II

With the Communists already effectively out of the way since 28 February, and the Enabling Act in force, the regime now turned its attention to the Social Democrats and the trade unions. They had already been subjected to widespread arrests, beatings, intimidation, even murder, and to the occupation of their premises and the banning of their newspapers. Now the full fury of the Nazis was turned upon them. They were in no condition to resist. The ability to work together with the unions had been crucial to the Social Democrats in defeating the Kapp putsch in 1920. But it was no longer present in the spring of 1933. Both wings of the labour movement had been united in their disapproval of the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933. And both had suffered similar acts of violence and repression in the following two months, with trade union premises being occupied and trashed by gangs of stormtroopers in growing numbers. Up to 25 March, according to the unions themselves, union offices had been occupied by brownshirts, SS or police units in 45 separate towns throughout the Reich. Such pressure was the most direct possible threat to the continued existence of the unions as the functional representatives of the workers in negotiating pay and conditions with their employers. It also drove a rapidly deepening cleft between the trade unions on the one hand and the Social Democrats on the other.

As the political repression and marginalization of the Social Democrats rapidly became more obvious, so the trade unions under Theodor Leipart began to try to preserve their existence by distancing themselves from the Social Democratic Party and seeking an accommodation with the new regime. On 21 March the leadership denied any intention of playing a role in politics and declared that it was prepared to carry out the social function of the trade unions ‘whatever the kind of state regime’ in power.¹¹⁵ The Nazis were aware, of course, that they had little support among trade unionists; the Nazi factory cell organization¹¹⁶ was not popular, and only managed single-figure percentages in the great majority of the elections to works councils held in the first months of 1933. Only in a very few areas, like the Krupp works, the chemical industry, some steelworks, or the Ruhr coal mines, did it do significantly better, showing that some workers in some major branches of industry were beginning to accommodate themselves to the new regime.¹¹⁷ Alarmed at the general result, however, the Nazis enforced an indefinite postponement of the remaining works council elections.

Despite their annoyance at this arbitrary interference in their democratic rights, the trade union leader Theodor Leipart and his designated successor Wilhelm Leuschner intensified their efforts to secure the institutional survival of their movement. They were encouraged in their efforts at a compromise by their belief that the Nazis were serious about setting up the job-creation schemes they had been demanding for many years. On 28 April they concluded an agreement with the Christian and Liberal Trade Unions that was intended to form the first step towards a complete unification of all trade unions in a single national organization. ‘The nationalist revolution’, began the unification document, ‘has created a new state. This state wants to bring together the whole German nation in unity and asserts its power.’ The unions evidently thought that they had a positive part to play in this process, and wanted to play it independently. As a sign that they would do so, they agreed to support Goebbels’s public declaration that May Day, traditionally the occasion for massive public demonstrations of the labour movement’s strength, would be a public holiday for the first time. This was a long-cherished desire of the labour movement. The unions agreed that it would be known as the ‘Day of National Labour’. This act, once more, symbolized the new regime’s synthesis of the seemingly divergent traditions of nationalism and socialism.¹¹⁸

On the day itself, trade union premises, in a departure from labour movement tradition that many older workers must have found scandalous and depressing, were decked out with the old national colours of black, white and red. Karl Schrader, president of the textile workers’ union, marched in the Berlin procession under the sign of the swastika, not the only union official to do so. Few, indeed, took part in the ‘flying’ counter-demonstrations staged with lightning speed at various locations by the Communists, or the quiet commemorations of the day held behind locked doors by the Social Democrats in their own secret meeting-places. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people marched through the streets led by brass bands of stormtroopers playing the Horst Wessel Song and patriotic tunes. They streamed towards vast open-air meeting-places, where they listened to speeches and readings from nationalistic ‘worker-poets’. In the evening, Hitler’s voice boomed out over the radio, assuring all German workers that unemployment would soon be ^a thing of the past.¹¹⁹

The Tempelhof field in Berlin was packed with a vast assembly of over a million people arranged, military-style, in twelve huge squares, surrounded by a sea of Nazi flags, with three huge Nazi banners illuminated by searchlights. After dark, firework displays culminated in the emergence from the gloom of vast glowing swastikas lighting up the sky. The media blared forth their celebration of the winning over of the workers to the new regime. It was a proletarian counterpart of the ceremony held for the upper classes at Potsdam ten days before.¹²⁰ The masses, however, did not appear at the ceremonies entirely of their own accord: and the atmosphere was less than wholly enthusiastic. Many workers, especially in state employment, had been threatened with dismissal for non-attendance, while thousands of industrial employees in Berlin had had their timecards confiscated on arriving at work, with the promise that they would only get them back on the Tempelhof field. The general atmosphere of looming violence and widespread intimidation had also played its part in bringing about the formal agreement of trade union leaders to participate.¹²¹

If the union leaders had thought they would preserve their organizations by such compromises, however, they were in for a rude awakening. In early April the Nazis had already begun secret preparations for a takeover of the entire trade union movement. On 17 April Goebbels noted in his diary:

On 1 May we shall arrange May Day as a grandiose demonstration of the German people’s will. On 2 May the trade union offices will be occupied. Co-ordination in this area too. There might possibly be a row for a few days, but then they will belong to us. We must make no allowances any more. We are only doing the workers a service when we free them from the parasitic leadership that has only made their life hard up to now. Once the trade unions are in our hands the other parties and organizations will not be able to hold out for much longer.¹²²

On 2 May 1933 brownshirts and SS men stormed into every Social Democratic-oriented trade union office in the land, took over all the trade union newspapers and periodicals, and occupied all the branches of the trade union bank. Leipart and the other leading union officials were arrested and taken into ‘protective custody’ in concentration camps, where many of them were beaten up and brutally humiliated before being released a week or two later. In a particularly horrific incident, stormtroopers beat four trade union officials to death in the cellar of the trade union building in Duisburg on 2 May. The entire management of the movement and its assets was placed in the hands of the Nazi factory cell organization. On 4 May the Christian Trade Unions and all other union institutions placed themselves unconditionally under Hitler’s leadership. The ‘row’ predicted by Goebbels never materialized. The once-powerful German trade union movement had disappeared without trace virtually overnight.¹²³ ‘The revolution goes on,’ trumpeted Goebbels in his diary on 3 May. With satisfaction he noted the widespread arrests of ‘bigwigs’. ‘We are the masters of Germany,’ he boasted in his diary.¹²⁴

Confident that the Social Democratic Party would no longer be able to call upon the unions to support any last-minute resistance it might decide to mount, the regime now began the endgame of closing the party down. On 10 May the government seized the party’s assets and property by court order, justified by the General State Prosecutor in Berlin with reference to the supposed embezzlement of trade union funds by Leipart and others, an accusation that had no basis in fact. Wels had arranged for the party’s funds and archive to be shipped out of the country, but the Nazis’ haul was still considerable. This measure deprived the party of any basis on which it could resurrect either its organization or its newspapers, periodicals and other publications. As a political movement it was effectively finished.¹²⁵ Yet, astonishingly, none of this prevented the Social Democrats from lending their support to the government in the Reichstag on 17 May, when Hitler put before the legislature a neutrally worded resolution in favour of German equality in international disarmament negotiations. The declaration had no real meaning except the assertion of German rights and no purpose apart from winning some credit for the regime abroad after months in which it had been heavily criticized all over the world; the government had no intention of taking part in any kind of disarmament process in reality. Nevertheless, the Social Democratic deputies, led by Paul Lobe, thought they would be portrayed as unpatriotic if they boycotted the session, so those who were able to do so turned up and joined in the Reichstag’s unanimous approval of the resolution, following a hypocritically moderate and neutrally worded speech by Hitler, to the strains of the national anthem, cries of ‘Hail!’ from the Nazis, and overt satisfaction from Hermann Goring, who declared in his capacity as presiding officer of the Reichstag that the world had now witnessed the unity of the German people when its international fate was at stake. The deputies’ action caused outrage in the party, above all among the leaders now in exile: they condemned the action as the negation of the proud vote against the Enabling Act on 23 March. Otto Wels, who had led the opposition to the vote, withdrew his resignation from the Socialist International. The exiled leadership relocated the party headquarters to Prague. In shame and despair at the failure of the Reichstag deputies to realize that they were being used as part of a Nazi propaganda operation, the most passionate opponent of the decision, Toni Pfülf, one of the leading Socal Democratic women in the Reichstag, boycotted the session and committed suicide on 10 June 1933. Lobe himself was arrested; Wels fled the country.¹²⁶

The gulf between the new party leadership in Prague and those officials and deputies who remained in Germany rapidly deepened. But the regime declared that it could not see any difference between the two wings of the party; those who had decamped to Prague were traitors defaming Germany from a foreign land and those who had not were traitors for aiding and abetting them. On 21 June 1933 Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick ordered the state governments throughout Germany to ban the Social Democratic Party on the basis of the Reichstag fire decree. No Social Democratic deputies in any legislature were to be allowed to take up their seats any more. All Social Democratic meetings, all Social Democratic publications, were prohibited. Membership in the party was declared incompatible with holding any public office or any position in the civil service. On 23 June 1933 Goebbels wrote triumphantly in his diary that the Social Democratic Party had been ‘dissolved. Bravo! The total state won’t have to wait for long now.’¹²⁷

Social Democrats did not have to wait long either to discover what the total state would mean. As Frick’s decree of 21 June was being published, over three thousand Social Democratic functionaries were arrested all over Germany, severely manhandled, tortured, and thrown into prisons or concentration camps. In the Berlin suburb of Köpenick, when they encountered armed resistance from one house, the stormtroopers rounded up 500 Social Democrats, and beat and tortured them over a period of several days, killing 91; this concerted assault, savage even by the standards of the brownshirts, quickly became known as the ‘Köpenick Blood-Week’. Particular vengeance was wreaked on anyone associated with the left in Munich in the revolutionary days of 1918-19. Kurt Eisner’s former secretary Felix Fechenbach, now editor of the local Social Democratic newspaper in Detmold, had been arrested on 11 March and put into custody along with most of the leading Social Democrats in the province of Lippe. On 8 August a detachment of stormtroopers took him by car out of the state prison, ostensibly to be transferred to Dachau. But on the way, they forced the accompanying policeman out of the vehicle. Then they drove into a wood, where they took Fechenbach a few paces and shot him dead. The Nazi press reported later that he had been ‘shot while trying to escape’.¹²⁸ Less controversial figures were targeted, too. The former Minister-President of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Johannes Stelling, a Social Democrat, was taken to a brownshirt barracks, beaten up, and thrown semi-conscious out onto the street, where he was picked up by another gang of stormtroopers, taken off in a car, and tortured to death. His body was sewn into a sack weighted down with stones and thrown into a river. It was later fished out with the bodies of twelve other Social Democratic and Reichsbanner functionaries who had been murdered the same night.¹²⁹

Similar brutal acts of repression against Social Democrats were carried out all over Germany. Particularly notorious was the makeshift concentration camp opened on 28 April at Dürrgoy, on the southern outskirts of Breslau, by the local brownshirt, Edmund Heines. The camp commandant was a former Free Corps leader and member of a far-right assassination squad, who had been convicted of murder under the Weimar Republic. His prisoners included Hermann Lüdemann, former Social Democratic chief administrator of the Breslau district, the former Social Democratic mayor of the city; and the ex-editor of the Social Democrats’ daily paper in Breslau. Inmates were subjected to repeated beatings and torture. The camp commandant held regular fire drills throughout the night, and had the prisoners beaten as they returned to their barracks. Heines paraded Lüdemann through the streets of Breslau, dressed as a harlequin, to the accompaniment of jeers and insults from watching stormtroopers. He also kidnapped the former Social Democratic President of the Reichstag, Paul Lobe, against whom he had a personal grudge, from his prison in Spandau; pressure from Lobe’s wife and friends quickly secured an order for his release, but he refused to leave, declaring his solidarity with the other Social Democratic prisoners.¹³⁰

With repression such as this, the party was effectively hounded out of existence well before it fell under the same ban as the Communists on 14 July. In retrospect, its chances of survival had been diminishing rapidly for nearly a year. Decisive in this context was its failure to mount any effective opposition to the Papen coup of 20 July 1932; if there had been any moment when it might have stood up for democracy, that was it. But it is easy to condemn its inaction with hindsight; few in the summer of 1932 could have realized that the amateurish and in many ways rather ludicrous government of Franz von Papen would give way little more than six months later to a regime whose extreme ruthlessness and total disregard for the law were difficult for decent, law-abiding democrats to grasp. In many ways, the labour movement leaders’ desire to avoid violence in July 1932 was thoroughly to their credit; they were not to know that their decision was to play a key role in opening the way to much greater violence later on.

With the crushing of the labour movement, the Nazis, assisted by the state’s law enforcement agencies and the sympathetic inaction of the armed forces, had removed the most serious obstacle to their establishment of a one-party state. The labour movement had been brought to heel, the trade unions smashed, the Social Democratic and Communist Parties, whose combined vote considerably exceeded that of the Nazis in the last fully free elections to the Reichstag in November 1932, had been destroyed in an orgy of violence. There remained, however, another major political force whose members and voters had stayed largely loyal to their principles and representatives throughout the Weimar years: the Centre Party. It derived its strength not simply from political tradition and cultural inheritance, but above all from its identification with the Catholic Church and its adherents. It could not be subjected to the kind of indiscriminate and unbridled brutality that had swept the Communists and the Social Democrats off the political stage. More subtle tactics were required. In May 1933 Hitler and the Nazi leadership set about putting them into action.