By now Hitler was no longer content to justify his expansionist aims on grounds of military geography and the need to acquire new sources of food. To these arguments he now added the Depression, whose cause, he claimed to be lack of
This speech is another example of Hitler’s tendency to make new combinations out of disparate ideas. The structure of his thinking was such that he understood every phenomenon merely as a further argument for ideas long ago fixed—even if that involved grotesquely misunderstanding the nature of the phenomena, as he was doing with regard to the Depression. And, as always, the only solution he recognized was in the realm of violence. At the same time, the speech also reveals the continuity in Hitler’s thought. It gives the lie to those theorists who maintain that responsibility did indeed have a moderating effect upon him, and pretend to see a later change in Hitler’s personality—usually ascribed to the year 1938—when he fell back into the old aggressive hate complexes or, according to another version, into a new pathological system of delusions.
Though Hitler freely borrowed the well-tested Bolshevik and Fascist formulas for the
It was important, first of all, to adapt the terrorist practices of the preceding months to the new situation. Thus, while he continued to send his brown auxiliary troops on revolutionary rampages, he permitted a few of these “excesses” to be punished by legal action. In any particular case it would be difficult to say that justice was being done, but the impression was created that the Nazis were maintaining discipline. A convincing screen of legality concealed the real nature of the regime.
Similarly, many of the old institutional facades were left intact. In their shadow fundamental upheavals in all conditions and relationships could be carried on unhindered, until at last people no longer knew whether the system was acting justly or unjustly and could no longer decide between loyalty and opposition. Thus the paradoxical concept of the legal revolution was a good deal “more than a propagandistic trick.” It was basic to Hitler’s whole program for entrenching himself. Hitler himself later declared that Germany at that time thirsted for order, so that he was obliged to shun any open use of force. In one of his despairing moods during the last days of January, when he was reviewing all the mistakes and omissions of the past, he roundly condemned the Germans’ craving for law and order. Their mania for legalism and profound dislike of chaos had made the revolution of 1918 an indecisive affair, but it had also caused his own failure in the Munich putsch of 1923. He blamed himself along with all other Germans for the halfway measures, the compromises, and the eschewing of a bloody surprise operation: “Had we gone ahead as we should have, thousands would have been eliminated at that time…. Only afterwards does one regret having been so good.”
At the moment, to be sure, the strategy of encasing a revolution within a legal framework was proving highly successful. Before February was over, three decrees decided the whole future course of events—and yet their legitimacy seemed guaranteed by the bourgeois associates at Hitler’s side, by Hindenburg’s signature, and by the accompanying fog of nationalistic slogans. As early as February 4 the decree “For the protection of the German people” was issued. It permitted the government on the vaguest grounds to forbid political meetings and ban the newspapers and publications of the rival parties. Almost at once the government moved against deviant political views of all kinds. A congress of leftist intellectuals and artists was banned shortly after it opened, purportedly because of atheistic statements made by some of the delegates. Two days later another emergency measure, a kind of second
With every day that passed the Nazis were penetrating deeper into the administrative apparatus. Hitler’s script for legal revolution had assigned a special role to Goring, whose fatness lent a jovial note to outright brutality. According to the new arrangements, von Papen held governmental authority in Prussia; but the real power was in Goring’s hands. While the Vice-Chancellor continued to hope that his “educational work in the cabinet” would succeed, Goring was installing a number of so-called honorary commissioners in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Such men as SS Oberfuhrer Kurt Daluege at once took hold in this ministry, which constituted the largest administrative apparatus in Germany. By a massive series of personnel shifts, dismissals, and appointments “the System bigwigs are being thrown out one after the other,” as a contemporary report put it. “From high-ranking official down to doorkeeper, this ruthless purge is going on.”
Goring kept his eye particularly on the police chiefs; within a short time he replaced most of them by high- ranking SA leaders. On February 17 he issued a decree ordering the police to “establish the finest concord with the nationalist associations (SA, SS, and Stahlhelm),” but in dealing with the Left the police were “to make free use of their weapons whenever necessary.” In a later speech he explicitly confirmed these instructions: “Every bullet that is now fired from the barrel of a police pistol is my bullet. If that is called murder, then I have committed murder, for I have ordered it all; I take the responsibility for it.”
Out of an inconspicuous minor department in Berlin police headquarters, which had been detailed to keep watch on anti-Constitutional activities, Goring began building the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), soon to become notorious as the Gestapo. Within four years, its budget had increased forty times. It had 4,000 men in Berlin alone. In order to “relieve the burden on the ordinary police in special cases,”’ on February 22 Goring set up an auxiliary police force approximately 50,000 strong, consisting chiefly of SA and SS men. This amounted to dropping the fiction of police neutrality and openly admitting the link between the party toughs and the forces of law and order. Henceforth, Nazi excesses became governmental action. “My measures,” Goring boasted, “will not be sicklied o’er by any legal scruples. My measures will not be sicklied o’er by any bureaucracy. It’s not my business to do justice; it’s my business to annihilate and exterminate, that’s all!”
This challenge was directed chiefly against the Communists. Not only were they the main enemy; they also would hold the balance in the next Reichstag. Three days after the formation of the cabinet, Goring had already banned all Communist meetings in Prussia in response to the Communist Party’s call for a general strike and demonstrations. Nevertheless, the muffled civil war continued; in the first few days of February there were clashes costing fifteen lives and ten times that number of wounded. On February 24 the police made a large-scale raid on the Communist Party headquarters, Karl Liebknccht House on Bulow Platz in Berlin. It had long since been abandoned by the Communist Party leadership, but the very next day the press and radio reported sensational finds of “tons of treasonous materials.” Subsequently these documents—which were never published—provided Nazi electioneering with atrocity stories of a projected Communist revolution: “The populace is to be terrified and cowed by preliminary measures involving murderous attacks etc. upon leaders of the nation and government, assaults upon vital factories and public buildings, poisoning of entire groups of especially feared persons, the taking of hostages, the kidnapping of wives and children of prominent men,” the police report stated. Nevertheless, the Communist Party was not banned, for that might have driven its voters into the arms of the Social Democratic Party.
The Nazis intensified their propaganda to make this campaign the noisiest and wildest of all the electoral battles of recent years. Hitler himself, who again made the greatest impact, had opened the campaign with a major speech in the Berlin Sportpalast. In it he verbosely repeated the old cry of fourteen years of shame and misery, the old denunciations of the November criminals and the parties of the “system,” and the old formulas for salvation. He ended on a pseudoreligious note. He had, he cried, the “rock-hard conviction that sooner or later the hour will come in which the millions who hate us today will stand behind us and together with us will hail what we have jointly created, toilsomely struggled for, bitterly paid for: the new German Reich of greatness and honor and power and glory and justice. Amen!”