Once again all technical media were utilized—this time with the prestige and support of the government. The country was inundated with appeals, slogans, parades, displays of banners. Once again Hitler was flying over Germany. Goebbels had hit on a new propaganda tool—radio. “Our opponents did not know what to do with its possibilities,” the propaganda chief wrote. “We must learn all the better how to handle it.” As Hitler visited city after city, the local radio station was to report on his appearance. “We will have our broadcasts held in the midst of the people and so give the listener a vivid picture of what goes on at our meetings. For each of the FUhrer’s speeches I myself will give an introduction in which I mean to try to convey to the listener the magic and the atmosphere of our mass demonstrations.”
A considerable portion of the expenses for the election campaign was obtained at an affair in the palace of the Reichstag President, to which Goring invited a number of leading businessmen on February 20. Among the participants were Hjalmar Schacht, Krupp von Bohlen, Albert Vogler of Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel), Georg von Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, the banker Kurt von Schroder, and other representatives of heavy industry, mining, and banking. In his speech to these notables Hitler once again emphasized the difference between the authoritarian ideology of employers and the democratic Constitution, which he derided as the political expression of weakness and decadence. He hailed the tightly organized ideological state as the sole possible means for combating the Communist menace, and lauded the supreme right of the great individual. He had refused to be merely tolerated by the Center, he continued. Hugenberg and the German Nationalists were only holding him back. To vanquish the enemy once and for all, he must have full control of the state. In language that abandoned even the sham of legality, he called upon his listeners for financial assistance: “We now are facing the last election. Whatever its outcome, there is no going backward…. One way or another, if the election does not decide, the decision will have to be taken in another way.” Goring followed up the appeal with a few remarks. The contribution, he said, “would surely come all the more easily to industry if it knew that the election on March 5 would surely be the last for ten years, or even for a hundred years.” Thereupon Schacht turned to the company, saying, “And now, gentlemen, to the cashier!” He proposed the creation of an “election fund” and promptly collected from the leading industrial firms at least 3 million marks, possibly more.1
In his campaign speeches, too, Hitler abandoned a good deal of his restraint. “The period of international babble, the promise of reconciliation among nations, is over and done with; its place will be taken by the German People’s Community,” he declared in Kassel. In Stuttgart he promised to “burn out the symptoms of rottenness and eliminate the poison.” He was determined, he said, “under no circumstances to let Germany fall back into the past regime.” He carefully avoided defining his program in detail (“We do not want to lie and we do not want to deceive… and give cheap promises”); his only specific statement was his pledge “never, never… to depart from the task of exterminating Marxism and everything connected with it” in Germany. The “first point” in his program would be to notify the adversary: “Away with all illusions!” Four years hence he would give the German people another chance to vote for him, but he would give no such opportunity to the parties of disintegration. Then let the German people judge, he exclaimed, falling into that messianic tone to which he was so prone at that period. He would admit no other judge, but “for my part the people may crucify me if they think that I have not done my duty.”2
One of the stratagems of legal revolution was not to openly crush the adversary, but instead to provoke him to acts of violence so that he himself provided the pretext for legal measures of repression. Goebbels described these tactics in a diary note dated January 31: “For the present we intend to refrain from direct countermeasures [against the Communists], First the Bolshevist attempt at revolution must flare up. Then we will strike at the proper moment.” This was Hitler’s old dream: to be called in at the climax of a Communist uprising, and annihilate the great foe in a single dramatic clash. Then he would be hailed by the nation as the restorer of order and granted legitimacy and respect. As early as the first cabinet meeting of January 30, therefore, he had dismissed Hugenberg’s proposal that the Communist Party be banned outright, its seats in the Reichstag withdrawn, thus assuring a parliamentary majority by doing away with the need for new elections.
He was worried, however, that the Communists might be in no position for a full-scale, vigorous act of rebellion. At various times he had expressed doubts of their revolutionary impetus—which, incidentally, Goebbels had also done early in 1932 when he said he could no longer see them as a danger. As a matter of fact, Nazi propaganda had to work hard to create the necessary bogey man. The revelations about the tons of seditious material found in Communist Party headquarters served this purpose along with a flock of rumors, obviously inspired by the Nazis themselves from the middle of February on, concerning a plan to assassinate Hitler. Rosa Luxemburg’s vain question of 1918, “Where is the German proletariat?” remained unanswered this time as well. To be sure, a few street battles occurred during the early weeks of February, but these were all local clashes. There was no sign of a centrally directed attempt at a major uprising of the sort that could stimulate full-blown anxiety complexes. Partly, the reason for this was the Depression and the depleted energies of the working class. But the principal reason was the grotesque error of the Communist leadership in its estimate of the historical situation. In spite of persecution and torture, the flight of many comrades and the mass defections of their followers, the Communists clung to their doctrine that the real enemy was Social Democracy, that there was nothing to choose between Fascism and parliamentary democracy, and that Hitler was merely a puppet whose installation in power was only bringing the victory of Communism closer. In this stage of history, the Communist leaders preached, patience was the supreme revolutionary virtue.
These tactical errors evidently expressed an underlying shift in the realities of power. One of the strange aspects of the seizure of power was the disappearance of the enemy at the moment of confrontation. For a long time the Communists had provided Nazism with psychological nourishment. The Red menace had been the crucial inspiration, had sparked the growth of National Socialism into a mass movement. Now a Communist following numbering millions, forming a powerful and effective threat, terrifying the bourgeoisie, had evaporated without even token resistance, without dramatic action, without so much as sounding the trumpet blast for “the final conflict.” If we accept the principle that we cannot speak of Fascism without mentioning both capitalism and Communism, the historical links to both were snapped at this time. Henceforth Fascism was neither an instrument nor a negation nor a mirror image of anything. During those days of the seizure of power it came into its own. And from then on, right to the end, Communism would not again emerge as a counterforce provoking a Fascist reaction.
The dramatic Reichstag fire of February 28, 1933, must be seen against this background, as well as the years of discussion that followed over the authorship of this deed. The Communists always passionately denied any connection with the fire, and in fact they had no motive whatsoever for it. For this very reason it was possible to paint a convincing picture of Nazi responsibility, since the fire fitted so neatly into the pattern of Hitler’s strategy. For a long time the argument that the Nazis themselves were the incendiaries went almost unchallenged, although details remained unclarified.
In the early sixties Fritz Tobias published a study of the Reichstag fire which analyzed the many crude partisan fictions and myths that had grown up around the subject. Tobias came to the conclusion that the Nazis did not set fire to the Reichstag, that the act was in fact committed by the half-naked Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe who was caught in the burning building, dripping with sweat and triumphantly babbling, “Protest! Protest!” Tobias mustered a good deal of convincing evidence for his thesis. But considerable doubts remain, and the controversy has continued.3 We need not go into it ourselves, since the question of what individual set the fire is a criminological one, with only small bearing on our understanding of the political currents. By instantly taking advantage of the fire to further their plans for dictatorship, the Nazis made the deed their own and manifested their complicity in a sense that is independent of “whodunit” questions. In Nuremberg Goring admitted that the wave of arrests and persecutions would have been carried out in any case, that the Reichstag fire only accelerated those steps.4
The first measures were taken at once, right on the spot. Hitler had been spending the evening of February 27 in Goebbels’s apartment on Reichskanzlerplatz. A telephone call from Hanfstaengl informed Goebbels that the Reichstag was in flames. Goebbels at first assumed that this report was a “wild fantasy” and forbore to tell Hitler. But, shortly afterward, the news was confirmed, and he then passed it on. Hitler’s spontaneous exclamation, “Now I have them,” indicated how he meant to use the event tactically and propagandistically. Immediately afterward, the two raced “at sixty miles an hour” down Charlottenburger Chaussee to the Reichstag. Clambering over fire hoses, they finally reached the grand lobby. Here they met Goring, who had arrived first and was “going great guns.” He had already issued the obvious statements about an organized political action by the Communists,
