III

The Nazi ‘co-ordination’ of German society did not stop at political parties, state institutions, local and regional authorities, professions, arid economic pressure-groups. Just how far it went is perhaps best illustrated by returning to the example of the small north German town of Northeim, long dominated by a coalition of liberals and conservatives with a strong Social Democratic movement and a much smaller branch of the Communist Party in opposition. The local Nazis had already managed to manipulate the municipal elections held on 12 March by running as the ‘National Unity List’ and freezing the other parties out. The Nazi leader in the town, Ernst Girmann, promised the end of Social Democratic corruption, and the end of parliamentarism. Despite all this, the Social Democrats held their own in the local and regional elections, and the Nazis, though they took over the town council, failed to do better than they had in July 1932. The new council met in public, with uniformed brownshirts lining the walls, SS men assisting the police, and chants of ‘Hail Hitler!’ punctuating the proceedings, in a local version of the intimidation that accompanied the passage of the Enabling Act through the Reichstag. The four Social Democratic councillors were refused permission to sit on any of the committees and not allowed to speak. As they walked out of the meeting, stormtroopers lined up to spit on them as they passed. Two of them resigned shortly afterwards, the other two went in June.

After the last Social Democrat had resigned, Northeim’s town council was used purely for announcing measures taken by Girmann; there was no discussion, and the members listened in absolute silence. By this time, some 45 council employees, mostly Social Democrats, had been dismissed from the gas works, the brewery, the swimming pool, the health insurance office and other local institutions under the civil service law of 7 April 1933. Including accountants and administrators, they made up about a quarter of the council’s employees. Easing out the town’s mayor, a conservative who had held the office since 1903, proved more difficult, since he resisted all attempts to persuade him to go, and stood up to a considerable degree of harassment. In the end, when he went on vacation, the Nazified town council passed a vote of no confidence in him and declared the local Nazi leader Ernst Girmann mayor instead.

By this time, the leading local Communists in Northeim had been arrested, together with a number of Social Democrats, and the main regional newspaper read in the town had started to run stories not only on the concentration camp at Dachau but also on one much closer to Northeim, at Moringen, which had over 300 prisoners by the end of April, many of them from other political groupings besides the main body of inmates, the Communists. At least two dozen of the SS camp guards were local men from around Northeim, and many prisoners were released after a short period in the camp, so that what went on there must have been well known to the townspeople. The local town newspaper, formely liberal in its allegiance, now frequently reported the arrest and imprisonment of citizens for trivial offences such as spreading rumours and making abusive statements about National Socialism. People knew that more serious opposition would meet with more serious repression. Opponents of the regime were dealt with in other ways, too; active Social Democrats were dismissed from their jobs, subjected to house searches, or beaten up if they refused to give the Hitler salute. Pressure was put on their landlords to evict them from their homes. The brownshirts subjected the local Social Democratic party leader’s shop to a boycott. Constant petty harassment was henceforth his lot, and that of other former prominent figures in the local labour movement, even if they abstained from all political activity.

Such were the implicit and sometimes explicit threats that lay behind the process of ‘co-ordination’ in a small town like Northeim, and in thousands of other small towns, villages and cities. The process began in March and rapidly gathered pace during April and May 1933. Like virtually all small towns, Northeim had a rich associational life, much of it more or less unpolitical, some of it not. The local Nazi Party brought all this under control by one means or another. Some clubs and societies were closed down or merged, others taken over. The railway workers in Northeim, an important centre in the national rail network, had already been pressurized by Nazis in senior positions in the local railway yards to enrol in the Nazi factory cell organization even before Hitler became Chancellor, but the Nazis made less progress in dealing with other workers until 4 May, when brownshirts took over the trade union offices and abolished the unions altogether. By this time, Girmann was insisting that every club and association had to have a majority of Nazis or Steel Helmets on its executive committee. Professional associations were merged into the newly founded National Socialist Physicians’ League, the National Socialist Teachers’ League and similar bodies, which all those concerned knew they had to join if they were to keep their jobs. The popular and well-funded local consumer co-operative was put under Nazi control but was too important to the local economy to close down, despite the fact that the Nazis had previously attacked it as a ‘red’ institution that undermined independent local businesses. Clubs for the war disabled were merged into the National Socialist War Victims’ Association, the Boy Scouts and the Young German Order into the Hitler Youth.

The inexorable pressure for Nazification of voluntary associations in the town met with a variety of responses. The Northeim singing clubs mostly dissolved themselves, though the workers’ choir attempted to adjust beforehand by cutting its links with the German Workers’ Singing League. The upper-class singing club (‘Song Stave’) survived by altering its executive committee and consulting the local Nazi Party before changing its membership. The shooting societies, an important part of local life in many parts of Germany, elected Girmann as Chief Captain and were told by him that they had to promote the military spirit rather than existing just for recreational purposes as they had done so far. They survived by flying the swastika, singing the Horst Wessel Song, and opening up some of their shooting competitions to the general public to counter Girmann’s charge of social exclusivity. All the local sports clubs, from the swimming association to the football club and the gymnastic societies, were forced to join in a single Northeim Sports Club under Nazi leadership, amid considerable recrimination. Some local social leaders took pre-emptive action to stop the Nazis confiscating their funds. The ‘Beautification Club’, a well-off association dedicated to improving the town’s parks and woods, put all its funds into building a hunting lodge just beyond the town boundary before dissolving itself. And several of the local guilds, informed that they had to elect new committees by 2 May, arranged huge drinking sessions and lavish banquets in order to use up the funds which, they were convinced, would soon fall into the hands of the Nazis.¹⁷²

This process of ‘co-ordination’ took place in the spring and summer of 1933 at every level, in every city, town and village throughout Germany. What social life remained was at the local inn, or took place in the privacy of people’s homes. Individuals had become isolated except when they gathered in one Nazi organization or another. Society had been reduced to an anonymous and undifferentiated mass and then reconstituted in a new form in which everything was done in the name of Nazism. Open dissent and resistance had become impossible; even discussing or planning it was no longer practicable except in secret. Of course, in practice, such a situation remained an aim rather than a reality. The process of co-ordination was less than perfectly carried out, and a formal adherence to the new order through, for example, attaching the name ‘National Socialist’ to a club, a society or a professional organization, by no means implied a genuine ideological commitment on the part of those involved. Nevertheless, the scale and scope of the co-ordination of German society were breathtaking. And their purpose was not simply to eliminate any space in which opposition could develop. By bringing Germany into line, the new regime wanted to make it amenable to indoctrination and re-education according to the principles of National Socialism.

Reflecting on this process a few years later, the lawyer Raimund Pretzel asked himself what had happened to the 56 per cent of Germans who had voted against the Nazis in the elections of 5 March 1933. How was it, he wondered, that this majority had caved in so rapidly? Why had virtually every social, political and economic institution in Germany fallen into the hands of the Nazis with such apparent ease? ‘The simplest, and, if you looked deeper, nearly always the most basic reason’, he concluded, ‘was fear. Join the thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was a kind of exhilaration, the intoxication of unity, the magnetism of the masses.’ Many, he also thought, had felt betrayed by the weakness of their political leaders, from Braun and Severing to Hugenberg and Hindenburg, and they joined the Nazis in a perverse act of revenge. Some were impressed by the fact that everything the Nazis had predicted seemed to be coming true. ‘There was also (particularly among intellectuals) the belief that they could change the face of the Nazi Party by becoming a member, even now shift its direction. Then of course many jumped on the bandwagon, wanted to be part of a perceived success.’ In the circumstances of the Depression, when times were hard and jobs were scarce, people clung to the mechanical routine of daily life as the only form of security: not to have gone along with the Nazis would have meant risking one’s livelihood and prospects, to have resisted could mean risking one’s life.¹⁷³