetheless, by voting eight percent for the Nationalists, the Germans gave the Nazis coalition control.
Thus flush with victory, Hitler now sought real dictatorial power, which meant dissolving parliament by transferring power from it to the Reich cabinet. For such change, originally to hold for four years, the Nazis needed to amend the Constitution, for which they needed the vote of two-thirds of the Reichstag. Again, their electoral strategy relied heavily on terror, this time supplemented by blackmail, lies about future concessions, and by simply excluding their opponents from parliament. In this way, Hitler secured crucial votes from the Catholic Center Party. Moreover, when the Enabling Act, otherwise known as the Law for the Removal of the Distress of People and Reich, came up for vote on March 23, Nazi storm troopers encircled the Reichstag, so that in order to enter the building, legislators had to pass through a ring of these raucous thugs, whose chants rang in their ears as they voted. The vote was a fait accompli: 441 for, and ninety-four (all Social Democrats) against. The Nazis were now a legal dictatorship, and Hitler Germany’s legal dictator.
Occurring a few days before Germany’s national elections of 1933, the Reichstag fire decree gave rise to rumors and trepidation. The public and even some of the conservatives distrusted the Nazis’ account. The foreign press blamed Goering, which seems most likely. It is difficult to ascertain whether Hitler was involved. On one hand it is unlikely that any Nazi—especially the intensely loyal Goering—acted without the Führer’s consent. Conversely, Hitler’s ever-alert radar in prejudging popular sentiment might have led him to cancel Goering’s cynically brilliant plot.
Whosever calculations they were, they were intensely political. After all, the fire department had restored calm the night of the fire, and the Nazis, using existing decrees, had already preempted a large-scale, planned revolt by proscribing K.P.D. newspapers, meetings and demonstrations. The calculations were also intensely effective. After all, no one died in the fire, the alleged arsonist was tried, convicted and decapitated, and given that the Nazis’ rise owed in large part to the middle-class fear of Communism, the smoke screen allowed them to expertly shape that fear into a campaign slogan. In sum, though some argue that the Reichstag Fire Decree constituted a quantitative, not a qualitative change, most agree that, by means similar to those of a coup d’etat, it represented the “Constitution of the Third Reich,” as Helmut Krausnick put it, and proved, as Karl Dietrich Bracher has shown, to be “fundamental to the stabilization” of the Nazi dictatorship.[6]
Foonotes
[1] “The Rise of Hitler: February 27, 1933: The Reichstag Burns,” History Place.
[2] As quoted in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Simon and Schuster), p. 192.
[3] As quoted in Hans Mommsen, “The Political Effects of the Reichstag Fire,” in Henry A. Turner Jr. (ed.), Nazism and the Third Reich (New York: Franklin Watts, 1972), p. 127.
[4] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Simon and Schuster), p. 194.
[5] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Simon and Schuster), p. 194.
[6] As quoted in Hans Mommsen, “The Political Effects of the Reichstag Fire,” in Henry A. Turner Jr. (ed.), Nazism and the Third Reich (New York: Franklin Watts, 1972), p. 128
February 27th, 2004
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis, never garnered more than 37 percent of the popular vote in a fair election, the last of which came in November 1932. How then, as Elie Wiesel asks, did Hitler, an “Austrian without title or position[,] manage to get himself [appointed] head of a German nation renowned for its civilizing mission?”[1] As one scholar explains, “The Nazis came to power legally, but they never played politics by the rules of a liberal parliamentary democracy.” Indeed, Hitler became chancellor not by adhering to the principles of the Weimar Republic, which never really took root in a country with little experience or interest in democracy, but through a series of backroom deals, intrigues, and betrayals, all of which entailed massive blunders and naïve miscalculations; via a procession of musical-chair coalitions, sudden governmental collapses, and continual new elections, most of which entailed the invocation of emergency dictatorial powers; and on the heels of his paramilitary, which from its inception had only one goal: power by whatever means necessary.
The first indications of Nazi politicking came in 1921, when other national socialist and volkisch parties sought to join forces with the Nazis to form a united front. Rather than share any power, Hitler resigned in protest. For his return, by now indispensable, he demanded “dictatorial powers,” which he received with only one contrary vote, thus effectively making the Nazi movement the Hitler movement. (It was never a “party,” in that its aims—to restore the German soul—transcended politics.)
In the same year, Hitler began to organize his own army, drawing recruits largely from unemployed former Free Corps veterans. The result was the brownshirted Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers), or the S.A. Trained to vent fury and sow terror, the Storm Troopers broke up meetings of opponents, administered beatings, provoked street fights, staged riots, mutilated bodies and kicked in skulls. Such tactics were so brutally effective that, by 1923, Hitler resolved to privilege arms over elections.
Thus, on November 8, 1923, the S.A. surrounded a Munich beer hall. Pushing forward to the platform, Hitler declared, “The National Revolution has begun!” At gunpoint, he forced the three officials of the Bavarian government into a backroom, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to have them join the putsch. Then, with the aid of General Erich Ludendorff, the new régime would win over the German army, proclaim a nationwide revolt and crush the democratic elements in Berlin. The plot, however, backfired, and ultimately Hitler found himself charged with high treason.
The trial, though it resulted in a sentence of five years, proved to be a turning point for the führer. With judges chosen because they sympathized with the Nazi program, the courtroom became Hitler’s bully pulpit. His jailers further accommodated him with a spacious private cell and a personal secretary, Rudolf Hess.
A few days before Christmas 1924, having served only nine months, Hitler re-emerged with new ideas about the means necessary for his old ends. The Nazis would now use the constitution to destroy the constitution, cloaking their shameless intimidation in legality. Thus, though banned from public speaking, Hitler feverishly reorganized his party. To remedy the failures of the ‘23 putsch, he formed in 1925, under Heinrich Himmler, a special elite corps to supplement the S.A., the Schutzstaffeln (Guard Squadrons), or S.S. Additionally, following the hierarchy of the Prussian military, he transformed the Nazis into a tightly controlled, highly disciplined shadow government, so that when their time came, this regime in waiting could slip into power.
It took five years, but on October 24, 1929, the New York stock market crashed and plunged the world into depression. Recalling the inflation of 1923, Germans were particularly desperate. In the face of mass indigence, the government appeared powerless. Parties in Reichstag splintered into uncompromising factions; so that to break the stalemate, President Hindenburg invoked Article 48 of the Constitution, thus giving himself emergency powers to rule by decree. When that failed, Hindenburg dissolved the Reichstag and called for new elections in September 1930. Hitler knew his opportunity had arrived, and the Nazis seized the moment, furiously and ambiguously adapting their master propaganda machine to local concerns.
Before the depression the Nazis had achieved only seven percent of the electorate, in 1924. Now, given the turmoil and despair that makes people vulnerable to radicalism, they captured 18 percent, making them Germany’s second largest party. Yet, knowing that it accrued to their advantage for conditions to worsen, the Nazis withheld their cooperation. While alleging to work within legal boundaries, they worked to undermine the parliamentary system and foment disorder. As obstructionists, Nazi delegates regularly disrupted proceedings with vulgar and rowdy behavior, if they didn’t boycott them. Then, although they instigated civil violence, the Nazis blamed the government for its inability to curb the lawlessness.[2] Meanwhile, they continued to campaign—uniquely, they had never stopped—so that in the run-off between Hitler and Hinderburg in April 1932, Hitler garnered 37 percent of the vote.
Thus a part of Germany’s largest party, the Storm Troopers, who now numbered 400,000 under Ernst Roehm, sprang into action—too much action as it happened for Chancellor Brüning, who banned the S.A. and S.S. shortly after the run-off. As it further happened, though, a scheming general, Kurt von Schleicher, offered to lift the ban if Hitler would support him in a new Reichstag coalition. Hitler agreed, and the Nazis went to work catcalling the “Hunger Chancellor,” who resigned on May 29. Schleicher then ushered in a puppet chancellor, Franz von Papen, who fulfilled Schleicher’s bargain with Hitler. But the two would only offer Hitler the vice chancellorship, which, echoing previous moves, he rebuffed in hope of the chancellorship.
Yet, as the loss of two million votes in the November elections affirmed, Nazi popularity was declining—though this didn’t stop groups of brown-shirts from stalking the streets, provoking violence and simply murdering rivals on an unprecedented scale. Indeed, the situation was so dire that Papen considered reverting to authoritarianism. When that failed, he resigned, and Hitler again demanded the chancellorship. Hinderburg instead appointed Schleicher.
To get even, Papen met sub rosa with Hitler to plot ousting Schleicher. They reached a pact whereby Hitler would become chancellor, Papen vice-chancellor. Conveniently, Schleicher resigned on January 23, though by this time, this Reichstag civil war had exhausted the 85-year-old Hinderburg, whose senility Hitler exploited to demand four additional cabinet posts. Hinderburg was unwilling, however, to appoint Hitler chancellor—until a rumor that in revenge Schleicher would attempt a coup and arrest Hinderburg so alarmed the president that he relented. Fhe former Field Marshall also thought he could control this “bohemian corporeal.”
Thus, on January 30, 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. It was the result, observes the historian Alan Bullock, “not of any irresistible revolutionary or national movement . . . nor even of a popular victory, but as part of a shoddy political deal with the ‘Old Gang’ whom he had been attacking for months . . . Hitler did not seize power; he was jobbed into office by a backstairs intrigue.”[3]
Once in office, Hitler wasted no time. He dissolved parliament and called for new elections. To the Prussian Ministry of the Interior he appointed Hermann Goering, who forthwith conferred on the Storm Troopers the power of police, with impunity. Another Hitler confidant, Joseph Goebbels, assumed the state-run media, via which he broadcast Nazi propaganda across the nation. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this reign of terror, the German people denied the Nazis a Reichstag majority. Of course, as Hitler had explained in 1930: “Parliament is for us not the goal, but the means to an end. We are not a parliamentary party out of conviction. . . . but out of compulsion and out of necessity.” Our goals “mean[s] the elimination of democracy.”[4]
And so, with ever-increasing aggression, blackmail and duplicitous promises, the Nazis began legally but undemocratically establishing the state apparatus of totalitarianism. Breaking with centuries of tradition, they ended the independence of local governments and centralized federal power. Armed S.A. and S.S. thugs cowed, replaced or killed the opposition. Finally, Hitler prevailed on the Reichstag to accept an act “for the removal of the distress of people and reich.” By sharing with Hitler the Reichstag’s prerogative to pass laws—especially laws that “deviate from the Constitution”—this so-called Enabling Act would render the parliament irrelevant. With its passage on March 23, 1933, German democracy effectively passed away. In its stead, Germans would swear loyalty to der Führer.
Footnotes
[1] Elie Wiesel, “Adolf Hitler,” in People of the Century: 100 Men and Women Who Shaped the Last 100 Years (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1999).
[2] Jackson J. Spielvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001), p. 60.
[3] Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), p. 144.
[4] As quoted in Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz, Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich (Lexington and Toronto: D.C. Heath: 1992), p. 104.
Notes
* The Nazis held out to the electorate something besides material support. They promised the Germans the satisfaction of a special kind of lust: the lust to see their enemies, foreign and domestic, torn into bloody pieces. In this emotionalist country, this kind of lust was the dominant emotion.
* In order to be loyal to the Fatherland, one needed to be disloyal to the republic.
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