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the weimar republic: origins and early years
It was clear in the summer of 1918, even to the most ardent militarists and nationalists, that Germany had lost the war. The attempted deflection of social tensions at home into imperialist adventures abroad had failed; and defeated Germany was to face an exacerbation, rather than resolution, of the social tensions which had fed into the origins of the war. During the war previous tendencies towards the concentration of capital had increased, with large cartels monopolising prices and markets and squeezing out small businesses and small traders: the lower middle classes were more threatened than before, the large capitalists stronger. Yet at the same time the strength of the organised working class had also increased. In the desire to avoid strikes and disruption of production in the economic mobilisation for total war, industry and government had made concessions to organised labour, with improvements in working conditions and the recognition of unions as legitimate representatives of labour. There had also been a certain politicisation of sections of the population, as women and young people were brought into areas of the labour force from which they had formerly been excluded, with a war-time labour shortage. Psychologically, people’s horizons and perceptions had been changed by war-time experiences in a variety of ways, whether through shell-shock and disorientation, with difficulties in adapting to and reentering civilian life, or whether through increased dependence on, and expectations of, the state, by virtue of state pensions or allowances.
There was increasing domestic unrest in Germany towards the end of the war. It was evident that things would have to change – not only because of American President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ indicating that domestic reforms in Germany would be necessary for negotiating a modified peace treaty, but also because of pressures from below – and because of the desire of the army to evade responsibility for a ‘dishonourable’ peace. By the end of September it appeared opportune to army leaders to hand over power to a civilian government which could then take the opprobrium of accepting defeat; the reforms of October were not simply a ‘revolution from above’, in that parliamentary parties had for some time, with lesser or greater degrees of energy, been pushing for reforms. In October 1918, Prince Max von Baden became chancellor, and constitutional reforms were introduced. These included reform of the suffrage (including abolition of the Prussian three-class voting system), ministerial responsibility to parliament, and the control of the armed forces by the civilian government and not the monarchy. In effect, Emperor William II consented to what amounted to a constitutional monarchy; but the one thing he refused to do – and which might have saved the monarchy as an institution – was to abdicate in favour of one of his sons. However, these reforms – which were intended largely as a holding operation pending a return to authoritarian government – were to be overtaken by more radical developments.
At the end of October, navy leaders ordered a last – suicidal – attack on the British to redeem German honour, and on 28 October the Wilhelmshaven fleet was ordered out. Not surprisingly, a majority of sailors decided that in this hour of German defeat they would rather salvage their own lives than German honour, and they mutinied. On 3 November, demonstrations in Kiel sparked off a more general mutiny. In the first days of November all over Germany, from the north right down to Kurt Eisner’s socialist government in Bavaria, there were revolutionary upheavals, and the setting up of ‘councils’ of soldiers, sailors and workers to replace existing local government. Berlin, too, was a centre of unrest, with shop stewards and members of the USPD debating whether there should be an armed uprising, a notion which was opposed by moderates in the SPD. By 9 November, it was clear that the emperor must abdicate. Prince Max von Baden’s government resigned and William II – who had already fled Berlin – left Germany for Holland.
In this revolutionary situation, with the collapse of government under pressure of military defeat, in an industrialised state with a large, politically organised working class, conditions were surely ripe for a classic Marxist revolution. Yet, in contradiction to Marxist theory, it was in relatively backward Tsarist Russia in 1917 that a communist revolution succeeded, whereas what developed in Germany in 1918–19 was a series of fudges and compromises, satisfying neither left nor right, and embodying a set of legacies that were to prove liabilities for Germany’s first attempt at democracy. These compromises were already symbolised in arrangements made in the first few days after 9 November. While apparently stabilising in the short term, they tended to paper over, rather than resolve, tensions which erupted all the more powerfully in the longer run. Furthermore, the so-called revolution of 1918 in effect amounted to little more than a political and constitutional revolution, from Empire to Republic, but it – crucially – failed to effect radical changes in the socioeconomic structure of Germany, nor did it reform key elites. Army, bureaucracy, judiciary, educational and religious establishments, retained their positions of power and influence – and used them to speak and act in the main against the new Republic.
On 9 November, Prince Max von Baden handed over power, in an act of apparent legitimacy and continuity, to SPD leader Friedrich Ebert as ‘Imperial chancellor’. Given the revolutionary tumults in Berlin and rumours of more radical action, Ebert’s colleague Scheidemann proclaimed a Republic. This Republic, the exact form of which was by no means clear as yet, faced very immediate problems and tasks: demobilising soldiers, signing an armistice, dealing with revolts and uprisings all over Germany, rebuilding the economy and ensuring an adequate food supply, and – in the context of all these disruptions – devising an acceptable new constitution for post-Imperial Germany. It was by no means an easy set of tasks, and retrospectively, historians have had little difficulty in identifying failures of nerve or vision on the part of those in a position to affect Germany’s future.
Two very crucial compromises were reached almost immediately. In the infamous ‘Ebert–Groener pact’, General Groener offered Ebert the support of the army if Ebert would adopt a moderate course and suppress the more radical council movements (Groener boasting that this successfully averted the threat of Bolshevik revolution in Germany); and as time went by, Ebert came more and more to rely on the powers of the military to suppress uprisings by force, rather than exploring and responding to the causes of social unrest. Secondly, in the so-called ‘Stinnes–Legien agreement’, the leader of the labour unions, Carl Legien, and the industrialist Hugo Stinnes concluded a bargain which consolidated the position of organised labour, including the introduction of an eight-hour day, and an employers’ agreement to stop supporting ‘yellow unions’ (or house unions, an employer’s stooge). The initial government itself was a compromise, with a ‘Council of People’s Representatives’ set up on 10 November consisting of three SPD and three USPD members. While this was subsequently given some legitimacy through confirmation by Berlin council delegates, a congress of council delegates from all over Germany in December saw the first serious splits between moderate and radical socialists. While the majority of the five hundred delegates supported the SPD and Ebert’s plans for elections to a National Constituent Assembly which would draft a new constitution for Germany, a minority supported the more radical views of the USPD, who criticised Ebert’s ‘government by procrastination’ which refused to undertake socioeconomic reform before constitutional change, or to reform the army. Ebert’s defence was that there was little point in ‘nationalising bankruptcy’, and that good relations with the army were essential for orderly demobilisation and reconstruction, both points which were queried at the time as well as later. In the event, the USPD finally broke with the SPD, leaving an all-SPD cabinet; and at the end of December 1918 the left-wing ‘Spartacist’ group, which like the USPD had increasing differences with the SPD, formed themselves into the new Communist Party of Germany, the KPD.
Unrest had by no means simply been quelled by the proclamation of a Republic. Renewed uprisings in Berlin in January 1919 were suppressed by army and Free Corps units (volunteer groups financed by industry and organised by the army), in the course of which radical leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered. This provoked bitter hostility and resentment among left-wing critics of the SPD. The split between moderate and radical socialists was to survive until the collapse of Weimar democracy, when communists viewed Social Democrats as a greater evil even than Nazis. All over Germany in the first half of 1919 it appeared as if the Social Democrats were relying on the forces of the old order to suppress initiatives in favour of the new. In Bavaria, after Kurt Eisner’s assassination, a second attempt at revolution, with the proclamation of a Soviet republic in Munich in April 1919, was brutally suppressed by Free Corps units in May, with over one thousand deaths. Political violence of all shades was rife, as demobilised soldiers failed to find new roles in civilian life and sought to continue the comradeship of the trenches in paramilitary groups, while right-wingers and left-wingers attempted to effect immediate influence on an uncertain course of political events. Others simply observed, bewildered and hoping for some form of stabilisation. Meanwhile, the process of devising a new constitution was underway. Elections on 19 January 1919 – in the wake of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin – gave the SPD only 38 per cent of the vote, necessitating a coalition government. On 6 February the National Constituent Assembly opened in Weimar. On 11 February Ebert was elected President, and on 13 February a cabinet under Scheidemann was formed from the ‘Weimar coalition’ parties of SPD, Catholic Centre, and the liberal DDP (German Democratic Party).
Plate 29. Barricades in Berlin, March 1919.
Plate 30. The Free Corps Werdenfels, in Munich to suppress revolutionary uprisings.
Map 9. The Versailles settlement, 1919
The Weimar Constitution, which took effect on 11 August 1919, appeared quite progressive. A President was to be elected by direct popular vote for a period of seven years, and, as a sort of ‘substitute emperor’ (Ersatzkaiser), the President had considerable powers. These included the right to appoint and dismiss chancellors, the right to dissolve parliament and call new elections, and the right to call national referenda. Ultimately the most notorious of the Weimar President’s powers was embodied in Article 48 of the constitution:
Plate 31. The Kapp Putsch. Soldiers march into Berlin, March 1920.
the right to rule by emergency decree. Other provisions included a voting system of proportional representation, with universal suffrage for all adult men and women, the latter receiving the vote for the first time. The cabinet was to be responsible to parliament. A considerable degree of autonomy continued to lie with individual state governments, in what remained a relatively decentralised state.
In the early summer of 1919 the harsh terms of the Versailles peace treaty were revealed. Scheidemann’s cabinet resigned and was succeeded by the Bauer cabinet, which sent a delegation to sign the Versailles Treaty on 28 June. Germany was to lose large areas of land: Alsace-Lorraine was to be returned to France, West Prussia, Upper Silesia and Posen were to go to the newly reconstructed Poland, Danzig was to become a free city under League of Nations supervision, with the ‘Polish Corridor’ separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Germany was deprived of colonies, and any union of Germany and Austria was forbidden. The army was limited to 100,000 men, and the left bank of the Rhine was to be demilitarised under Allied supervision, with Allied occupation to be phased out over a period of time. In the notorious ‘war guilt clause’ Germany was burdened with responsibility for the war. Reparations were as yet to be determined; when they were finally announced in the Paris conference of January 1921, they were to provoke as much indignation as the other provisions of the Versailles Treaty.
Undoubtedly it was a harsh set of peace terms, and the contrast with the settlement in the aftermath of the Second World War was, as we shall see, very marked. But even more was made of the Versailles Treaty by its critics than realities warranted. Already in August 1918 the myth of the ‘stab in the back’ had been propagated, asserting that domestic enemies (such as Jews and socialists) had brought down an army which was undefeated abroad but betrayed from within. This myth was inflated in the autumn of 1919 to become common currency in circles opposing the Republic. The years from 1919 to 1923 saw a series of attacks on the Republic and attempted putsches on the right, as well as continued strikes and revolutionary movements on the left, in the context of mounting economic problems. While right-wing extremists were generally treated leniently by a highly conservative judiciary, left-wingers were subjected to harsh sentences, including disproportionate use of the death penalty. In March 1920, Kappand Lu ̈ttwitz organised a march of Free Corps units on Berlin, and Ebert’s government was forced to flee to Stuttgart, since the army, under General von Seeckt, refused to fight the Free Corps soldiers. Nevertheless, at this time a general strike was sufficient to defeat the Kapp putsch. A more limited rightist coup brought to power a right-wing government, under Kahr, in Bavaria. In 1921 and again in 1923 communists unsuccessfully attempted insurrection in Saxony. There were also continued strikes, particularly in the Ruhr, in 1919 and 1920. Largely spontaneous demands for ‘nationalisation’ of the mines were not part of a coherent political programme, but rather for immediate economic improvements: control over improved working conditions and better wages. While the KPD and the USPD did not initiate these protests, they attempted to gain control of them; misjudging the mood of grass-roots workers, in the main they failed. More crucially, the SPD miscalculated badly, and, fearing what they now viewed as a ‘Bolshevist threat’ to the new Republic, overreacted and instead of responding to the causes of distress attempted to suppress the symptoms by force. While the regular army had been unwilling to fight against insurgent Free Corps units in the Kapp putsch, it was only too willing to cooperate with these against the ‘Red Army’ in the Ruhr and Rhine areas. Under the leadership of von Seeckt, the Army was effectively sustaining the pre-republican, Prussian tradition of being a ‘state within a state’. This ‘apolitical’ stance, refusing to support the Republic since to do so would be ‘political’, later proved no barrier to markedly political actions serving to undermine the Republic. Meanwhile, splits among the left-wing parties continued. Some regrouping took place with the disbanding of the USPD in 1922 and the reabsorption of its leaders and some of its members into the SPD while most of the grass-roots joined the KPD. But the fundamental gulf between the SPD and KPD – with theoretical roots reaching back to pre-war debates, exacerbated by strategic differences, and inflamed by the bitterness arising from Liebknecht’s and Luxemburg’s deaths – became essentially unbridgeable.
In the Reichstag elections of June 1920, the ‘Weimar coalition’ parties – SPD, Centre and DDP – lost votes and there was a swing to the extremes of both right and left. (The KPD had not contested the 1919 election.) National politics were particularly complicated by mounting economic and political difficulties connected with the reparations question. When the extremely high level of reparations was finally revealed, there was consternation about how an already weak German economy could deal with repayments. Germany’s economic problems were partly rooted in methods of financing the war – through loans and bonds rather than the raising of taxes – and the roots of inflation were already present before the reparations question exacerbated matters. Inflation was, however, wildly fuelled by the so-called ‘policy of fulfilment’ pursued by Wirth’s government in 1921–2 – a policy attacked in many quarters as capitulation to the demands of the victorious powers, but in fact designed to show that Germany could not fulfil reparations payments. As one commentator has put it, Germany’s currency difficulties were presented as reparations payments difficulties. Meanwhile, France under Poincare ́ was pursuing revisionist policies of its own, aiming to gain control of the left bank of the Rhine. Crises reached a peak under the Cuno government of November 1922–August 1923 (in which the SPD refused to participate, opposing the inclusion of the right-wing DVP, the German People’s Party). The French used the shortfall in German wood and coal deliveries as a pretext for ‘supervising’ production in the Ruhr area, backed up by ‘protective’ armed forces (including Belgian troops) which marched into the Ruhr area in January 1923 and by the summer months had reached a total of 100,000 troops –equivalent to the total permitted strength of the German Army. The Germans responded by an official policy of passive resistance, refusing to co-operate with the French occupation and also ceasing economic production – which hurt the German economy more than the French. The only apparent solution for Germany was the printing of paper money, which sent the already existing inflation spiralling totally out of control. By August 1923, bank notes were being simply stamped over to increase their value by thousands; payments were being made by the waggon-load, and money became effectively worthless. Millions of people found themselves in severe difficulties or financial ruin, particularly those on fixed in- comes (such as pensions) and many of the self-employed and lower middle classes. A few large industrialists were able to make profits. The general outcome was a widespread total loss of confidence in the Republic, fear and panic, and a wave of strikes and riots. The experience of 1923 left an imprint with reverberations carrying right on well into post-war West German history.
The situation was finally brought under control by the Stresemann government of August–November 1923. A combination of currency reform, introducing the Rentenmark, and termination of passive resistance in the Ruhr, dealt with the immediate economic crises and led to a reconsideration of the reparations question. Left- wing putsch attempts (mainly communist in inspiration) in Saxony, Thuringia and Hamburg were firmly put down. Meanwhile, in the right-wing haven of Bavaria a complex set of plans were being laid by a group of nationalists, including army officers, as well as one Adolf Hitler, leader of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), one of many small nationalist vo ̈lkisch parties. Inspired by Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ of 1922, plans were made to effect a ‘March on Berlin’. At the last minute, on 8–9 November 1923, Hitler lost the support of his more powerful and well-placed associates in the Bavarian hierarchy, and found the Nazi putsch isolated and easily suppressed, with the death of a few supporters when they were shot while marching past Munich’s Feldherrnhalle. In contrast to the harsh sentences meted out to left-wingers at the time, Hitler – after a trial from which he won a great deal of beneficial national publicity – received a minimum sentence of five years, of which he in fact served only a few months, in comfortable detention in Landsberg prison, being released in time for Christmas 1924. Hitler made use of the opportunity to reflect on his long-term aims – in the process writing Mein Kampf – as well as on strategy and tactics. He allowed the NSDAP, which he had taken over from the previous DAP (German Workers’ Party) led by Drexler, to disintegrate in his absence, so that he could impose firm leadership on his return to freedom; and he renounced the putschist approach, to adopt from 1925 the tactic of the legal, parliamentary path for anti-parliamentary ends. But the rise of this Austrian-born failed artist and ex-corporal was as yet something which no one would have predicted; for after the crises of 1923, the Weimar Republic entered a new period of apparent stabilisation.
the collapse of weimar democracy
Even before the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, there were plans afoot to dismantle parliamentary democracy in Weimar Germany. But the way in which the collapse of democracy took place was highly affected by the economic crises unleashed by world recession, which had particularly harsh reverberations in Germany. Following the relative success of the SPD in the 1928 elections, a ‘grand coalition under SPD chancellor Hermann Mu ̈ller had been formed.This survived initial splits in the SPD over money for a battleship as well as wider crises over adoption of the Young Plan. But the Wall Street Crash had peculiarly serious implications, given the dependence of the German economy on short-term loans from abroad which were rapidly withdrawn. Unemployment rose rapidly, from 1.3 million in September 1929 to over 3 million by September 1930, reaching over 6 million – one in three of the working population – by the be ginning of 1933. With official underestimation of the true figure, as well as widespread short-time working, perhaps half the families in Germany were affected by the slump; and many more experienced fear of financial catastrophe, verging on panic. These circumstances had a variety of implications. They directly led to the downfall of Mu ̈ller’s government, which became deadlocked over the question of what to do about unemployment insurance in a situation where rising numbers out of work could no longer be supported by declining numbers in work at the levels agreed in 1927. No compromise could be reached between alternative schemes, with unions, employers, and members of the different parties all having very different positions on the matter, characterised by varying degrees of intransigence. In March 1930 the attempt to ensure that government had party-political support in parliament was abandoned: the first presidential cabinet was appointed, to rule without serious regard for democracy.
TheBru ̈ning cabinet of 1930 had already been planned for in 1929 as part of a strategy to remove power from parliament and restore it to the old elites – army, bureaucracy, and economic elites – under a presidential, authoritarian regime. After 1930 increasing use was made of Article 48 to promulgate emergency decrees, while parliamentary sittings and parliamentary legislation decreased. Bru ̈ning pursued deflationary policies, combined with a policy of fulfilling reparations payments, consciously exacerbating the deterioration of Germany’s financial and employment situation with the aim of achieving a fundamental revision of the reparations question. This he did indeed achieve – at the expense of the suffering of millions of Germans – with the Hoover Moratorium ultimately leading to the end of reparations in 1932. But in the meantime fundamental upheavals were occurring in an already highly labile domestic political situation. In the years from 1930 to 1933 two factors coincided, which in conjunction doomed Weimar democracy: the attacks on parliamentary government by the old elites, which in essence had predated the economic crisis, coincided with the rise of a new mass movement mobilising, in periods of crisis, a large proportion of the population seduced by the appeals of a charismatic leader figure, Adolf Hitler.
Hitler had emerged from his period of detention to refound the NSDAP in 1925. During the later 1920s and 1930s the party sought to widen its appeal, from its early Bavarian base, across the different regions of Germany and across a range of social groups. While its predominant social basis remained among petty middle-class, Protestant, rural and small-town voters, particularly in northern and eastern Germany, it was able to gain support also among educated, upper middle-class and professional groups, as well as, to a more limited degree, among some sections of the less well-organised working class. (Although percentages were small, given the size of the working class overall numbers of working-class Nazi supporters were not inconsiderable.) In the 1928 elections, the NSDAP achieved only 2.6 per cent of the vote, giving them twelve parliamentary seats. The campaign against the Young Plan in 1929, in which the NSDAP cooperated with the DNVP under the right-wing press baron Hugenberg, gave the Nazis tremendous free publicity as well as an aura of respectability by virtue of their association with right- wing establishment nationalists. The electoral breakthrough for the NSDAP came with the elections of September 1930, in which the NSDAP became the second largest party in the Reichstag (after the SPD) with 107 deputies. With the collapse of the parties of the ‘bourgeois middle’, and the rise in votes for extremist parties – the KPD increased its mandate to seventy-seven seats – there was no basis for a parliamentary majority in support of any viable coalition cabinet. The SPD, however, fearful of the likely consequences of further elections, chose to ‘tolerate’ the Bru ̈ning presidential cabinet. And, although the financial support of business circles was negligible as a factor in the NSDAP’s success before 1930, and was not even very important thereafter, industrialists began to perceive the NSDAP as important in the destruction of the parliamentary system
Plate 33. A 1932 election poster for Hindenburg.
and were to become influential, particularly in 1932–3, in persuading Hindenburg that Hitler could be of some use in this project.
The political history of Germany in 1932–3 is a complex one of intrigues and miscalculations.Bru ̈ning’s cabinet fell partly because of Bru ̈ning’s mismanagement of Hindenburg’s humiliating re-election as President (after a second ballot, in which Hitler had gained one- third of the votes). A key figure in the machinations of the summer, autumn and winter was General von Schleicher, who first engineered the short-lived government of von Papen. Von Papen raised the ban instituted by Bru ̈ning’s government on the Nazi paramilitary SA and SS, and then used the violence on the streets partly as a pretext to suggest that the Prussian Land police were incapable of maintaining order, as a result of which the Prussian SPD-led government was deposed and a central administrator imposed on Prussia. In the elections of July 1932 the Nazis gained a staggering 230 seats, which, along with the eighty-nine seats held by the KPD, meant that there was an anti-parliamentary majority not prepared to tolerate the government of von Papen. Schleicher also played a role in unsuccessful negotiations with Hitler over the inclusion of the Nazis in a new coalition government. In August 1932, Hitler turned down Hindenburg’s reluctant offer of the vice-chancellorship – a move which provoked much criticism within the NSDAP, which feared that Hitler had turned down a great chance which would not be presented again. In September, the Papen government lost a motion of no confidence by 512 votes to forty-two. On all sides, right-wing circles, industrial and agrarian elites, and army leaders, as well as President Hindenburg, were considering strategies for effectively abolishing parliamentary government, reinstalling the old elites in power, and removing the constitutional necessity for parliamentary elections. With mounting unemployment and violence on the streets, with clashes between rival paramilitary gangs of left and right, with the effective emasculation of parliament in which there was total deadlock, with bitter splits between communists and Social Democrats who could not unite in opposition to Nazism, Germany in the autumn of 1932 was verging on civil war. Yet curiously, the final blow to Weimar democracy came just as the worst of the economic crisis was beginning to pass, and as the popularity of the Nazis for the first time was in decline. In the November elections of 1932 the NSDAP lost 2 million votes and saw its parliamentary strength reduced to 196 deputies. It remained the largest party in the Reichstag, but this in itself was no reason why it should automatically lead a government, as the history of the SPD in the Weimar Republic had shown.
Briefly, Schleicher himself became chancellor in December– January 1932–3. He attempted to gain support from labour unions, as well as the radical wing of the NSDAP represented by Gregor Strasser. This simultaneously aroused the fears of industrialists
Plate 34. The Berlin rent strike of 1932. Communist and Nazi flags hang side by side in this courtyard.
and agrarians because of Schleicher’s labour-creation and taxation schemes; nor did Strasser in the end respond favourably to Schleicher’s overtures, ultimately resigning his party offices and withdrawing from the scene of political strife. It was clear that Schleicher could as little cobble together a workable compromise among different interests as could his predecessors. He had also, perhaps unwisely, persuaded Hindenburg that the army would be unable to keep order in the event of civil war developing. In January 1933, von Papen initiated a series of discussions including Hitler, Hindenburg’s son, and Hindenburg, in which great pressure was put on the ageing President by industrial and agrarian interest groups (such as the Nazi-infiltrated Reichslandbund) to appoint Hitler as chancellor in a new coalition cabinet. Reluctantly, at the end of January Hindenburg, who greatly despised this upstart ‘Bohemian corporal’, gave in. Hitler was constitutionally appointed chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933.
In one sense, this represented a simple continuity with the line of presidential cabinets and authoritarian rule since 1930. In another sense, of course, it represented – because of what was to come – a fundamental break. Hitler was the leader of a party which, after the failed putsch of 1923, was openly committed to the ‘path of legality’ as a means to anti-parliamentary ends: the Nazis made no secret of their intention to destroy democracy. The Nazi party itself was also rather unique. Although disproportionately supported by some social groups rather than others, it did in many respects represent a broad mass movement in contrast to the narrow interest-group parties so characteristic of Weimar politics, and could at least claim to be a ‘people’s party’ (Volkspartei) rising above the factional strife and class conflicts of Weimar Germany. It could promise to heal the divisions tearing society apart. With its vague, all-embracing ideology – anti-modern, anti-capitalist, anti-communist, racialist, vo ̈lkı ̈sch – it could mean all things to all people; with its increasing sophistication in the use of mass media and the staging of political rituals (evident for example in the 1929 Nuremberg party rally) it could become a form of powerful, pagan religion; with its charismatic leader figure, Adolf Hitler, who had been discovering and improving his gifts of oratory as well as having a public image built up for him, Nazism could pose as Germany’s salvation and destiny, led by the strong man for whom many Germans had long been yearning. The promise of a new, national community, which would make Germany great again and tear apart the provisions of the hated Treaty of Versailles, which would punish the ‘November criminals’ of 1918, which would rid Germany of the ‘Jewish bacil us’ that was infecting and polluting the ‘Aryan’ race and would outlaw the Bolsheviks and criminals who had been undermining Germany from within for so long – all this proved a powerful vision to large numbers of desperate, frightened Germans for whom Weimar democracy had meant only national humiliation, economic disaster, social conflicts and personal uncertainty. Recognising the force of such a mass movement, and recognising their own lack of a popular base, the nationalist, industrial, agrarian and military elites thought they could ‘harness’, ‘tame’ and use this movement to give their own schemes for the destruction of democracy a legitimacy which they could not on their own achieve. Hitler did not need to ‘seize’ power; the old elites simply opened the door and welcomed him in. Faced with such a conjunction, there was little that the weakened unions and the divided left could do to salvage a democracy which had been effectively deserted by powerful interests as well as petty bourgeois masses. The miscalculated machinations of the elites proved a sadder, more irresponsible mistake than the weaknesses and errors of those who were ultimately unable to protect and defend the inherently unstable, ill-fated Weimar Republic. In this unique combination of circumstances, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.
the consolidation of hitler’s power
It nevertheless took Hitler some time to extend his hold on power, appointed as he was to lead a cabinet in which there were only two other Nazis, Frick and Goering. Elections were called for 5 March 1933, and, despite the intimidating atmosphere following the burning of the Reichstag on 27 February, which the Nazis used as a pretext for declaring a state of emergency, the Nazis still failed to win an absolute majority at the polls. The NSDAP achieved 43.9 per cent of the vote, giving it 288 seats, while the left gained over 30 per cent of the vote (128 seats for the SPD and eighty-one for the KPD) and the Centre and Liberals together gained 18 per cent. Even together with their Nationalist coalition partners the Nazis could not immediately obtain the two-thirds majority necessary to alter the constitution by an Enabling Law to destroy democratic government. Yet, after a well stage-managed opening of the Reichstag in the Garrison Church in Potsdam on 21 March, Hitler was able to convince the Centre party and other smaller right-wing parties that they should support his plans. By preventing communists and twenty-one Social Democrats from attending the Reichstag on the evening of 23 March, Hitler ensured the passing of the Enabling Law, with only the Social Democrats courageous enough to speak and vote against the destruction of democracy in Germany. Henceforth, Hitler could pass any ‘law’ he wanted, without regard for parliamentary approval. In any event, the latter soon became meaningless: in the course of the early summer of 1933, all parties except the NSDAP were either outlawed (the KPD being the first to go) or
Plate 35. Propaganda for Hitler celebrating the ‘Day of Potsdam’ and representing Hitler as a major statesman and successor to Frederick II, sanctioned by Hindenburg.
disbanded themselves (the Centre Party formally dissolving itself on 5 July 1933). On 14 July 1933 the ‘Law against the formation of new parties’ effectively established a one-party state.
Moves towards ‘co-ordination’ (Gleichschaltung – literally, ‘putting into the same gear’) were taken in a wide range of spheres. The civil service was purged of political opponents of Nazism, as well as Jews, in the ‘Law for the restoration of the professional civil service’ of 7 April 1933. The powers of the different La ̈nder were attacked by the Nazi seizure of local powers in March 1933, and in April ten so-called ‘Reich Governors’ (Reichsstatthalter) were appointed to assert Nazi power at the Land level. In May, trade unions were wound up and replaced by the ‘German Labour Front’ (DAF) under Robert Ley. Walter Darre ́ took control of the ‘Reich Food Estate’ dealing with agriculture and the peasantry, while craftsmen and small traders were organised under an umbrella organisation, the HAGO. On 30 January 1934, one year after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Reichsrat (upper chamber of parliament) was abolished and the federal system terminated. The final major constitutional change came with the death of President Hindenburg on 2 August 1934. Hitler made use of the occasion to combine the offices of President and Chancellor in his own personas Fu ̈hrer,and to take personal command of the armed forces, who now swore an oath of obedience to him.
The new, personal allegiance of the army to Hitler was made easier by Hitler’s decision to resolve conflicts with the SA in favour of thearmy.The SA,underits leader Ernst Ro ̈hm,had been developing into a rather unruly rival for both the SS and the army. Aware that he vitally needed the support of the latter for his revisionist and expansionist foreign policies, Hitler instigated the so-called ‘night of the long knives’ on 30 June 1934, in which leaders of the SA were murdered along with a number of other individuals with whom Hitler had fallen out (including Schleicher and Gregor Strasser). This mass murder was retroactively ‘legalised’ by a law passed on 3 July 1934. The SA was firmly put in its place, in relation not only to the army, but also to the SS. The latter, under Heinrich Himmler – who by 1936 had combined control of the SS and the German police, effectively concentrating control of the means of terror in the Third Reich – was able to arrest, detain, imprison, torture and murder, with no respect for law or justice. In March 1933 the first Nazi concentration camp was opened in Dachau, near Munich – to much public fanfare, with open and enthusiastic newspaper coverage. This was essentially a detention centre and forced-labour camp, in which ‘anti-social elements’ (including political opponents of the regime and homosexuals, as well as ‘criminals’ more conventionally defined) were subjected to a penal regime. While inhumane treatment, torture, malnutrition, ill-health and overwork as well as outright murder were all causes of death, these labour camps (which proclaimed on their gates the slogan that ‘Arbeit macht frei’, ‘work liberates’) were not extermination centres in the sense of those established solely or primarily for purposes of killing after 1941. Fear of arrest, and fear of informers, led to a frightened public conformity on the part of many Germans, who were forced to lead a double life, expressing their real views only in complete privacy.
At the same time as coercing the German people into conformity, measures were taken to attempt to obtain their consent to, and support for, the new national socialist community. Measures were partly ideological, partly practical. For those not excluded from the new ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) – for those apolitical Aryans, with no Jewish blood or political antipathy – life could be made relatively comfortable in the peacetime years of Nazi Germany. An economic upswing which had started already before Hitler came to power was given further impetus by Nazi work- creation schemes (autobahn building, general construction works, and increasingly projects connected with rearmament). Nazi economic policies were geared both to autarky and to preparation for war, as well as to consumer satisfaction, objectives that were not always mutually compatible. There is some debate about the connections between Nazi economic policies and economic recovery, as well as about their effects on different groups in the population. Rearmament policies after 1936, for example, on some accounts may have actually slowed down the pace of economic recovery. Furthermore, the increased concentration of capital represented a continuation of tendencies prevalent before the Nazis came to power, further complicating analysis of causes and effects. It should be noted that certain developments were at odds with some of the pre-1933 Nazi ideology, such as the proclaimed hostility to large department stores and the emphasis on the rural virtues of ‘blood and soil’ – positions which were hard to combine with the industrial requirements of rearmament. One thing is however quite clear: unemployment was rapidly reduced, so that by the late 1930s there was instead a labour shortage. In contrast to the uncertainties and hardship of the Weimar years, the Nazi dictatorship was associated for many Germans with a secure income and an improved standard of living, however qualified by restrictions on personal freedom.
There was also a range of schemes designed to inculcate a sense of harmonious, regenerated national community healing the wounds of Weimar’s conflicts. Programmes such as Scho ̈nheit der Arbeit (the beauty of labour) and Kraft durch Freude (strength through joy), with organised leisure activities and holiday trips for workers, and an emphasis on the notion of community even at the factory level, sought to infuse Germans with a new spirit and enthusiasm inculcated at work. Meanwhile, Goebbels’ curiously entitled Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda (created in March 1933) pumped out material designed both as light entertainment or diversion and as political indoctrination. The press and radio were co-opted, and the education system transformed into an instrument of Nazi socialisation. The burning of books by left-wing, Jewish and other ‘un-German’ authors on 10 May 1933, instigated by Nazi activists and presided over by Goebbels, symbolised the Nazi attempt to purge from German minds all views except their own. A range of social organisations, such as the Hitler Youth (HJ) and League of German Girls (BDM), and the Nazi women’s organisations, sought to incorporate different sections of society into the new community, while the multiplicity of preexisting German organisations were outlawed, dissolved, or taken over by the Nazis. The notion of a regenerated national community under the saviour figure of Adolf Hitler was further propagated by symbolic displays of power and unity, through the mass rituals, parades, and depiction of crowds of adoring Germans raising their arms in the Heil salute as Hitler passed.
The monolithic image promoted by the Nazis had a certain element of truth in it, and the notion of a charismatic Fu ̈hrer above all the local conflicts and frictions of everyday life represented a powerful element of cohesion. Local party bigwigs could be blamed for things people did not like,while they sighed ‘if only the Fu ̈hrer knew . . .’. But to take the Third Reich at its face value would be mistaken. The Nazi state was by no means so streamlined, nor the population so adulatory or brainwashed, as earlier interpretations of what was called Nazi ‘totalitarianism’ suggested. For one thing, there remained a ‘duality’ of power in the Nazi state, with new party organisations duplicating, and rivalling, continuing state administrative machinery. The overlapping spheres of jurisdiction led to considerable competition and conflict in a range of areas – between rival party organisations as well as between state and party bureaucracies – with no institutionalised means of resolving disputes other
Plate36. A delegation of the Nazi girls’ organisation,the Bund Plate Deutscher Ma ̈del, honour the Nazi heroes who fell in the 1923 putsch, at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich.
rival party organisations as well as between state and party bureaucracies – with no institutionalised means of resolving disputes other than by appeal to the Fu ̈hrer. The only finally decisive factor was ‘the Fu ̈hrer’s wish’. On some accounts,the very notion of acharismatic Fu ̈hrer‘ above ’the fray was less an attribute of the person of Adolf Hitler himself than a consequence of the way the regime, with its plurality of competing organisations, had to function in practice. Frequently, Hitler only entered into conflicts at the last moment, in true Social Darwinist fashion allowing participants to fight it out between themselves and then backing the stronger, winning side. In many areas of policy, Hitler postponed making decisions until the last possible moment. This does not necessarily mean that he was a ‘weak dictator’, as some interpretations have suggested, since when it mattered to him – particularly on foreign policy – Hitler was quit determined to ensure that he got his own way. In other areas he was simply less interested in the details of policy formation. Moreover, the totalitarian notion must also be qualified with reference to the fact that certain key elites – notably industry and Army – were not ‘co-ordinated’ in quite the same way as more subordinate groups. For much of the 1930s, they experienced a certain congruence of aims with the Nazis, in the areas of economic regeneration under authoritarian, anti-union auspices, and rearmament and revision of the hated Treaty of Versailles. But the congruence of aims was never complete: there were frictions and divergences of interest on a number of points, and from 1938 onwards the regime entered a more radical phase in which differences were thrown into sharper relief – complicated after 1939 because the nation was at war.
At the level of popular opinion, too, the picture is more complex than at first sight might be thought. While there was a hard core of convinced Nazis, many more joined party organisations after March 1933 out of opportunistic motives, while others remained aloof even at the cost of their professional careers or their family’s livelihood. People did not swallow a ‘Nazi ideology’ (which was in any event not very consistent or coherent) wholesale; rather, they sympathised with certain elements – such as promotion of German national greatness and revision of the Treaty of Versailles – while criticising other elements, particularly if they were personally, materially affected by, for example, some aspect of economic policy. Many peasants, to take one illustration, had supported the Nazi emphasis on ‘blood and soil’ before 1933; but they soon became disenchanted with certain Nazi agrarian policies, such as the Entailed Farm Law which stipulated that medium-sized farms could only be inherited by a single heir, of German Aryan stock, and not be divided among heirs. Public opinion was fragmented: people on the whole lived on a very day-to-day level, grumbling or applauding on particular issues but failing to develop a sense of the whole. There was also a widespread lack of interest in the fate of others, once they were removed from the immediate vicinity.
This restricted focus of interest, to areas of direct concern and immediate relevance, affected even the churches, whose record in the Third Reich is ambiguous. The Protestant churches – whose members had provided a disproportionate share of the Nazi vote – soon split between the pro-Nazi ‘German Christians’ and the anti- Nazi ‘Confessing Church’, among whose number were some highly courageous opponents of Nazism such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yet while the Nazis had to abandon their early plans to subvert the church for Nazism and install a Reich Bishop, the reactions of most Protestants to the regime remained mixed. Nazi attacks on denominational schools and attempts to reorganise church structure were resisted, but many Protestants shared anti-communist sentiments and conservative-nationalist goals with the Nazis. The Catholic community, with its transcendent loyalty to Rome, was initially more resilient to the attractions of Nazism, and perhaps its ‘total’ ideology and emphasis on community provided better protection against Nazism than did Protestant individualism. Yet in the main Catholics no more provided an effective bastion against Nazism than did Protestants. Reassured initially by the Concordat concluded between the Nazi government and the Vatican in July 1933, German Catholics slowly came to resist Nazi encroachments on their religion, such as the removal of crucifixes from classrooms in confessional schools. But they very firmly distinguished between ‘religious’ matters, in which it was proper and permissible to resist Nazi policies, and ‘political’ affairs which were no concern of the church. This self-limitation meant that while church leaders did in fact protest against the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme, in which many Germans (including of course Catholics) were killed because of mental disability or subnormality, they failed to protest against the treatment of the Jews. While remaining to an extent alienated from the regime, potential Catholic opposition was limited by a restrictive legalism in their separation of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’, the sphere of the church and that of the state; the same was also true of Protestants, who even had Luther to appeal to on this point.
The German people were thus subjected to a mixture of coercion and consent, as well as to changed experiences and circumstances, changed material and social conditions, in the course of the pre- war years, which led to a mixture of grumbling and support, approval and dissent, on different issues and at different times. But there were some who had little freedom to be so ambivalent: there were those who were to be excluded form the new national community, and were only too well aware of its dark side. Left-wingers early found themselves rounded up and imprisoned, or forced to go underground; resistance was extremely hazardous and clandestine. Others were discriminated against because of their racial heritage or personal practices: Jews, gypsies and homosexuals were singled out for harsh treatment, while the Slavic peoples were denigrated. Jewish policy in the 1930s was characterised by a series of more or less ad hoc measures: the attempted boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in April 1933, the exclusion of Jews from the civil service and certain professions, the ‘Nuremberg Laws’ of 1935 depriving them of citizenship rights and imposing restrictions on marriages between Jews and gentiles, the ‘night of broken glass’ (Kristallnacht) of November 1938 in which Jewish synagogues, homes and premises were attacked, burned, and looted and a number of Jews were killed. These measures were in the main initiated by Nazi activists or in response to pressures for action on the part of party radicals. Public displays of brutality commanded little general popular support among Germans. But there was much approval of the aim of ‘removing’ Jews from German society, and the ‘aryanisation’ of Jewish property (including housing) pleased the beneficiaries. The ‘legalisation’ of the pariah status of Jews in the Nuremberg Laws was applauded, while the destruction of property and creation of mess in the Kristallnacht was not. While it was quite clear that Jews were ‘not wanted’ (unerwu ̈nscht) in the new Germany of the Thousand-Year Reich, and were to be excluded from Germany’s glorious future, it was by no means clear in the peacetime years that the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’ which the Nazis had constructed would ultimately be a policy of mass murder.
There were two areas of policy in which Hitler had quite definite goals: racial policy, and foreign policy. Hitler wanted to make Germany into a ‘pure’ racial community; and he wanted to expand German ‘living-space’ (Lebensraum), achieving first European and then world mastery. Ultimately all else had to be subordinated to these ends. We must now turn to the radicalisation of the regime in foreign policy, war and genocide.
foreign policy and war
As early as the 1920s, in Mein Kampf and the (then unpublished) ‘Second Book’, Hitler had laid down a programme for his foreign policy. This programme consisted in revising the Treaty of Versailles, incorporating Austria and transforming Czechoslovakia and Poland into satellite states, confronting France before turning to conquer Russia, and finally achieving world domination, perhaps with Britain as some sort of junior partner which Germany would help to protect. Evidently at least the first stages of this programme commanded broad sympathy among conservative nationalist circles in Germany. Indeed, after 1930 a shift in foreign policy under Bru ̈ning’s government away from Stresemann’s more careful conciliation had been evident. A new, more confrontationist style went along with moves away from multilateral agreements towards a system of bilateral political and economic arrangements designed to extend Germany’s influence in south-eastern and eastern Europe. When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were certain continuities with these trends, although the pace quickened and the ultimate aims were rather more ambitious. Nevertheless the compromise with the old elites which had brought Hitler to power was sustained, with some tensions and frictions, until the winter of 1937–8.
Hitler’s general strategy in the 1930s was to achieve as much as possible by diplomatic means while energetically pursuing policies of rearmament. Rearmament had been secretly pursued, and different means of expanding the army canvassed, since the later 1920s. Hitler made his intentions explicit in speeches to the generals and to his cabinet within ten days of coming to power. Initially, rearmament was disguised, as with the issue of so-called ‘Mefo Bills’ in 1933, and in Krupp’s euphemistically named ‘agricultural tractor programme’ which produced tanks from July 1933. By 1934 explosives, ships and aircraft were in production – all against the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, but approved by the army. In March 1935 the existence of a German air force and of general rearmament, as well as the introduction of conscription, were finally announced to the outside world. In the meantime, Hitler had pursued individual agreements with particular countries in place of collective arrangements. He broke off German participation in the Geneva Disarmament Conference, and withdrew Germany from the League of Nations, in October 1933. In January 1934 he concluded a ten-year non-aggression pact with Poland (against the advice of the Foreign Ministry). In March 1935 the Saarland returned to Germany after a plebiscite in January. German rearmament was censured by the ‘Stresa Front’ of Britain, France and Italy, and by the League of Nations, in April 1935; but Britain and Germany were able to achieve a certain understanding in the Naval Agreement of June 1935, by which Germany was to increase her navy to one- third the strength of the British navy. Although there were tensions between Italy and Germany over Austria (after an attempted coup by Austrian Nazis in 1934, in which Chancellor Dollfuss was murdered), Hitler was concerned to improve relations. He admired the Fascist leader Mussolini, and for a while trod carefully in connection with the Austrian question. In any event, the Stresa Front itself was less than solid. The preoccupation of Britain and France with the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935, as well as the mounting pressure of popular discontent in a worsening economic situation at home, presented Hitler with the opportunity and impetus for his first really risky step in foreign policy. In March 1936 German troops remilitarised the Rhineland. This, despite the relatively limited numbers of German troops, was achieved successfully, to much popular acclaim at home and little serious criticism abroad. Germany was, after all, only ‘entering her own back yard’.
In 1936, Hitler announced that Germany must be ready for war within four years, and a ‘Four-Year Plan’ under Goering was launched. This marked a break with the previously relatively orthodox management of the economy under the former President of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, who subsequently resigned as Minister of Economics in November 1937 because of conflicts between his ministry and Goering’s Four-Year-Plan Office. Rearmament was to be vigorously pursued, but not at the expense of the living standards of consumers at home; Hitler had a perpetual eye on public opinion in general and his own popularity in particular. Shifts occurring on the foreign policy front also contributed to a loosening of ties between Hitler and his conservative nationalist allies. The Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July 1936, helped to bring Italy and Germany closer together (in their support of Franco) in the ‘Rome–Berlin axis’. Ribbentrop, who for some time had been effectively running a Nazi diplomatic service in rivalry with the Foreign Ministry, and who in 1936 became Germany’s Ambassador to Britain, failed to secure a British alliance with Germany. In the course of 1937, it became clear to Hitler that he would have to drop his plans for alliance with Britain, and strengthen his connections with Italy. In 1938, under Ribbentrop’s influence, Japan became the third member of the ‘Axis’. It also became increasingly clear that Germany would not be able to sustain a protracted rearmaments race, and would have to go to war sooner rather than later.
In the winter of 1937–8 these developments reached the point where a split between Hitler and certain old conservatives was inevitable. A meeting in November 1937 with leaders of the army, navy, air force, as well as the Foreign Minister and the War Minister, which was reported in a memorandum by Hitler’s military adjutant Colonel Hossbach, was the occasion for a lengthy harangue by Hitler on at least some of his plans for achieving German Lebensraum. Hitler failed to convince his audience, and was met with reservations and criticisms. But Nazi military planning in December became increasingly offensive, rather than defensive, in nature. By February 1938, Hitler had engineered a purge of the Army leadership, replacing conservatives critical of his views with others more amenable to Nazi plans. Fritsch was replaced by General von Brauchitsch; fourteen senior generals were retired, and forty- six others had to change their commands; the post of War Minister, held by Blomberg, was simply abolished, and Hitler himself became Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces (in addition to being Supreme Commander by virtue of his position as head of state). General Keitel became the new head of the Oberkammando der Wehrmacht (OKW) which replaced the old Wehrmacht office. In February 1938, finally, Ribbentrop replaced Neurath as Foreign Minister. The changes meant that the regime was now more specifically Nazi, less constrained by the more traditional considerations and ambitions of orthodox German nationalists.
Hitler was able to achieve two of his major foreign policy aims in the course of 1938–9 by – relatively – peaceful means. Despite Germany’s reassurances in 1936 about respecting Austrian independence, which had facilitated the rapprochement with Italy, tensions continued in relation to Austria. Under considerable pressure from Goering, who took much of the initiative in the course of 1937, the Austrian issue came to a head in the spring of 1938. The Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg, who had succeeded Dollfuss, had talks with Hitler in February 1938. Schuschnigg then called a plebiscite in March 1938, formulated to predetermine the outcome; Hitler (and Goering) managed to effect a postponement and rewording of the plebiscite, and a handover of power from Schuschnigg to the Nazi
Plate 37. The Austrian town of Lienz, now part of the Greater German Reich, changes the name of one of its major squares to ‘Adolf-Hitler-Platz’ (as did many other places in Germany and Austria).
sympathiser Seyss-Inquart. Austrian troops were then instructed to offer no resistance when German troops marched triumphantly into Hitler’s native country, greeted by welcoming crowds, and with this bloodless invasion the Anschluss of Austria was effected. Despite its prohibition in the Treaty of Versailles, other European powers saw little reason to protest. For Austrian Jews, the consequences were disastrous. The vicious anti-semitism of Austrian Nazis was given free rein, and Jews in a country which later purported to be ‘Hitler’s first victim’ received worse treatment than their brethren in Germany.
Hitler did not have quite such an easy time in relation to Czechoslovakia. Unrest in connection with the sizeable ethnic German population, particularly in the Sudeten border areas, had been fomented by a right-wing party under Heinlein with support from Germany. In the course of the summer of 1938, a crisis developed – partly due to inaccurate reports of German mobilisation on the Czech border, which led to real Czech mobilisation. After a week of mounting tension, the situation was defused; but discussions were sharpened, with British Prime Minister Chamberlain playing a key role in negotiations. When, finally, at the end of the Munich Conference of September 1938 – at which Czechoslovakia was not represented – certain border areas were ceded mainly to Germany, Chamberlain made his famous return to Britain waving a piece of paper signed by Hitler and proclaiming that it meant ‘peace in our time’. Chamberlain’s so-called ‘appeasement policy’ has come in for considerable subsequent criticism as well as the defence that it helped to buy Britain time for effective rearmament. Hitler himself at the time was bitterly disappointed at his bloodless success, feeling cheated of a potentially successful war. The German people, by contrast, were relieved that the threat of war had been averted, and Hitler’s domestic popularity rose accordingly. Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, had lost its effective lines of defence. When in March 1939 Hitler decided to invade what was left of Czechoslovakia, his troops were able to march into Prague with minimal opposition. Bohemia and Moravia were turned into a ‘Protectorate’, and Slovakia effectively became a satellite state of the German Reich. The western powers let this ‘far-away country’ of which they knew little, and for which they cared less, fall with no gesture of help.
On Poland, Hitler faced more serious intransigence on the part of the western powers. Memel was ceded by the Lithuanians, but the Poles refused to give way on Danzig and on 31 March the British guaranteed Polish independence. Despite this setback, Hitler had by now formed the impression that Britain was essentially weak and vacillating, and would not stand by its guarantee. On 23 August 1939 Hitler, in a surprise move, made the notorious pact with Stalin’s Russia which had for so long been the ideological arch-enemy of the Nazis. The Nazi–Soviet pact was purely strategic for both Hitler and Stalin: both had an interest in carving up Poland, and while Stalin needed time for rearmament, Hitler was concerned to prevent a potential British alliance with the USSR and to be able to concentrate his attention on defeating the west without having a war on two fronts. On 1 September 1939 German troops invaded Poland. On 3 September Britain and France, honouring their pledge to Poland, declared war on Germany. The second major war of the twentieth century unleashed by Germany had begun. The German people on the whole embarked on it with foreboding, and little of
Map 10. Territorial annexations by Nazi Germany, 1935–9
the enthusiasm with which considerable numbers had greeted the outbreak of war in 1914.
The Polish campaign raised false hopes that the war would be over soon. In a lightning campaign (Blitzkrieg) Poland was defeated in less than three weeks. Parts of it were incorporated into an expanded Reich, and parts were transformed into the ‘Generalgouvernement’ under German administration. There followed during the winter months of 1939–40 the so-called phoney war or Sitzkrieg. In the spring of 1940 Hitler rapidly turned his attention north and west: first to Scandinavia, where the Quisling regime in Norway gave a new political concept to history, then, in May 1940, via Holland and Belgium to France, the defeat of which was followed by occupation of the northern and western parts and the installation of the compliant Vichy regime. In spring 1941 Germany attacked Yugoslavia and Greece. The unexpected early and rapid victories boosted Hitler’s domestic popularity, at a time when consumer conditions were still relatively satisfactory; they also gave Hitler himself a false sense of invincibility. Goering persuaded Hitler that the German Luftwaffe was in a position to knock Britain out of the war, and a series of air-raids over Britain began. But Britain proved more resistant to invasion and defeat than the Germans had expected; and Hitler did not wait to defeat Britain and consolidate his hold in the west before turning his attention eastwards. In the summer of 1941 he decided the time had come to invade Russia, thus effecting what he had previously been concerned to avoid: war on two fronts. The Russian campaign proved disastrous. German troops were over extended and ill-equipped; and when the Russian winter came, with icy winds and deep snow, German soldiers found themselves immobilised, without adequate clothing, afflicted by frostbite and in some instances even freezing to death. The Nazi charity collections at home (the winter relief fund, WHW, including donations and one-pot meals) persuaded numerous Germans to part with boots, coats, skis; but it was too little and too late. There were also serious tactical mistakes in the military campaign, particularly in the mounting of simultaneous and overambitious offensives which could not be sustained. In 1943, at Stalingrad, the Germans finally suffered a major defeat which could not be disguised. Neither domestic morale nor Hitler’s faith in his inevitable victory ever recovered.
Map 11. The partition of Poland in 1939
The invasion of Russia was the first turning point in the war. Germany had been prepared for a short, sharp war, but was not equipped to sustain a protracted conflict of the sort which now developed. The second turning point came with the transformation of what was still a European war into a world war in December 1941. There had been a separate set of conflicts in the Pacific since the early 1930s involving Japan. In December 1941 the Japanese attacked and destroyed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, as a result of which the USA declared war on Japan. While Germany was linked with Japan as one of the axis powers, there was no compulsion for Germany to come to Japan’s defence; yet Hitler took this opportunity to declare war on the USA. His megalomaniac desire
Map 12. Hitler’s empire by autumn 1942
for world mastery turned a European war – which Germany at this time still had some hope of winning – into a world war, taking on the enormous military and economic might of the most advanced industrial nation in the world.
From 1942–3, the war turned against Germany, with desert campaigns in north Africa, relentless air-raids over Germany carried out by the RAF and the American air forces, and continued fighting in Italy even after the deposition of Mussolini by the Fascist Grand Council in July 1943. Germany was fighting on three fronts, and the German situation became increasingly desperate as the Russians launched an offensive in the east to coincide with the Normandy landings of the western allies on 6 June 1944. Morale on the home front plummeted, as people feared for friends and relatives at the front and suffered deteriorating conditions at home. Hitler himself became a virtual recluse, making fewer and fewer public appearances and withdrawing increasingly to his East Prussian retreat, the ‘Wolf’s Lair’. Wrapped up in their own troubles and concerns, the majority of German people paid little attention to a phenomenon, of which they knew more than they would later like to admit, which was taking place at precisely this time.
holocaust, resistance and defeat
Hitler’s basic aims had been two-fold: to achieve Lebensraum for the German race; and to rid that race of what he saw as a pollutant, a bacterium, poisoning and infecting the healthy ‘Aryan’ stock: the Jews. Slowly, during the period after 1933, Jews had been identified, stigmatised, and excluded from the ‘national community’, the Volksgemeinschaft. Measures had been adopted to give Jews an outcaste status, and many Jews, realising they had little future in Germany, had already fled for more welcoming shores. While there had been acts of violence and discrimination against Jews, there had however been no systematic policy for totally ridding Germany of the Jewish population. In war-time, things changed. For one thing, with the conquest of territories in which there were far larger Jewish communities (particularly in the east), the ‘Jewish problem’ assumed new proportions. For another, more extreme circumstances suggested and promoted more radical solutions. Hitler let it be known that he wanted the expanded Reich to be ‘cleansed of Jews’ (Judenrein). Initially, schemes were actively considered for the mass deportation of Jews to a reservation in Madagascar, and Jews were even sent to southern France in preparation for shipment. In eastern Europe, there were plans for a Jewish reservation in the area around Lublin in south-eastern Poland. After the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941, the ‘final solution’ became altogether more sinister.
No written Hitler-order for the extermination of the Jews has ever been found; nor, given Hitler’s style of government, is such an order likely ever to have existed. But he let his wishes be known and fostered a climate in which the policy of extermination could be effected. There is some disagreement among historians as to whether the extermination programme which actually took place was the direct consequence of a pre-determined plan, or whether it developed in a more ad hoc, haphazard manner as a result of local initiatives which were later co-ordinated. Whatever the interpretation, the broad outline of facts is clear. The first mass killings of Jews were undertaken by specialist so-called Einsatzgruppen who arrived in Russia in the wake of the invading German troops. Jews were rounded up and taken out to forests where they dug mass graves, were lined up naked, and were then shot into the graves. This technique had serious disadvantages from the Nazi point of view: killings were relatively public and easily witnessed by passersby, allowing the news to filter back to Germany; and those doing the shooting – which included shooting young women cuddling babies in their arms – often, despite the SS suppression of human emotions and inculcation of obedience and brutality, found themselves physically incapable of undertaking such cold-blooded murder without first imbibing copious quantities of vodka. Meanwhile, in the ghettoes in Poland, overcrowding and disease were becoming ever more serious, as more and more Jews were transported from occupied territories. From the point of view of those in charge of the Warsaw and Lodz ghettoes, some means would have to be found sooner rather than later of dealing with the increasing numbers of Jews, whether by halting the influx or disposing of those already there. The means chosen was death: immediate death by inhalation of gas, rather than shooting. Jews from the Lodz Ghetto were rounded up, from December 1941, and driven out to Chelmno (Kulmhof), about forty miles north-west of Lodz, where they were driven around in vans which had the exhaust pipes redirected to pump the exhaust fumes back inside the body of the vehicle. When the screams of those packed inside had died down, the drivers stopped and the bodies were dumped in mass graves in the forest. This too, however, proved to be a relatively ‘inefficient’ means of killing: it could – and did – kill tens of thousands, but could not dispose of millions.
In January 1942, a conference was called at Wannsee, in the beautiful lakeland surroundings on the west of Berlin, to co-ordinate the ‘final solution’ which was already taking place, under the general direction of SS-leader Heinrich Himmler. In Poland, specially designed extermination camps were opened at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Under the so-called ‘Reinhard Action’ (named after Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated in Prague in May 1942), these camps effected the liquidation of the vast majority of Polish Jews.
Plate 38. The Jewish ghetto in Radom, Poland, with a poster forbidding entry by those without police permits and warning of the danger of epidemic diseases. Jews in ghettoes were reduced into creatures readily portrayed as a serious danger to physical health, as well as, more metaphorically, a ‘bacillus’ or ‘cancer’ in the body of the nation, which needed to be ‘purified’ of Jewish ‘contamination’.
They made use of the expertise and personnel of the now-terminated ‘euthanasia’ programme. The most infamous of the camps, the name of which has come to epitomise evil and suffering, was however not tucked away out of sight in eastern Poland, but was in fact within the borders of the greater German Reich: Auschwitz. Auschwitz (Oswiecim) was a major industrial centre on the main west–east railway line in Upper Silesia. The Auschwitz complex spread over several square kilometres, in and around the town, straddling both sides of the main railway line (with an extra side-line built specifically to allow trains to go directly into the extermination centre at Birkenau). Auschwitz I, an already existing prison and labour camp largely for political prisoners, was the scene of horrific ‘medical’ experiments under Josef Mengele; it was also the place where the use of Zyklon B gas was first tried. Auschwitz II, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, was established a few kilometres away, as a specifically designed factory for mass murder. Whole train-loads could be ‘processed’, the trains cleaned and readied for their empty return to the west, within three or four hours. When all the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau were in full operation, it was possible to kill up to 9,000 people within twenty-four hours. Also in the town of Auschwitz was the Monowitz camp, whose inmates worked for I. G. Farben’s new Buna plant at Dwory. The Auschwitz complex also supplied labour for a number of other German firms such as Krupp, Borsig and Siemens. This was no isolated, hidden concentration camp, but rather a vast enterprise of which large numbers of Poles and Germans were perfectly well aware. Complicity in the functioning of the Third Reich extends far beyond a small band of Nazi thugs and criminals.
The bureaucratically organised, technologically perfected and efficiently executed mass murder of over 6 million Jews, as well as the almost complete annihilation of Europe’s gypsy population, and the killing of numerous political opponents of Nazism or others deemed ‘unworthy of life’, from a whole range of cultural, political and national backgrounds, including communists, Social Democrats, Conservatives, Protestants, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others – this mass killing, undertaken by members of that highly cultured nation which had produced the music of Bach and the poetry of Goethe, raises questions almost impossible to contemplate, let alone answer. But that does not mean that the phenomenon should be elevated to a plane of unique reprehension, abstracted from real historical explanation, above causality and the focus solely of horror and shame. This reaction, which is quite understandable, nevertheless evades the real questions of responsibility and guilt. Hitler created the climate and provided the impetus for mass murder – which even conflicted with other central aims of the regime, such as the need for slave labour in the war effort – but he cannot be held to be the only guilty man, as certain explanations which concentrate on the takeover of Germany by a uniquely evil individual imply. Nor can responsibility be placed solely on a small band of fanatics around Hitler. Hitler did not come to power by accident; nor was his regime simply maintained by terror and coercion. Many Germans, in different capacities, facilitated the Holocaust by their actions or permitted it to continue by their inaction. By the end of 1943 at the latest, a considerable percentage of Germans – amounting to several million – knew that the Jews who were being rounded up and shipped off to the east would, directly or indirectly (via transit camps such as Theresienstadt), ultimately end up in a place not of ‘resettlement’ but of death. This was known, too, by governments of neutral countries and of Hitler’s enemies; but powers such as Britain and the USA, for whatever range of reasons, good and bad, chose to ignore the question and concentrated rather on the military effort of defeating Germany in war.
Whatever the extent to which people ‘knew’ about the evils of the Nazi regime, most Germans preferred to ignore or disbelieve what did not concern them directly. Their intimations were better suppressed. There were some courageous groups and individuals in Nazi Germany who made attempts to oppose Hitler and terminate his rule. These included many clandestine left-wing opposition groups in the 1930s who continued to meet, discuss and organise, despite the flight of the SPD leadership into exile and the dispersal of KPD members to Moscow as well as the west. There were also many who had little hope of doing more than expressing their dissent in symbolic ways, like the dissident youth groups such as the ‘Edelweiss Pirates’ or the swing culture. For many who refused to assent or conform to the regime, there was little that simply keeping faith with like-minded souls could hope to achieve. Attempts by better-placed individuals who moved in elite circles and could hope to influence foreign opinion or alter the course of events, such as Adam von Trott, were for a variety of reasons unsuccessful. A few individuals were simply unlucky. Hitler had extraordinary good fortune in escaping assassination attempts, as when the Swabian carpenter Georg Elser single-handedly succeeded in hollowing out a pillar in the Munich Beer Hall and installing a bomb timed to go off when Hitler would be giving his speech commemorating the 1923 putsch. Unfortunately for Elser’s plans, on the particular night of 9–10 November 1939, it was foggy in Munich; Hitler decided at the last minute not to fly back to Berlin as planned, but rather to leave early and take the overnight train. He thus had left the hall when the bomb exploded. Elser was arrested crossing the border to Switzerland. After detention in concentration camps throughout the war, he was finally shot in Dachau in April 1945. A group of Catholic students in Munich, known as the ‘White Rose’ group led by Hans and Sophie Scholl, were equally courageous in their printing and distribution of leaflets criticising the regime. Their attempts to rouse public opinion, and to connect with other resistance groups in positions to affect the regime, could do little more than keep a flame of morality burning among the prevailing self-centredness, conformity and apathy. They were caught and executed, still in their early twenties. Many others too paid with their lives.
The resistance which received most public attention in West Germany after the war was the so-called July Plot of 1944. This constituted, however, a somewhat ambiguous legacy for West German democracy. Many individuals associated with the July Plot had earlier helped the Nazi regime to power and sustained it in the 1930s. Conservative nationalists had shared many of the revisionist foreign policy goals of Hitler, and for many doubts had begun to grow only after 1938. Hopes of toppling Hitler and replacing him by a conservative regime were faced with a number of difficulties, including the oath of obedience sworn to Hitler by the army, as well as the early successes of the war which made circumstances less propitious for a coup attempt. By the summer of 1944, Germany’s eventual defeat was becoming increasingly inevitable, and the accusation can be levelled against the military resistance that they simply wanted to salvage Germany from total destruction and occupation. Moreover, even taking into account differences of opinion among nationalist resistance circles about the form a post-Hitler regime should take, most of them were essentially anti-democratic in outlook. They wanted an authoritarian government by elites, and not a return to the sort of constitution embodied in the Weimar Republic; they disliked the idea of mass participation in government, and had little conception of any need for popular legitimation of a new government. In the event, their conceptions of alternative government could never be realised. The attempt by Stauffenberg to kill Hitler failed. A briefcase containing a bomb was placed by Stauffenberg under the large table in the Wolf’s Lair where Hitler and others were engaged in military planning. The bomb successfully went off, and Stauffenberg, seeing the explosion after leaving the building, returned to Berlin reporting success. But the weighty
Plate 39. Although the railway lines are grassing over, and the remains of the gas chambers are falling into weed-covered rubble-holes – with passing Polish peasants going about their business much as they did when the smoke still rose from the crematoria – Auschwitz-Birkenau casts a shadow over German history which cannot be erased.
table, under which the briefcase had been pushed, shielded Hitler from the full blast of the explosion, and he survived relatively unscathed. In the wake of the July Plot the reign of terror was intensified to an extraordinary degree. Not only were the main participants in the plot arrested and killed in the most gruesome manner, but thousands more were also rounded up, imprisoned, tortured and in many cases put to death. Penalties for even the most minor ‘crimes against the regime’ in the winter of 1944–5 were increased, so that thousands of ordinary Germans were executed for such offences as listening to foreign radio broadcasts or making political jokes, as the many agonising detailed case-histories in Berlin’s Plo ̈tzen see jail testify.
Despite a German counter-offensive in the winter of 1944–5, by the spring of 1945 it was clear to Germany’s leaders that the war was lost. Hitler’s ‘scorched-earth’ policy exacerbated the destruction of Germany: Hitler instructed his people to fight to the last, never to surrender and to leave nothing to the victors to inherit. Hitler’s view was that if the German people were not strong enough to win, then they did not deserve to survive at all. Hitler, too, went down with the country he had led to ruin. In a sort of Wagnerian Go ̈tterda ̈mmerung, in his bunker under the ruins of Berlin, with the advancing Russian army ever closer, Hitler married his long- time faithful friend, Eva Braun, on 29 April 1945; and on 30 April they committed suicide. Their remains were incinerated by members of Hitler’s entourage. On 2 May Berlin capitulated to the Russians, and on 7–8 May the unconditional surrender of Germany was signed.A brief provisiona lgovernment under Do ̈nitz was dissolved on 23 May, and the occupying powers assumed supreme power in Germany. Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich had ended in ruins and ashes, after twelve years which had profoundly affected the course of history. The Nazi ‘national awakening’ and ‘revolution’ had ultimately achieved only genocide and suicide; millions lay dead, the destruction was almost immeasurable; the credibility of the old German elites had been destroyed, the cycle of tensions from Imperial Germany brought to a halt; but it was far from clear, in the devastated conditions of Germany in May 1945, what form the future could possibly take.the weimar republic: origins and early years
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