Hitler

only in terms of triumph, to counter all appearances by celebrating even the severest setbacks as victories. In spite of their disappointment the Nazis therefore pretended that the election results were an overwhelming success and made this assumed success the basis for a historic mission—“to execute the verdict that the people have passed upon Marxism.” Immediately after the election the Center protested the raising of the swastika flag on public buildings. Goring haughtily replied that “the preponderant part of the German population” had declared its adherence to the swastika flag on March 5. He added: “I am responsible for seeing that the will of the majority of the German people is observed, but not the wishes of a group which apparently has failed to understand the signs of the times.”

In the cabinet session of March 7 Hitler brashly claimed that the election had been a “revolution.” During the next four days he seized control in the states in the equivalent of a coup d’etat. The SA everywhere played its customary part of embodying the wrath of a people outraged beyond the point of self- control. Storm troopers marched through the streets, besieged government offices, demanded the deposition of mayors, police commissioners, and finally the state governments themselves. In Hamburg, Bremen, and Lubeck, the Free Cities, and in Hesse, Baden-Wurttemberg, and Saxony the same procedures forced the governments to resign and thus left the road clear for a “nationalist” cabinet.

Sometimes the careful language of legality cracked, and the real voice of the new masters was heard. “The government will strike down with all brutality anyone who opposes it,” Wilhelm Murr, gauleiter of Wurttemberg, declared after his manipulated election as the new governor of the state. “We do not say: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. No, if anyone strikes an eye from us, we will chop off his head, and if anyone knocks out one of our teeth, we will smash in his jaw.” In Bavaria Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, assisted by Ernst Rohm and Heinrich Himmler, forced Premier Held to resign on March 9 and promptly had the government building occupied. In Munich a few days earlier the state government, in an effort to fend off Gleichschaltung (forcible co-ordination), had considered restoring the monarchy under Crown Prince Rupprecht. The Bavarians warned that they would arrest any Reich commissioner who attempted to cross the line of the Main River. But now it turned out that the Reich commissioner had long been inside the country and that his popularity was far greater than that of any ministers of the state government. On March 9 state governmental authority was transferred to General von Epp, the same von Epp who had smashed soviet rule in Bavaria in 1919. Three days later, Hitler came to Munich. That morning he had announced over the radio that the black-red-goid colors of the Weimar Republic were abolished; henceforth the black-white-red flag and the swastika flag would together constitute the colors of the nation. Simultaneously, “to celebrate the victory” of the Nationalist forces, he had ordered a three-day display of flags. Now he declared “the first part of the struggle” ended, and added: “The co-ordination of the political will of the states with the will of the nation has been completed.”

The fact was that co-ordination—Gleichschaltung—was the peculiar form in which the Nazi revolution was carried to completion. In the preceding years Hitler had repeatedly decried old-fashioned and sentimental revolutionaries who saw in revolution “a spectacle for the masses.” “We aren’t wild-eyed revolutionaries who are counting on the lumpenproletariat.” The revolution Hitler had in mind was not a matter of rioting but of directed confusion, not anarchy but the triumph of orderly violence. He therefore noted with distinct displeasure the acts of terrorism that erupted immediately after the election, committed by SA men additionally inflamed by the noisy slogans of victory. Such acts disturbed him not because they were violent, but because they were undirected. In the Chemnitz district of Saxony five Communists were murdered within two days, and the editor of a Social Democratic newspaper was shot down. In Gleiwitz a hand grenade was thrown through the window of a Center deputy. In Dusseldorf armed storm troopers forced their way into a meeting being held by the mayor and lashed one of the participants with a whip. In Dresden the SA broke up a concert by the conductor Fritz Busch. In Kiel they killed a Social Democratic lawyer. They harassed Jewish businesses, released party members from prison, occupied banks, forced the dismissal of politically unpalatable officials. The number of deaths within the first few months has been reckoned at between 500 and 600; the number of those swept off to the abject concentration camps—the establishment of which was announced by Frick as early as March 8—has been estimated at about 100,000.

As always in Nazi behavior, the motive forces are a tangle of political elements, personal spite, and cold calculation. This is apparent from the names of some of the victims. Alongside the anarchist poet Erich Muhsam, we find, in the list of the murdered, the theatrical agent Rotter and his wife; the former Nazi deputy Schafer, who had given the Boxheim Papers to the authorities; the professional clairvoyant Hanussen; Major Hunglinger of the Bavarian police, who had opposed Hitler at the Burgerbraukeller on November 9, 1923; the former SS leader Erhard Heiden; and, finally, one Ali Hohler, who happened to be the killer of Horst Wessel.

Yet Hitler assumed a sharp and injured tone when reproved by his bourgeois partners for the mounting “rule of the streets.” He told Papen that in fact he admired “the incredible discipline” of his SA and SS men. “Some day the judgment of history will not spare us a reproach because in a historic hour, ourselves perhaps already sicklied o’er by the weakness and cowardice of our bourgeois world, we proceeded with kid gloves instead of with an iron fist.” He would not let anyone deter him from his mission of exterminating Marxism, he said, and therefore “most insistently” requested Papen “henceforth no longer to bring up these complaints.”

Nevertheless, on March 10 he told the SA and SS “to see to it that the nationalist revolution of 1933 will never be compared with the revolution of knapsack Spartacists in 1918.”⁷

The SA men took such restraints in bad part. They had always assumed that coming to power would entitle them to the open use of force without having to account to anyone. Their brutalities, in fact, were meant in part to “give the revolution its true tone.” For years they had been promised that after victory Germany would belong to them. Was this pledge to turn into a mere figure of speech? To their minds, very specific things went with it; they were counting on being made officers and administrative chiefs, on receiving sinecures and pensions. But Hitler’s plan merely envisaged—at least in its first phase—sufficient pressure to bring about a complete change of personnel in key positions. As for the great mass of smaller bureaucrats, Hitler counted on their being tricked or frightened into co-operation. But the storm troopers had to be mollified as well. “The hour for smashing the Communists is coming!” he promised them as early as the beginning of February.

The disappointments of the SA constituted the hopes of the bourgeoisie. That class had looked to the brown pretorians to restore order, not to make things worse by excesses, killings, and the establishment of sinister concentration camps. They were therefore pleased to see that the SA was being set to such harmless activities as going around with collection boxes or marching in a body to church services. The deceptive notion of a moderate Hitler, the guardian of law and order, forever trying to subdue his radical followers—this notion so necessary for his good repute came into being in this early period.

In addition Nazi propaganda had coined a “second magic phrase” that immensely assisted the process of legal revolution. This phrase was the “National Rising.” It could serve as camouflage for the most brazen behavior on the part of the Nazis and as a cloak for a good many acts of violence. Moreover, it offered a slogan full of reverberations to a country still suffering from national inferiority feelings. By such creative use of language the Nazis were able to accomplish their aims and paralyze a broad sector of the public, from their conservative colleagues in the cabinet to the ordinary bourgeois citizen. They encountered no resistance. On the contrary, their seizure of power was actually hailed as a “nonpartisan” breakthrough.

Such was the pattern of thought and feeling that was imposed upon the nation and from which there was henceforth no escape. At its center, subject to innumerable and sometimes grotesque variations, stood the propaganda creation known as the Volkskanzler, the populist Chancellor remote from partisan disputes and petty selfish interests, concerned only with the law and the good of the nation. Goebbels personally now assumed the task of constructing and cultivating this image. On March 13 Hindenburg had signed the measure installing Goebbels in the post planned for him from the start but so far postponed out of consideration for the other partners in the coalition, the post of Reich Minister for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda. In establishing the Propaganda Ministry Hitler was riding roughshod over his previous pledge- that the composition of the cabinet would be unalterable.

The new minister snatched sizable administrative areas from his colleagues. But at the same time he adopted a manner of courteous urbanity that contrasted favorably with the victory-drunk, “slap-in-the-face” tone taken by most of the Nazi leaders. In his first speech to the press, in which he outlined his program, he stated that “in instituting the new Ministry the government is carrying out its plan of no longer neglecting the people. This government is a people’s government…. The new Ministry will enlighten the people concerning the plans of the administration, with the aim of establishing political coordination [Gleichschaltung]