The Coming of the Third Reich

A Dutch construction worker, Marinus van der Lubbe, was previously a Communist, but he later joined “a radical anarcho-syndicalist organization” (328). Stopping in Germany while trying to migrate to the Soviet Union, Lubbe was shocked at how demoralized leftists had become in Hitler’s Germany. He decided to engage in an act of protest by burning down the Reichstag building. Although there was evidence that Lubbe acted alone, the Nazis used the Reichstag fire as an excuse to outlaw the German Communist Party and round up known Communists, regardless of legalities. President Hindenburg signed the anti-Communist decree, even though it suspended some civil liberties guaranteed in the Weimar constitution and “ceded a significant part of his powers to the Hitler government” (333). Also, it gave the government the power to “take over the federated states if public order was endangered” (333).

Goebbels launched a propaganda campaign to convince the public that the Reichstag fire was just one part of a Communist plot to unleash terror and violence across Germany. The police and the brownshirts went after Communists across the country, arresting Communist presidential candidate Ernst Thälmann and others, shutting down Communist party offices, and looting the homes of Communist Party members. Many were arrested or fled Germany, including Communist representatives in the Reichstag.

With the destruction of the Communist movement in Germany, the Nazis had removed their main threat on the streets. Also, it represented the success of the Nazi tactic of not explicitly ordering street violence, but instead giving the brownshirts “general, more than implicit approval, by the constant, repeated violence of their rhetorical attacks on ‘Marxists’ of all kinds” (337). Since the Nazis had taken control of the government, it could also issue such subtle instructions to civil servants and other officials.

During the 1933 elections, brownshirts and SS members were highly visible, Nazi flags dominated public spaces, and police patrolled polling stations. Meanwhile, propaganda from other political parties was banned. However, even with “massive violence and intimidation,” the Nazis only had support from 43.9 percent of voters. Even with the Communists in exile, in prison, or driven underground, they still won 12.3 percent (340). This “testified to the complete failure of the Nazis, even under conditions of a semi-dictatorship, to win over a majority of the electorate” (340).

Courts ruled against some of the Nazi efforts to take over state governments. Still, many state officials felt they could not resist the policy of placing Nazi flags on all official buildings. Those who resisted were pressured to resign or “put under house arrest by detachments of brownshirts” (343). They would then be replaced by Nazis who would in turn replace elected officials and police with their own appointees.

Leaders of the Social Democrats and their paramilitary wing, the Reichsbanner, either fled Germany or were arrested. Richard J. Evans notes that the Communists and the Social Democrats “crumbled virtually without resistance” (344). He argues this is because of the powers Hitler’s government were able to claim because of the Reichstag fire and the precedents set by President Ebert’s suspension of local elections in 1923 and the purge of Social Democrats in Prussia by Papen’s government.

The Nazis moved to dismantle the conservative state government of Bavaria, taking control of key positions and arresting political opponents. They took control of key positions in the Bavarian government and the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, ordered the mass arrest of political opponents of the Nazis. So many people were arrested that they could not be contained in the existing prisons, so the first Nazi concentration camp was established at Dachau. At this camp, “prisoners were exposed to arbitrary acts of cruelty and sadism in a world without regulations or rules” (345).

Concentration camps had been used before by the British during the Boer War in South Africa and by the Germans with native rebels in their West Africa colony. The Nazis were aware of these precedents and had intended to establish concentration camps even before they came to power. Prisoners under arrest were also subjected to uncontrolled violence. It was “violence on a vast and unprecedented scale” with “at least 25,000 arrests in Prussia alone in the course of March and April” (347), a number that still did not account for unofficial arrests by brownshirts.

The Reichstag fire decree and the 1933 elections gave the Nazi regime “the appearance, however threadbare, of legal and political legitimation” (349).

Conservatives like President Hindenburg were “worried” (350) by the Nazi crackdown. In an effort to calm them, Hitler hosted an inaugural ceremony for the new Reichstag building and gave a politically moderate speech that praised Hindenburg. Soon after the ceremony, Hitler introduced the Enabling Act to the Reichstag. Under the Act, the Reichstag and the office of president would continue to exist, but “the Weimar constitution would be a dead letter, and the Reichstag would be shut out of the legislative process” (331). Since it was an amendment to the constitution, passing the Enabling Act would require a two-thirds vote of the Reichstag.

The Nazis illegally did not count the votes of Communist representatives, which narrowed the required quorum of delegates. Also, Hitler helped secure Centre Party support of the Enabling Act by promising to protect the rights of the Catholic Church and the states in the heavily Catholic south of Germany. Fear of the resulting violence if the Enabling Act was voted down also caused some Centre Party delegates to vote for the act. Otto Wels, the chairman of the Social Democrats, also tried to “adopt a moderate, even conciliatory tone in his speech for the opposition” (353). The Enabling Act passed with a vote count of 444 to 94 (354). It would be renewed in 1937 and 1939 and reestablished as permanent by 1943.

Empowered by the Enabling Act, the Nazis next targeted trade unions and Social Democrats, both of which had already been violently attacked by brownshirts and subjected to censorship and intimidation. Already alienated from the Social Democrats because of their support for Chancellor Brüning’s social service cuts, the trade unions tried to disavow the Social Democrats “to try to preserve their existence” (355). Encouraged by Nazi interest in job creation policies that the labor unions had promoted under previous governments, they supported Goebbels’ decision to make May Day, traditionally a day of pro-labor demonstrations, into a national holiday, the Day of National Labour (356) and marched in processions with Nazi flags.

Starting on May 2, the day after May Day, the SS and the brownshirts took over trade union offices, newspapers, and bank branches. Union leaders were arrested, beaten, and detained for weeks. Justifying their actions through false allegations of embezzling trade union funds, the Nazis seized the property and funds of the Social Democratic Party. Even then, Social Democratic representatives supported a resolution by Hitler calling for the fair treatment of Germany in international disarmament talks. The gesture was condemned by party leaders and the Social Democratic leadership left Germany for Prague.

With the excuse that the leaders of the Social Democrats were libeling Germany in a foreign country, the government invoked the Reichstag fire decree to outlaw the Social Democratic Party and ban their representatives from the Reichstag. Social Democratic members were assaulted, arrested, tortured, and sometimes killed with those who participated in the 1918 revolution especially targeted for violent retribution. Evans blames the party’s dissolution on their decision not to oppose Papen after his coup in Prussia,

Conservative Catholic priests were bitterly opposed to Communism and had been supporters of the monarchy, but they also found that under the Weimar Republic more Catholics could pursue jobs with the government than had been the case under the German Empire. Concerned that such “gains” (363) would be lost under the Nazis, the German Catholic hierarchy discouraged priests from criticizing the Nazi regime and lifted a ban on wearing political uniforms during church services. Catholic student organizations and some newspapers became loyal to Hitler’s government. Catholic leadership hoped that Hitler would agree to a so-called “Concordant” (363) with the papacy, which would be similar to other agreements the papacy made with governments to protect the Catholic Church and Catholic rights.

Under the leadership of the former Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, the Centre Party became much less democratic and much more accommodating to Hitler. He did not combat the fact that the Nazis had been closing down the Centre Party’s newspapers and organizations and arresting prominent Catholic writers, activists, and politicians who had criticized the regime. In the end, the Concordant banned priests being directly involved in politics, which meant the end of the Centre Party. Evans suggests this response was because the “Church as a whole was turning against parliamentary democracy all over Europe in the face of the Bolshevik threat” (366).

The smaller political parties were less difficult for the Nazis to dismantle. All the parties, even the moderate right-wing ones, either dissolved themselves, were banned, or pressured those parties’ members into joining the Nazi Party.

On May 6, 1933, stormtroopers and members of the National Socialist German Students’ League attacked Magnus Hirschfield’s Institute for Sexual Science, which had a vast library and had advocated for sexual education, abortion, and gay rights. They burned all the books and photographs they could carry. Hirschfield, who had been in France, did not return to Germany and remained in France until his death in 1935. “The destruction of his Institute was only one part…of a far more wide-ranging assault on what the Nazis portrayed as the Jewish movement to subvert the German family” (376).

As part of their general campaign on sexual morality, the Nazis attacked activists dealing with abortion, homosexuality, and contraceptives. A 1927 law, the Law Against Sexually Transmitted Diseases, was amended to criminalize prostitution and education on abortion. This had been preceded by a large public debate over the legalization of abortion between 1929 and 1932. The Weimar Republic’s health care system was demolished on the basis that “it was geared towards preventing the reproduction of the strong on the one hand, and shoring up the families of the weak on the other” (377).

Ideas of racial hygiene had become more accepted during the Great Depression since it was seen as a way to reduce the cost of welfare through sterilization of the poor and handicapped. Building on this and Weimar policies to employ the unemployed on rural improvement projects, the Nazis required the unemployed to do unpaid labor to qualify for welfare benefits. Also, the homeless and “work-shy” (379) were sent to concentration camps.

Blaming organized crime on Jews, the Nazis encouraged police to arrest members of criminal “ring associations” (379) and detain them without trial. Views that criminality was hereditary also shaped Nazi policy. These continued from a trend where the welfare state of the Weimar Republic had already “begun to turn to authoritarian solutions” (380).

After the election of 1933, the brownshirts had unleashed violence against all dissenters and “deviants, vagrants, nonconformists of every kind.” It was a process the Nazis themselves called “Gleichschaltung” or “co-ordination” (381). State officials, local town mayors and councils, judges, and civil servants were forced to resign and let themselves be replaced by Nazi appointees or to join the Nazi Party. The Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service legitimized the intimidation campaign and allowed for the dismissal of any civil servant who had Jewish ancestry, was married to a “non-Aryan” (382), or had been involved in political activities that would cast doubt on their adherence to Nazi ideology.

Because government jobs were now contingent on being a member of the Nazi Party, the party’s membership expanded greatly. Also the law allowed for the purging of lawyers and judges willing to oppose the Nazis’ violent and illegal tactics.

Businesses were being extorted by SA and Nazi Party groups for payments to fund the Nazi Party. However, German industries were satisfied with Nazism’s opposition to socialist policies and the profits to be made from military rearmament. Other organizations faced pressure and coercion. The Federation of German Women’s Associations chose to dissolve rather than follow Nazi demands that they expel all Jewish members and place Nazis in leadership roles. Clubs and professional associations were likewise taken over by Nazis or forced to merge with existing Nazi organizations, like the Boy Scouts who were merged with the Hitler Youth.