IV

The destruction of the Communists, the Social Democrats and the Centre Party was the most difficult part of the Nazis’ drive to create a one-party state. Together, these three parties represented far more voters than the Nazi Party itself ever won in a free election. In comparison to the problems they posed, getting rid of the other parties was easy. Most of them had lost virtually every vote and seat in the Reichstag they had ever possessed. They were ripe for picking off one by one. By early 1933 the only one among them which had belonged to the coalition of parties that had supported the Weimar Republic from the beginning, the State Party (formerly the Democrats) was drifting helplessly at the mercy of events, reduced to two seats in the Reichstag and issuing pathetic appeals to other parties to take its deputies under their wing. It continued to advertise its opposition to the Nazis, but at the same time it was also advocating the revision of the constitution in an unmistakeably authoritarian direction. It failed to improve its support in the elections of March 1933, though by tagging its candidates onto the much better supported Social Democratic Party list, it increased its representation in the Reichstag from 2 seats to 5. With strong reservations, but unanimously, the party’s deputies, including the later Federal German President Theodor Heuss, voted for the Enabling Law on 23 March 1933, cowed by Hitler’s threat of a bloodbath should the vote go against him. In practice their votes made no difference, as they must have known. The party’s parliamentary floor leader Otto Nuschke began signing his official letters with the ‘German freedom greeting’ and urged recognition of the government’s legitimacy. Meanwhile, civil servants, who had been a major element in the party, were leaving it en masse to join the Nazis in a bid to keep their jobs. Ever since the party had been pushed to the fringe in the elections of 1930 there had been repeated discussions over the question of whether it was worth going on. The brownshirts unleashed a fresh campaign of terror on the few remaining deputies, officials and local councillors who openly declared their allegiance to the party. The government then stripped its Reichstag deputies of their seats, on the grounds that they had stood on the Social Democratic list in the March election and were therefore Social Democrats. After this, the party leadership finally gave up and declared the State Party formally dissolved on 28 June 1933.¹⁴¹

The People’s Party, which had moved sharply to the right after the death of its leading figure for most of the Weimar years, Gustav Stresemann, in 1929, began to shed its liberal wing in 1931 - ‘liberal’ being defined by this time as support for the Brüning government, yet another measure of how far the political spectrum had shifted to the right - and agitate for a general coalition of all nationalist forces, including the Nazis. The more the party lost electoral support, however, the more it disintegrated into a chaos of warring factions. With only 7 seats left in the Reichstag after July 1932, the People’s Party had been pushed far out onto the political fringe. Its leader by this time, the lawyer Eduard Dingeldey, thought it a good idea to join forces with the Nationalists in a common electoral list in November 1932. This drove out the remaining liberals from the party but failed to bring it any real gains. Alarmed at this sign of further dissolution, Dingeldey abandoned the pact with the Nationalists for the next election, with the result that the People’s Party was able to win only 2 seats in March 1933. This was all that was left of the proud tradition of Germany’s National Liberal Party, which had dominated the Reichstag in the 1870s and done so much to soften the harsh contours of Bismarck’s creation with a broad palette of liberal legislation. While Dingeldey withdrew from politics for two months as a result of a serious illness, the party’s remaining members, and in particular civil servants frightened for their jobs, began to leave in large numbers, while others, led by the deputy leader, urged the party to dissolve itself and formally merge with the Nazis. When Dingeldey succeeded in preventing this, the party’s right wing resigned. His efforts to obtain an audience with Hitler or Goring were rebuffed. Fearing for the safety of the party’s remaining officials and deputies in the general atmosphere of intimidation, Dingeldey announced the dissolution of the People’s Party on 4 July. As a reward, he obtained an audience with Hitler three days later, and the Nazi Leader’s assurance that former party members would not suffer any discrimination because of their political past. Needless to say, this did not prevent the Nazis from enforcing the resignation of former People’s Party deputies from legislatures all over Germany, nor the dismissal of civil servants on grounds of opposition to the National Socialist movement. Dingeldey’s protests at such actions were contemptuously brushed aside.¹⁴²

The Nationalist Party under Alfred Hugenberg had hardly been any more successful than the two liberal parties in electoral terms. It had lost almost all its votes to the Nazis in the early 1930s. Yet it regarded itself as the main coalition partner of the Nazis, whom it had always treated with a certain degree of condescension. Leading Nationalists welcomed the fact that the Hitler cabinet marked the definitive end of the parliamentary system and the beginning of a dictatorship. Hugenberg campaigned vigorously in the elections of 5 March 1933 for an overall majority with the Nazis that would provide popular legitimacy for this transformation. Yet the leading Nationalists were uncomfortably aware that this left them extremely vulnerable. They warned against the ‘socialism’ of the Nazis and pleaded for a ‘non-party’ government. Certainly, the Nazis were careful to maintain the illusion of a genuine coalition during the campaign. No Nationalist newspapers were banned, no Nationalist meetings broken up and no Nationalist politicians arrested. But the massive repression and violence of the campaign were wholly exerted in favour of the Nazis. On 5 March the Nazis got their reward, increasing their representation in the Reichstag from 196 seats to 288. The Nationalists, by contrast, did not manage to improve their situation significantly, winning 52 seats instead of 51. These seats, and the 8 per cent of the vote they represented, were enough to push the coalition over the 50 per cent mark. But the electoral results demonstrated graphically how unequal the coalition partners were. On the streets, the paramilitary ‘fighting leagues’ associated with the Nationalists could in no way compete with the might of the brownshirts and the SS. And the Nationalists had failed to win the unconditional allegiance of the Steel Helmets, the one major paramilitary group that seemed to share their political views.

The March election result changed the relationship between the two parties fundamentally. With the Communists now out of the legislature, the Nazis no longer needed the Nationalists to form an overall majority, though they still fell some way short of possessing the two-thirds needed to alter the constitution. Hitler and Goring now began to make it brutally clear to Hugenberg that they were calling the shots. The passage of the Enabling Act with the support of the Nationalists was made palatable for the more conservative party members by the preceding formal opening of the parliament in Potsdam, with its clear reference to the Bismarckian traditions they were dedicated to renewing. But as soon as the Enabling Act had gone through, Hitler lost no time in declaring that there could be no question of restoring what he regarded as the failed institution of the monarchy. It was at this point, finally, that the Nazis began to apply to the Nationalists the same pressures under which the other parties had already been suffering since the middle of February. On 29 March the office of the party’s floor leader in the Reichstag, Ernst Oberfohren, was searched, and on the following day his house was raided. The Nazis revealed that documents found there showed Oberfohren to be the author of anonymous letters attacking Hugenberg. This was enough to persuade the party leader to drop his intention of complaining. Oberfohren had also been taking a suspiciously close interest in the circumstances in which the Reichstag had burned down, suggesting that he shared the Communist view that the arson had been organized by the Nazis. Warned by the raid on his home, Oberfohren immediately resigned his seat. Meanwhile, other senior Nationalists also began to come under pressure. Gunther Gerecke, Reich Commissioner for Work Creation, was accused of embezzlement. The head of the Reich Land League, an organization traditionally close to the Nationalists, was dismissed for illicitly speculating on the corn market. And reports began to come in of the dismissal of civil servants who openly acknowledged their membership of the Nationalist Party.¹⁴³

The Nationalists had entered the coalition on 30 January feeling that they were the senior partners in an alliance with an immature and inexperienced political movement that they would easily be able to control. Two months later, all this had changed. Amid privately expressed fears of the destructive consequences of a full-blown Nazi revolution, they now acknowledged helplessly the impossibility of preventing illegal actions against their own members by a government in which they were still a formal partner. In this situation, it seemed wise to them to adapt to the new, post-democratic order. Hugenberg obtained a restructuring of the party organization that made the ‘Leadership Principle’ fundamental at every level. Following this, the Nationalists changed their formal designation from the German-Nationalist People’s Party to the German-Nationalist Front, to make clear their view that political parties were a thing of the past. But these changes only deprived Hugenberg of the last vestiges of democratic legitimacy and so left his position even more exposed than before. One after another, Nazis in Berlin and in the country at large publicly criticized and pressurized institutions and organizations which Hugenberg considered to be under his aegis, amid a whispering campaign that he was slowing down the ‘national revolution’.

Regional organs of the Nazi Party now began to declare that Hugenberg, as Prussian Minister of Agriculture, no longer enjoyed the confidence of the peasantry. There were rumours that he was about to resign from his Prussian posts. Hugenberg’s response to these attempts to undermine him was to threaten to quit the cabinet. He believed that by doing so he would invalidate the Enabling Act, since it applied only to what it called the ‘present government’. Already, however, the constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt, an influential supporter of the Nazis, had declared that by ‘present government’ the Act did not mean the particular group of ministers in office when it was passed, but the ‘completely different kind of government’ which had come into being with the end of the party-political system. Thus the ‘present government’, and with it the validity of the Enabling Act, would not be affected by the resignation of this minister or that; its nature was, rather, determined by its Leader.¹⁴⁴ Hugenberg’s threat was an empty one, another example of the futility of legalistic reasoning in the face of Nazi pressure. Meanwhile, the threat of Nazi violence against his supporters became increasingly explicit. On 7 May Ernst Oberfohren, already hounded out of office by the Nazis, was found dead; in the prevailing atmosphere of ruthless intimidation by the Nazis, many rightly refused to believe the official story that he had shot himself. There were reports of arrests of local Nationalist officials and the banning of some Nationalist meetings. The Nationalists came under increasing pressure to dissolve their paramilitary ‘fighting groups’. By this time these groups, mostly student and youth organizations, had increased in strength to 100,000 in the wake of the ‘national uprising’ and so they were strong enough to cause some concern to the Nazis.

On 30 May 1933 some of the Nationalist leaders met with Hitler to complain about the growing pressure on them to surrender their autonomy. They were met with a ‘hysterical outburst of rage’ in which the Nazi leader shouted that he would let his ‘SA open fire and arrange a bloodbath lasting three days long ... until there’s nothing left’, if the Nationalist paramilitaries did not wind themselves up of their own accord. This was enough to shake the Nationalists’ already weak resolve to resist. In mid-June, therefore, Hitler personally ordered the dissolution of the Nationalist student and youth organizations and the confiscation of their assets. Leading Nationalists associated with these groups, including Herbert von Bismarck, who was also State Secretary in the Prussian administration, were arrested and interrogated; faced with alleged evidence of the groups’ infiltration by supposed Marxist elements, Bismarck confessed he had had no idea how bad things had become.

By this time, leading Nationalists such as the ultra-right Catholic historian Martin Spahn had declared that they could not serve two leaders, and had begun defecting to the Nazis. The daily humiliations that the Nationalist ‘Leader’ Hugenberg had to suffer in the cabinet were becoming more and more pronounced. When he publicly demanded, at an international economic conference, the return of Germany’s African colonies, without consulting the cabinet beforehand, the government equally publicly disowned him, embarrassing him before the whole world. On 23 June his non-Nazi conservative cabinet colleagues Papen, Neurath, Schwerin von Krosigk and Schacht joined Hitler in condemning his behaviour. Hugenberg’s planned speech to a Nationalist political meeting on 26 June was banned by the police. Complaining bitterly that he was constantly blocked in his ministerial duties and publicly attacked by the Nazi press, he demonstratively tendered his resignation to Hindenburg the same day.

Hugenberg of course did not really intend to leave the government. But the aged President failed completely to meet his expectations; instead of rejecting his letter and intervening with Hitler as he was supposed to, Hindenburg did nothing. A meeting with Hitler to try and resolve the situation amicably only provoked Hitler into demanding that the German-Nationalist Front must be dissolved if Hugenberg’s resignation were to be rejected. If this did not happen, ‘thousands’ of Nationalist civil servants and state employees would be dismissed, he said. But the alternative was a false one; Hitler never had any intention of allowing Hugenberg, the last remaining independent cabinet member of any political stature, to withdraw his resignation. As Hitler was triumphantly reporting Hugenberg’s departure to the cabinet, the other leading figures in the German-Nationalist Front met Hitler to conclude a ‘Friendship Agreement’ in which they agreed the party’s ‘self-dissolution’.¹⁴⁵ The conditions agreed by the Nationalists - Hitler’s formal coalition partner - were superficially less oppressive than those agreed by other parties; but in practice the Nazis forced any deputies or elected legislators whose views they did not like, such as Herbert von Bismarck, to resign their seats, and only accepted those who they could be confident would follow orders without question. Guarantees that Nationalist civil servants would not suffer because of their party-political past were not treated as binding by the regime. The ‘Friendship Agreement’ was little more than abject surrender.

With the parties dissolved, the Churches brought to heel, the trade unions abolished and the army neutralized, there was one major political player still to be dealt with: the Steel Helmets, the ultra-nationalist paramilitary veterans’ organization. On 26 April 1933, after lengthy negotiations, Franz Seldte, the Steel Helmets’ leader, joined the Nazi Party and placed the Steel Helmets under Hitler’s political leadership with the guarantee that they would continue to exist as an autonomous organization of war veterans. Those who opposed this move, such as the joint leader of the organization, Theodor Duesterberg, were summarily dismissed. A rapid expansion in numbers to perhaps as many as a million, comprising war veterans drawn from a variety of recently banned organizations including the Reichsbanner, diluted the political commitment of the Steel Helmets still further and opened them up to criticism from the Nazis. As auxiliary police, the Steel Helmets had lent support to the actions of Nazi stormtroopers during the previous months without either fully participating on the one hand, or attempting to restrain them on the other. Their position was rather like that of the army, for whom they regarded themselves indeed as an armed, experienced and fully trained reserve. Their leader Franz Seldte was a member of the cabinet and proved completely incapable of standing up to the bullying of Hitler and Goring. By May, they had been completely neutralized as a political force.¹⁴⁶

At the end of May, therefore, Hitler took the next step, accusing the Steel Helmets with some plausibility of being infiltrated by substantial numbers of ex-Communists and Social Democrats looking for a substitute for their own, now-banned paramilitary organizations. They were forcibly incorporated into the SA, while still retaining enough of a vestige of their previous autonomy to dissuade them from resisting. The presence of the Steel Helmets’ leader Franz Seldte in the cabinet seemed to most of them to guarantee their continued influence where it mattered. Their functions as a reserve army and a veterans’ welfare association carried on. Even as late as 1935, renamed the National Socialist German Front-Fighters’ League, they still claimed a membership of half a million. The Steel Helmets’ aim of the destruction of Weimar democracy and the return of an authoritarian, nationalist regime had self-evidently been achieved: what possible grounds could they have to object to their incorporation into the ranks of Ernst Röhm’s brownshirts? The merger caused organizational chaos for a time, but it effectively deprived the Nationalists of any last, lingering chance of being able to mobilize opposition on the streets to the rampaging stormtroopers of the SA.¹⁴⁷

The paramilitary groups had thus been shut down as effectively as the political parties. By the summer of 1933 the creation of a one-party state was virtually complete. Only Hindenburg remained as a potential obstacle to the achievement of total power, a senile cypher seemingly without any remaining will of his own, whose office had been neutralized by the provisions of the Enabling Act. The army had agreed to stand on the sidelines. Business had fallen into line. On 28 June 1933 Joseph Goebbels had already celebrated the destruction of the parties, the trade unions and the paramilitaries and their replacement by the monopoly of power on the part of the Nazi Party and its affiliated organizations: ‘The road to the total state. Our revolution has an uncanny dynamism.’¹⁴⁸