I

That Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor was no ordinary change of government became immediately clear, as Goebbels organized a torchlit parade of brownshirts, Steel Helmets and SS men through Berlin, beginning at seven in the evening on 30 January 1933 and going on well past midnight. One pro-Nazi newspaper, carried away with enthusiasm, put the number of marchers at 700,000.¹ More plausible than this quite fantastic figure was the report of another paper, which described the parades sympathetically as ‘an unforgettable experience’, that 18,000 brownshirts and SS men, 3,000 Steel Helmets and 40,000 non-uniformed civilians, 61,000 in all had taken part; a third estimate from a more hostile source put the number of uniformed marchers at no more than 20,000. Crowds of curious onlookers lined the streets to watch the march. Many cheered as the paramilitaries passed by. The spectacle was typical of the kind of stage-management which Goebbels was to perfect over the coming years. Watching the march in a Berlin street, the young Hans-Joachim Heldenbrand happened to be standing at the spot where the stormtroopers paused to exchange their guttering torches for new, freshly lit ones. Scanning their faces as the evening went on, he began to notice the same men appearing in front of him again and again. ‘There,’ said his father to him, ‘you see the con trick. They’re constantly marching round in a circle as if there were a hundred thousand of them.’²

As the columns of uniformed paramilitaries marched past, the aged Hindenburg came to the first-floor window of his official residence to take the salute. To symbolize the relative positions of Nationalists and Nazis in the new government, Goebbels had arranged for the SA to head up the parade and the Steel Helmets to follow them. After Hindenburg had been standing stiffly for some hours, his attention began to slip and his mind to wander back to the glorious early days of the First World War. One of his entourage later told the British writer John Wheeler-Bennett:

The brownshirts passed at a shambling pace, to be followed by the field-grey ranks of the Steel Helmets, moving with a precision born of discipline. The old Marshal watched them from his window as in a dream, and those behind him saw him beckon over his shoulder. ‘Ludendorff’, the old man said, with a return to its harsh barking, ‘how well your men are marching, and what a lot of prisoners they’ve taken!’³

Befuddled or not, Hindenburg was presented by the Nationalist press as the central figure in the jubilation, and the parades as a ‘tribute to Hindenburg’ by ‘his people’.⁴ The police did their part, accompanying and, in effect, taking part in the general jubilation, and beaming a searchlight on the window where the President stood, so that everyone could observe him acknowledging the cheers of the marchers.⁵ Black, white and red flags were everywhere. Over the radio, Hermann Goring compared the crowds to those who had gathered to celebrate the outbreak of the First World War. The ‘mood’, he said, ‘could only be compared with that of August 1914, when a nation also rose up to defend everything it possessed.’ The ‘shame and disgrace of the last fourteen years’ had been wiped out. The spirit of 1914 had been revived.⁶ These were sentiments with which every Nationalist could agree. Germany, as one Nationalist paper declared, was witnessing a ‘second August-miracle’.⁷ A few days later, seeing the marchers on the streets amongst the crowds, Louise Solmitz made the same comparison: ‘It was like 1914, everyone could have fallen into everyone else’s arms in the name of Hitler. Intoxication without wine.’⁸ She may not have recalled at that moment that the spirit of 1914 betokened war: the mobilization of an entire people as the basis for waging armed conflict, the suppression of internal dissent as preparation for international aggression. But this was what the Nazis were now aiming for, as Göring’s statement implied. From 30 January onwards, German society was to be put as quickly as possible on a permanent war footing.⁹

Goebbels was jubilant at the celebrations. He had already been able to organize a live commentary on the state radio, though as yet he had no official position in the new cabinet. The results more than met his expectations:

Great jubilation. Down there the people are creating an uproar ... The torches come. It starts at 7 o‘clock. Endless. Till 10 o’clock. At the Kaiserhof. Then the Reich Chancellery. Till after 12 o’clock. Unending. A million people on the move. The Old Man takes the salute at the march-past. Hitler in the house next door. Awakening! Spontaneous explosion of the people. Indescribable. Always new masses. Hitler is in raptures. His people are cheering him ... Wild frenzy of enthusiasm. Prepare the election campaign. The last. We’ll win it hands down.¹⁰

Choruses of the national anthem alternated with the Horst Wessel Song as the uniformed columns marched on, through the Brandenburg Gate and past the government buildings.¹¹

Many people found themselves caught up in the enthusiastic demonstrations. The torchlit parades were repeated in many other towns and cities outside Berlin on the following evenings.¹² In Berlin, on the afternoon of 31 January, the National Socialist German Students’ League staged its own parade, which ended up in front of the Stock Exchange (‘The “Mecca” of German Jewry’, as a right-wing newspaper put it). Emerging stockbrokers were greeted by the students with chants of ‘Judah perish!’¹³ Watching another torchlit parade in Hamburg on 6 February, Louise Solmitz was ‘drunk with enthusiasm, blinded by the light of the torches right in our faces, and always enveloped in their vapour as in a sweet cloud of incense’. Like many respectable bourgeois families, the Solmitzes took their children to witness the extraordinary scenes: ‘So far, the impressions they had had of politics’, Solmitz remarked, ‘had been so deplorable that they should now have a really strong impression of nationhood, as we had once, and keep it as a memory. And so they did.’ From ten at night onwards, she reported,

20,000 brownshirts followed one another like waves in the sea, their faces shone with enthusiasm in the light of the torches. ‘For our Leader, our Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, a threefold Hail!’ They sang ‘The Republic is shit’ ... Next to us a little boy 3 years of age raised his tiny hand again and again: ‘Hail Hitler, Hail Hitler-man!’ ‘Death to the Jews’ was also sometimes called out and they sang of the blood of the Jews which would squirt from their knives.

‘Who took that seriously then?’, she added later to her diary.¹⁴

The young Melita Maschmann was taken by her conservative parents to watch the torchlight parade on 30 January, and remembered the scene vividly many years later, recalling not just the enthusiasm but also the threatening undertones of violence and aggression that accompanied the parade, including

the crashing tread of the feet, the sombre pomp of the red and black flags, the flickering light from the torches on the faces and the songs with melodies that were at once inflaming and sentimental.

For hours the columns marched by. Again and again amongst them we saw groups of boys and girls scarcely older than ourselves... At one point somebody suddenly leaped from the ranks of the marchers and struck a man who had been standing only a few paces away from us. Perhaps he had made a hostile remark. I saw him fall to the ground with blood streaming down his face and I heard him cry out. Our parents hurriedly drew us away from the scuffle, but they had not been able to stop us seeing the man bleeding. The image of him haunted me for days.

The horror it inspired in me was almost imperceptibly spiced with an intoxicating joy. ‘We want to die for the flag’, the torch-bearers had sung... I was overcome with a burning desire to belong to these people for whom it was a matter of death and life ... I wanted to escape from my childish, narrow life and I wanted to attach myself to something that was great and fundamental.¹⁵

For such respectable middle-class people, the violence that accompanied the marches seemed incidental and not particularly threatening. But for others, Hitler’s appointment already presaged disaster. As the foreign press corps observed the march-past from a window of the Reich Press Office, one journalist was heard to remark that they were witnessing the equivalent of Mussolini’s seizure of power in Italy eleven years before - ‘the march on Rome in German form’.¹⁶

Communists, in particular, knew that the Hitler government was likely to crack down hard on their activities. Already on the evening of 30 January, the right-wing press was calling for the party to be banned after shots were fired from a house in Charlottenburg at a marching column of torch-bearing stormtroopers, resulting in the death of a policeman as well as a brownshirt.¹⁷ The Red Flag was banned and copies confiscated, and the police made more than sixty arrests as a shooting-match broke out between Nazis and Communists in Spandau.¹⁸ There were similar, though less spectacular clashes in Düsseldorf, Halle, Hamburg and Mannheim, while elsewhere the police immediately proscribed all demonstrations by the Communists. In Altona, Chemnitz, Müncheberg, Munich and Worms, and various working-class districts in Berlin, the Communists staged public demonstrations against the new cabinet. Five thousand workers were reported to have marched against the new cabinet in Weissenfels, and there were similar, though smaller demonstrations elsewhere. ¹⁹ In one of the most remarkable of these, in the little Württemberg town of Mössingen, where nearly a third of the votes had been cast for the Communists in the 1932 elections, the men staged a general strike. With up to 800 from a total population of no more than 4,000 marching through the streets against the new government, the inhabitants of the small industrial centre soon learned the realities of the situation, as the police moved in and began to arrest those identified as the ringleaders, eventually apprehending over 80 participants, 71 of whom were subsequently convicted of treason. In charge of the police operation was the conservative Catholic government of the Württemberg State President Eugen Bolz, who evidently feared a general Communist uprising. Looking back on these events many years later, one of the participants said proudly that if everyone else had followed the example of Mössingen, the Nazis would never have succeeded. For another, it was an equal source of pride that, as he said with pardonable exaggeration, ‘Nothing happened, not nowhere, except here.’²⁰

In a number of towns and cities there was a good deal of preparedness on the part of rank-and-file members of the labour parties to collaborate in the face of the Nazi threat. But neither the Communists nor the Social Democrats did anything to co-ordinate protest measures on a wider scale. Although the Communist Party did immediately urge a general strike, it knew that the prospects of one occurring were zero without the co-operation of the unions and the Social Democrats, who were unwilling to allow themselves to be manipulated in this way. For the Comintern, the appointment of the Hitler cabinet showed that monopoly capital had succeeded in co-opting the Nazis into its plans to break the proletariat’s resistance to the creation of a fascist dictatorship. The key figure in the cabinet according to this view was thus Hugenberg, the representative of industry and the big estates. Hitler was nothing more than his tool.²¹ A number of left-wing Social Democrats, including Kurt Schumacher, one of the party’s most prominent Reichstag deputies, shared this view. The Communists also feared that the ‘fascist dictatorship’ would mean a violent crack-down on the labour movement, increased exploitation of the workers, a headlong drive towards an ‘imperialist war’.²² By i February 1933 the Communist press was already reporting a ‘wave of banning orders in the Reich‘, and a ‘storm over Germany’ in which ’Nazi terror bands’ were murdering workers and smashing up trade union premises and Communist Party offices. More would surely come.²³

Others were less sure of what the new cabinet meant. So many governments, so many Reich Chancellors, had come and gone over the past few years that a number of people evidently thought the new one would make little difference and be as short-lived as its predecessors. Even the enthusiastic Louise Solmitz noted in her diary:

And what a cabinet!!! As we didn’t dare dream of in July. Hitler, Hugenberg, Seldte, Papen!!! On each of them hangs a large part of my German hope. National Socialist élan, German Nationalist reason, the unpolitical Steel Helmets and Papen, whom we have not forgotten. It is so inexpressibly beautiful that I’m writing it down quickly before the first discordant note is struck ...²⁴

To many readers of the newspapers that reported Hitler’s appointment, the jubilation of the brownshirts must have appeared exaggerated. The key feature of the new government, symbolized by the participation of the Steel Helmets in the march-past, was surely the heavy numerical domination of the conservatives. ‘No nationalistic, no revolutionary government, although it carries Hitler’s name’, confided a Czech diplomat based in Berlin to his diary: ‘No Third Reich, hardly even a 2½.’²⁵ A more alarmist note was sounded by the French ambassador, André François-Poncet. The perceptive diplomat noted that the conservatives were right to expect Hitler to agree to their programme of ‘the crushing of the left, the purging of the bureaucracy, the assimilation of Prussia and the Reich, the reorganization of the army, the re-establishment of military service’. They had put Hitler into the Chancellery in order to discredit him, he observed; ‘they have believed themselves to be very ingenious, ridding themselves of the wolf by introducing him into the sheepfold.’²⁶