always be traveling between the chancellery, the Brown House, Obersalzberg, Bayreuth, parade grounds, and meeting halls. As the years went on, his need to be in motion increased. On the morning of July 26, for example, he delivered an address in Munich to a delegation of 470 Italian Young Fascists; at 2 P.M. he attended the funeral of Admiral von Schroeder in Berlin; and by 5 P.M. he was at a concert in Bayreuth. On July 29, still in Bayreuth, he was the guest of honor at a reception given by Winifred Wagner, and the following day laid a wreath on the composer’s grave. In the afternoon he spoke at the German Gymnastic Festival in Stuttgart, then went to Berlin, then to a meeting with high party officials at Obersalzberg. On August 12 he took part in a Richard Wagner Festival in Neuschwanstein, where in the course of his speech he referred to himself as completing the plans of King Ludwig II. From there he returned to Obersalzberg for a week. On August 18 he left for Nuremberg to see to preparations for the party rally, and a day later went to Bad Godesberg for a discussion with SA and SS leaders. It would appear that, now, having achieved success, he was once more prey to the fluctuating desires and interests of his earlier years. Often, he would let himself drift irresolutely for a long while, then he would suddenly display an explosive energy—especially in questions concerning power. In the political realm he manifested a peculiar and surely rare combination of indolence and genius. Soon he was shirking the many burdensome routine duties of his office and brazenly going to the opera or the movies instead. During those early months as Chancellor he once more read through all of Karl May’s nearly seventy volumes of adventure stories—of which he later said that they had opened his eyes to the world. It was this unusual style of undisguised laziness that prompted Oswald Spengler to remark sarcastically that the Third Reich was “the organization of the jobless by the job- shirkers.”36 Rosenberg, for example, was highly indignant that Hitler preferred an ice revue to a demonstration Rosenberg had organized. In years past, Gottfried Feder had wanted to assign an army officer to Hitler to help him handle a proper day’s agenda. But Goebbels explained his master’s working methods in characteristically high-flown terms. “What we… are constantly endeavoring to bring to bear has become for him a system in world-wide dimensions. His creativity is that of the genuine artist, no matter in what field he may be working.”
If we look at the matter in retrospect, Hitler accomplished an amazing amount in the first year of his chancellorship. He had eliminated the Weimar Republic, taken the decisive steps toward building a government dependent upon him personally as leader, had centralized the nation, politically regimented it, and had brought it to the point of becoming the weapon he considered it to be, as indeed he considered everything to be a weapon. He had initiated an economic turnaround, had thrown off the fetters of the League of Nations, and had won the respect of the outside world. Within a short time, a pluralistic free society with its many centers of power and influence had been burned down to “pure, uniform, obedient ashes.” As he himself put it, he had “got rid of a world of opinions and institutions and installed another in its place.” Only disorganized groups without political weight were left of the shattered opposition.
Granted, what Goebbels called the “process of resmelting the nation” had not taken place without the use of violence. But we should not overestimate the part played by brute force in the course of the seizure of power. Hitler spoke of the “least bloody revolution in world history.” This soon became one of the rhetorical slogans of the regime. And it certainly contained a kernel of truth. And yet—consider a decree such as Goring’s of June 22, 1933, “For Combating Griping and Defeatism.” The mere expression of discontent was viewed as a “continuation of Marxist agitation,” and hence a punishable offence. Such a decree made plain what methods were used to heat the smelting crucible.
Similarly, when we contemplate the “miracle” of the folk community, we cannot overlook its illusory character. It was an impressive facade, but for the most part it only covered over and did not eliminate social conflicts. One episode from the first few days of the regime throws light on the way the national “reconciliation” was compounded of coercion and deception. The episode is as grotesque as it is illuminating: on Hitler’s order the notorious leader of “Killer Storm Troop 33,” Hans (“Firebug”) Maikowski, was honored with a state funeral. He had been assassinated on the night of January 30, 1933, returning from the historic torchlight parade. A policeman named Zauritz who had been killed that same night was likewise granted a state funeral. In the name of the “folk community” and over the protests of the church officials, the policeman, who had been a Catholic and a leftist, was without more ado placed on a bier in the Lutheran cathedral alongside the storm trooper, who had been a gangster and a freethinker. To complete the missing element in this forcible reconciliation, the former Crown Prince was sent to lay wreaths on these coffins.
Nevertheless, the second phase of the seizure of power had proceeded more swiftly and more smoothly than anticipated. The necessary measures to organize government and party into a leader state were taken in the course of that legalistic game, which simultaneously prepared the next steps even as it was sanctioning the present one. In the provinces Reichs-tatthalter—federal governors—acted as party bosses, deposing ministers, appointing officials, participating in cabinet meetings, and exercising virtually unlimited authority as soon as the autonomy of the states was abrogated by law and the Reichsrat, the upper house, abolished. The federal government also stripped the states of their judiciary independence. A new organizational scheme for the party divided the country into thirty-two gaus, the gaus into sections, local groups, cells and blocks.
A statute of December 1, 1933, proclaimed the unity of party and state, but in fact Hitler was bent on separating the two. He had his reasons for leaving the national headquarters of the NSDAP in Munich. It was evident that he meant to keep the party from directly affecting government affairs. Hence his appointment of feeble, submissive Rudolf Hess, who lacked any power base of his own, to the post of FUhrer’s deputy. Certainly no political primacy of the National Socialist Party existed. Unity was present only in the person of Hitler, who continued to foster a multiplicity of divided authorities and who allowed the party only in a few special cases to assume governmental functions and carry through its totalitarian claims.
Almost all the powerful institutions in Germany were overwhelmed. Hindenburg no longer counted. He was, as his friend and Neudeck neighbor von Oldenburg-Januschau pungently remarked, “the President we no longer have.” Significantly, the leadership of the party, in taking that mass oath of February 25, swore allegiance to Hitler, not to the President, as should have been the case under the statute promulgating the unity of party and state. The old man still figured in a good many schemes as the supposed embodiment of justice and tradition; but in the meantime he had not only capitulated to Hitler, but allowed Hitler to corrupt him. His willingness to support the Nazi conquest of all power in the state with his moral authority certainly contrasted remarkably with the dour reserve with which he had left the Weimar Republic to its fate. On the anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg the new rulers made him a gift of the Domain of Langenau, which bordered on Neudeck Estate, and the woodlands of Preussenwald, free and clear. He reciprocated with a gesture almost unprecedented in German military history, conferring upon retired Captain Hermann Goring “in recognition of his preeminent services in war and peace” the honorary rank of an infantry general.
The army remained the single institution that had escaped “co-ordination.” The SA was clearly seething with impatience to carry out that final
As always in the decisive situations of his life, he continued to hesitate, to answer those who pressed him to act with “We must let the situation ripen.” But from the spring of 1934 on, forces entered into play that, operating along different paths, accelerated matters. On June 30, 1934, many different interests and impulses coincided, and all met before the rifle barrels of the execution squads.
The Rohm Affair
