With the passage of this law, Hitler was able – with all the appearance of legality – to overthrow the remnants of any form of parliamentary democracy. He no longer needed to pay attention to the views of most of the nationalist members of the government, nor did he need President Hindenburg’s signature for the passage of legislation. Henceforth, ‘law’ could be used to justify any arbitrary act of the regime. But this garb of legality, while reassuring to moderate, middle-class Germans, did not preclude the use of violence and terror; it simply accompanied it.
Map 4.1 The Reichstag elections, 5 March 1933.
From spring 1933 the Nazis engaged in a series of moves to extend and consolidate their power. Initial measures were taken to purge the civil service in the ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ of 7 April 1933. Having survived the transition from Imperial Germany to the Weimar Republic relatively unscathed, the German professional civil service found itself under stronger attack in this new revolutionary upheaval. Jews were removed from positions in the civil service and related state professions (under the broad German categorization of state servants, or Beamten), as were political opponents of the regime. The purge was, however, by no means as thorough as many NSDAP members would have liked, since considerations of administrative efficiency in some cases outweighed Nazi credentials. Furthermore, some civil servants who harboured misgivings about the Nazi regime justified their decision to stay as ‘preventing something worse’. Yet the overall record of civil servants in the Third Reich remains one of compromise rather than subversion of the regime. Recent exhaustive works by independent historians’ commissions tasked with researching the involvement of Reich ministries in the Nazi regime have demonstrated the extent to which they were not merely depressingly compliant but actively complicit in furthering Nazi goals across a wide range of areas, including racial discrimination and persecution in both peacetime and during the war.
At the same time, the traditional decentralization of the relatively recently unified Germany was attacked – a continuation of tendencies already evident towards the end of the Weimar Republic. The powers of the Länder were reduced by the Nazi seizure of power in the regional states in March 1933. (The takeover of Prussia the previous summer, with the installation of a Reich Commissioner in place of the elected government, had provided a useful precedent.) On 7 April 1933 10 so-called Reichsstatthalter (Reich governors) were appointed, usually the senior Gauleiter of each state, except in the cases of Bavaria (Ritter von Epp) and Prussia (Hitler). The takeover was by no means smooth: as at national level, there were perpetual tensions between party and state. Frictions varied from place to place, depending on preexisting political configurations and circumstances. Curiously, the heavy-handed actions of local party officials were often dissociated in people’s minds from the regime as a whole, and the person of Hitler in particular: people frequently asserted that ‘if only the Führer knew’, things would not be allowed to go on in the way they were locally.
While the Nazis made strenuous efforts to woo economic elites – many of whom had been belatedly persuaded to give financial support to the Nazi election campaign in the spring of 1933 – they had no such tender consideration for the bulk of the German people, and notably the workers. Giving the appearance of populism by proclaiming 1 May a national holiday on full pay, the Nazis rapidly proceeded to dismantle and destroy the autonomous workers’ organizations. Trade unions were wound up and replaced by a body spuriously claiming to represent the interests of all German workers in the new ‘national community’, the German Labour Front (DAF) under Robert Ley. Walther Darré took control of the Reich Food Estate (Reichsnährstand), dealing with the peasantry and agriculture, while small traders were organized into the HAGO (Handwerks-, Handelsund Gewerbe-Organisation). While in appearance developing a form of corporatism, in practice this was a coercive system in which none of the Nazi organizations actually represented the real interests of their ‘members’.
At the same time, there was an assault on political parties. In the course of spring and summer 1933 these were either outlawed (starting with the KPD) or they dissolved themselves (the Centre Party formally dissolved itself on 5 July 1933). With the ‘Law Against the Formation of New Parties’ of 14 July 1933 a one-party state was formally established. No longer was there any legal parliamentary opposition: the sole function of the Reichstag was to acclaim the decisions of the Nazi government. Yet this government itself became progressively more chaotic in nature: cabinet meetings were less and less frequent, eventually being so rare that they ceased to fulfill any governmental function; and political decision-making processes became more and more a matter of gaining direct access to the Führer – an increasingly difficult task as he spent more time in his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden and became less interested in the minutiae of most aspects of domestic policy.
On 30 January 1934, one year after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Reichsrat, or upper chamber of the Reichstag, was abolished and the federal system was effectively terminated by removing independent authority from the states. Perhaps the final major event in terms of initial constitutional change came with the death of President Hindenburg on 2 August 1934. Hitler made use of the occasion to merge the offices of President and Chancellor and to take personal command of the armed forces. Abolishing Hindenburg’s title of Reich President, Hitler now styled himself ‘Führer and Reich Chancellor’. The army and public officials had to swear personal oaths of obedience to Hitler – oaths that subsequently proved for many to be a moral obstacle to resistance against Hitler’s regime.
The army was able to ignore or surmount its potential misgivings about Hitler in August 1934 for a number of reasons. For one thing, Hitler had made no secret of his intention to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, revising the much-hated Treaty of Versailles. Hitler’s whipping-up of resentment against Versailles, and his sharp denunciations of the Jews and Bolsheviks whom he held to be the ‘November Criminals’ responsible for Germany’s national humiliation, had been constant themes prior to his coming to power. After becoming Chancellor Hitler had lost little time in setting revisionist policies in motion: on 8 February 1933 Hitler informed ministers that unemployment was to be reduced by rearmament; in July 1933 Krupp’s euphemistically named ‘agricultural tractor programme’ started the production of tanks; and by 1934 explosives, ships and aircraft were in production – all contrary to the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, but greeted with approval by the army itself.
Furthermore, Hitler had just resolved a potential source of friction in relation to the traditional armed forces. The SA, under its leader Ernst Röhm, had become a large and rather unruly organization, propagating unwelcome notions of the need for a ‘second revolution’ and developing into a rival not only for the elite SS but also for the army proper. Hitler decided that the support of the latter two groups was more important to him than was the SA, so he instigated the so-called Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934, during which the leaders of the SA were murdered along with other individuals with whom Hitler had fallen out, including Gregor Strasser, Gustav Kahr (who had been state commissioner for Bavaria at the time of the abortive putsch of 1923) and General von Schleicher. There were also a few cases of mistaken identity. Retroactively this mass murder – which continued for three days, entailing 77 officially admitted deaths, although the true figure was much higher – was ‘legalized’ on 3 July 1934, when a law was passed simply stating that ‘the measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July to strike down the treasonous attacks are justifiable acts of self-defence by the state’.2 Although few can