The apogee of Nazi attempts to piggyback off Hindenburg’s reputation was reached during the opening of the new session of parliament, little more than two weeks after the election had been held. As a result of the burning of the Reichstag, the ceremony was held on 21 March in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. The location could hardly have been more symbolic – the garrison church, the burial site of Frederick the Great, whom Hitler hero-worshipped.
‘Here the marriage was successful, if not forever, then at least temporarily, between the masses led by Hitler and the “Spirit of Potsdam”, the Prussian tradition, represented by Hindenburg,’ wrote the young German novelist Erich Ebermayer in his diary. ‘What a brilliant production by the master producer Goebbels! Hindenburg, the members of the government and parliament drive from Berlin to Potsdam past a single, cohesive line of cheering millions. All of Berlin seems to be in the streets.’ As Goebbels had wanted, Ebermayer was struck by the significance of Hindenburg’s presence as the one individual who could unite Germany’s past with its future.
While Hindenburg took centre stage, resplendent in his field marshal’s dress uniform, Hitler demonstrated his subservience by wearing civilian clothes. And once inside the church, he was obsequious in his praise. ‘Your wondrous life’, he said, addressing Hindenburg, ‘is a symbol of the indestructible vigour of the German nation for all of us.’ Hindenburg’s ‘understanding’ had permitted a consummation of ‘the marriage between the symbols of old greatness and young strength’. Hindenburg then descended alone into the crypt of the church to pay homage to the Prussian kings in their burial chamber. As a propaganda spectacle, demonstrating Hindenburg’s endorsement of the link between the new regime and the days of German glory, it could not have been bettered.
Hitler moved on to the first session of the new Reichstag, held in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin. He wanted the deputies to pass an Enabling Act that would allow him to bypass both the President and the Reichstag. But he faced a hurdle. He needed two-thirds of the deputies present to support him.
The communists were no longer an obstacle – they weren’t even allowed into the building – but members of the Centre Party had to be persuaded to vote for the Nazis. Consequently, just as he had been obsequious to Hindenburg, Hitler was now obsequious to deputies of the Centre Party. The Nazi leader hypocritically professed support for their Christian beliefs, saying, ‘The National Government sees in both Christian denominations the most important elements for the preservation of our nationhood.’
Hitler started the debate in as dignified a manner as he could, but after Otto Wels of the Social Democrats had voiced the view that ‘criticism is wholesome and necessary’ and protested at the ‘serious consequences’ of passing the Enabling Act, Hitler’s mask of statesmanship fell away and he revealed his true nature – that of a beer-hall rabble-rouser. In a speech filled with threat he claimed that the Nazis were ‘restraining’ themselves ‘from turning against those who have tortured and tormented us for fourteen years’. He called the Social Democrats ‘sissies’ for ‘speaking of persecution’ and told them that their ‘last hour has come’ and they deserved their fate. ‘Everything in a nation that becomes rotten, old and frail’, he declared, ‘will vanish and never return.’
All the parties in the Reichstag, with the exception of the Social Democrats, subsequently voted for the Enabling Act, which passed by 444 votes to 94. A majority of Reichstag deputies thus voted themselves into irrelevancy.
By the time the Enabling Act was passed, the Nazis had already made determined efforts to secure control of the security apparatus of the state. Heinrich Himmler, for instance, had become acting police chief of Munich on 9 March after the Minister-President of Bavaria, Heinrich Held, had been forced out of office.
At a press conference a few days after taking office, Himmler announced that ‘I have made quite extensive use of protective custody … I felt compelled to do this because in many parts of the city there has been so much agitation that it has been impossible for me to guarantee the safety of those particular individuals who have provoked it.’ The cynicism of Himmler’s concept of ‘protective custody’ was breathtaking. He wanted his audience to believe that he had imprisoned opponents of the regime to ‘protect’ them from the righteous anger of other Germans. He thus maintained that he was doing them a favour by locking them up.
Given the decentralized structure of the state, the Nazi takeover of the security forces had to be conducted piecemeal, and it wasn’t until 1936 that Himmler formally became chief of all the German police. But from these early days, policemen understood that they faced a stark choice – support the new regime or be forced out. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed in April, gave legal backing to the removal of any members of the police who opposed the Nazis. This, coupled with the appointment of police leaders who were members of the party, swiftly created a police force loyal to the new regime.
Not that there needed to be much of a purge. Most German police officers stayed on and served the Nazis. They decided to do this even though their new bosses were often the very people they had been targeting as dangerous revolutionaries just a few months before. Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, who had been conducting a variety of illegal operations prior to Hitler’s Chancellorship, now became head of the political section of the police in Munich.
One of the policemen that Heydrich inherited was Heinrich Müller, a thirty-two-year-old career officer. Although Müller loathed communism, he had never been a supporter of the Nazis. Yet even though the Nazis were aware that Müller’s loyalties had been directed elsewhere, his career flourished and he eventually became head of the Gestapo. In 1937 a revealing appraisal of him by the local party stated that while Müller had acted against left-wing groups before 1933, ‘It is no less clear, however, that Müller, had it been his task, would have proceeded just the same against the right.’ The report concluded: ‘With his vast ambition and relentless drive, he would have done everything to win the appreciation of whoever might happen to be his boss in a given system.’ As a description of human pragmatism, it could hardly have been bettered.
Heinrich Müller was not alone in demonstrating this fundamental psychological trait. Enormous numbers of other Germans swiftly changed their previous allegiance and conformed to the new order. Over a million joined the Nazi Party in early 1933. It would be naive to think that all these people suddenly recognized the validity of Hitler’s arguments in a kind of collective Road to Damascus moment. Many of them were surely opportunists.
The novelist Erich Ebermayer encountered one such character in April 1933. He was shocked to discover that a friend, who ‘until now had been anything but a Nazi’, was ‘wearing a party badge under his jacket, on his waistcoat! I am aghast. He explains to me, in a cold and sober manner, that he is not keen on being pushed against the wall by the Nazis. You must take part in this, and whether your heart is in it or not doesn’t matter.’ Ebermayer was astonished, especially given that his friend was the ‘most talented young actor in Leipzig – why should politics concern him?’
Three years later, a member of the now illegal political party the SPD reached the doleful conclusion that ‘The average worker is first and foremost interested in work and not in democracy. People who once enthusiastically defended democracy don’t show any interest in politics. One must be clear about the fact that in the first place men are part of a family and have professions, and that politics is of secondary importance and then only when they hope to get something out of it.’
Psychological research has demonstrated that most of us feel a profound ‘need to belong’. We are social animals and ‘lack of attachments is linked to a variety of ill effects on health, adjustment, and well-being.’ This ‘need’ can be fulfilled by participating in social groups independent of the state, but this became increasingly difficult in Nazi Germany as the regime sought to push its influence into every organization. This invasion of the individual’s personal space was one of the many sinister sides to the utopian dream of the Volksgemeinschaft.
While Erich Ebermayer’s actor friend in Leipzig was able to accommodate himself to the new Germany, it was impossible for anyone the Nazis considered a Jew to do likewise. Less than 1 per cent of Germans were Jews, so they were a minority that was easy to oppress. During these early months of the regime the Jews were particularly at risk of arbitrary attacks from Stormtroopers in actions that were often designed to humiliate. Rudi Bamber, from a Jewish family in Nuremberg, remembered how his father was taken to a sports stadium and made, along with other Jews, to cut the grass with his teeth.
Hitler openly expressed his own anti-Semitism just a few days after the passing of the Enabling Act. In a proclamation to all party organizations, he blamed German Jews for supposedly helping to orchestrate protests about Nazi atrocities from foreign nations, and repeated the conspiracy theory that Jews plotted with each other across national boundaries. Jews, he believed, owed their loyalty to other Jews – not to the countries in which they lived.
However, this proclamation was not all it seemed. Though it was inconceivable that it could have been issued without Hitler’s input, it was nonetheless only signed ‘Party Leadership’. And while the proclamation called for a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses, it also emphasized that the Jews were not to be physically abused. Disingenuously, the Völkischer Beobachter reported on 30 March that Hitler had said one reason for the boycott was the risk that ‘the Volk’ might rise up against the Jews in actions that would ‘perhaps assume undesirable forms’.
Just as Himmler had said people should be imprisoned in concentration camps to ‘protect’ them from the wrath of the populace, so Hitler now asserted that Jews should be persecuted by the state in order to safeguard them from spontaneous attacks by ordinary Germans. It was a nonsensical argument, not least because it presupposed that the Nazis couldn’t police their own population.
The reason for this twisted logic was that Hitler knew he had to balance competing interests. Local party activists had already been targeting Jews, and while he needed to keep their support he also had to ensure that traditional conservative elements – including the army, his cabinet colleagues and President Hindenburg – didn’t think that Germany was now at the mercy of a lawless rabble.
Hitler was right in his proclamation in one respect. There had been protests abroad about the Nazis’ actions against Jews, most notably a rally on 27 March in New York attended by more than 50,000 people. But Hitler omitted the reason why people were protesting – the Nazis were already persecuting German Jews. Though he had tried to present the Nazis as the wronged individuals in the dispute with the Jews, he and his comrades had caused the problem in the first place. Hitler frequently used this kind of duplicitous argument. He would light a fire and then blame other people for trying to put it out.
The night before the boycott of Jewish shops and businesses was due to start, Goebbels announced that it would last for just one day. This was likely because Hitler realized that there wasn’t widespread support for the action within Germany and that a longer boycott risked aggravating foreign trading partners still further.
The boycott when it took place on 1 April was traumatic for German Jews. Stormtroopers positioned themselves outside Jewish shops and intimidated people into staying away. For the Jews it brought the realization that not only would the state not protect them, the state actually wished them harm. ‘I felt as if I was falling into a deep hole,’ said one German Jew, a teenager in Stuttgart. ‘That’s when I intuitively realized for the first time that the existing law did not apply to Jews.’
Wolfgang Teubert, along with his Stormtrooper comrades, stood ‘outside the Jewish shops for a whole day and said “nobody is allowed to buy anything here”’. He willingly accepted Hitler’s lie about the reason for the Jewish boycott. ‘We should always be aware of a natural law in such cases,’ he said, ‘effect and cause. No effect without cause. And that boycott that we held against the Jews, for one day, was caused by the declaration of [economic] war [by foreign Jews].’
For Nazi supporter Günter Lohse, this action against the Jews was a fulfilment of the ‘pronouncements of Hitler and Goebbels’ that the Jews ‘occupied all the significant positions – in the banks, in industry, with the authorities, in university chairs, there are Jews everywhere. And for months that was presented. And so I thought that some correction was not inhumane, but rather I should say that I didn’t give it much thought. But for me the significance lay in the background. They [the Jews] rule everything here, that shouldn’t be the case. Something like that.’
Günter Lohse was an intelligent man. A student when the Nazis came to power, he later went on to work in the German Foreign Office. Yet he could parrot the lie that the Jews ‘rule everything here’ when it was obvious that the people who ‘ruled’ Germany and had been instrumental in appointing Hitler – Hindenburg, Papen and others in the German elite – were demonstrably not Jewish. And though there were Jews in ‘significant positions’ within German society it was ludicrous to claim they were ‘everywhere’.
Representatives of Germany’s former adversaries were taking note of what was happening. None more so than Sir Horace Rumbold, British ambassador to Berlin, who wrote a perceptive long telegram to the Foreign Office in London on 26 April 1933. Rumbold spotted that though the ‘Reichswehr and the President are probably still in a position to check and possibly even to control Hitlerism’, the problem was that ‘sooner or later, especially if the President dies, the Reichswehr may be expected to throw in their lot with the present regime.’ Moreover, since Hitler believed that ‘only brute force can ensure the survival of the race’ he was set on a course of rapid rearmament. While that goal was being achieved, Rumbold thought that Hitler would try ‘to lull the outer world into a sense of security’. Simultaneously, the ‘new regime’ would attempt to convince Germans of the rightness of their aims, and ‘To this end it has embarked on a programme of political propaganda on a scale for which there is no analogy in history.’
Rumbold was one of the first to spot the talents of Joseph Goebbels, whom he described as ‘a man of infinite resource and invention’. Goebbels, newly installed as the Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, made his desire for control over the press explicit at the first press conference he gave. ‘It goes without saying’, he told journalists, ‘that you will still be given information here [at the Propaganda Ministry], but you will also receive instructions. You will know not only what is happening, but also what attitude the government takes to it and how you can most appropriately convey that to the nation.’
Cultural institutions were threatened with abolition if they didn’t fall into line and purge themselves of elements the regime opposed. Some, like the Organization for German Students – the Deutsche Studentenschaft – even volunteered lists of ‘corrupting’ literature. During this process of pseudo-renewal, unique cultural collections were destroyed, including Magnus Hirschfeld’s pioneering sexology institute.
The books from Hirschfeld’s institute, snatched on 6 May 1933, were among those destroyed at the infamous book burning in Berlin held four days later. Students threw works by Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Sigmund Freud and a host of other famous writers on the bonfire. In Leipzig, when he heard news of the book burnings, Erich Ebermayer was worried that his own works might be destroyed as well. A few days later, on 14 May, he received terrible news – his books were indeed to be banned.
Even joining the Nazi Party was no guarantee of safety, as the immensely wealthy industrialist Günther Quandt discovered that spring. He became a member of the party in early May but shortly afterwards was arrested and accused of currency and business irregularities. He was imprisoned, forced to pay a large amount to gain his freedom on bail and then placed under house arrest. Only after he had ‘donated’ still more money to the Nazi cause was he allowed to resume his normal life. It was just one example of the many protection rackets that the Nazis operated.
Hitler was initially ambivalent about such excesses. But by 6 July 1933 he was sufficiently worried by the lawless atmosphere to warn in a speech to Nazi leaders that ‘revolution is not a permanent condition, and it must not develop into a permanent one. The energy released by the revolution must be channelled into the safe bed of evolution.’ Businessmen shouldn’t be ‘removed’ merely because they weren’t Nazis, since ‘in business, the only crucial thing is ability.’ Moreover, ‘the ideas of the programme don’t oblige us to act like fools and overturn everything.’
It was all very well for Hitler to say these things, quite another to make his followers – especially the Stormtroopers – abide by them. And the abuses continued long after he had given his speech. This was a growing problem for both Hitler and Goebbels in their quest to convince the millions of Germans who had opposed the Nazis to support the new regime. It was obvious that the Volksgemeinschaft couldn’t be created in an atmosphere in which almost everyone was at risk of attack or extortion.
But that was not the only difficulty that Hitler faced. A more immediate problem was that Ernst Röhm was not falling into line. He had written an article in June 1933 in which he said that while ‘A victory on the road to the German revolution has been won,’ it was ‘not absolute victory!’ And ‘as long as the real National Socialist Germany still awaits fulfilment, the fierce and passionate struggle of the SA and SS will not stop.’ Furthermore, despite Röhm saying that the Stormtroopers were not a threat to the established army, there were signs, as they searched for a role in the new Germany, that they could be. The Stormtroopers had evolved into a powerful force – several million by the end of 1933 – and this huge expansion in membership only exacerbated the problem of enforcing discipline.
A confrontation between Hitler and his old comrade Röhm seemed inevitable. On 1 February 1934, Röhm sent Blomberg, the Minister of Defence, a memo in which – according to Blomberg – he said that he wanted his Stormtroopers to oversee the army. This was in direct opposition to Hitler’s policy – he wanted to rearm the established armed forces, not increase the influence of the Stormtroopers. During a speech to military leaders later that month, Hitler explicitly said that while the Stormtroopers might be used for ‘tasks of border protection and pre-military training’ this was only to happen during a ‘transitional period’ to allow the established armed forces to grow. He reiterated that the army were to become the sole ‘weapon carriers’ of the nation.
That same month, Blomberg wanted to demonstrate the army’s support for Hitler. So he insisted that the ‘Aryan paragraph’ was enforced and Jews removed from the ranks. He also oversaw a change in the uniforms of the armed forces. From now on an eagle clutching a swastika would be seen on all military jackets. It is another example of how individuals and organizations came forward to volunteer change to please the new regime, and of how their perception that Hitler had to ‘balance’ various power groups was often the motivation behind that change.
Röhm was not well that spring. The French ambassador, André François-Poncet, met him for dinner in May and remarked that he ‘looked absentminded and ill’. It is possible that Röhm was despondent partly because he believed that others were moving against him. The Stormtroopers were unpopular not only with the armed forces but with President Hindenburg and Franz von Papen as well.
Events soon reached crisis point. On 8 June, four days after meeting Hitler, Röhm told the Stormtroopers that he was going on sick leave and that they should take time off as well, reconvening on 1 August. He reassured them that ‘The SA is and remains Germany’s destiny.’ That, however, was not how others saw the future of the Stormtroopers. On 17 June, Papen gave a speech at Marburg University in which he insisted that ‘the government must represent the people as a whole’ and that ‘the government is well aware of the selfishness, the lack of principle, the insincerity, the unchivalrous behaviour, the arrogance which is on the increase under the guise of the German revolution.’
The situation worsened for Hitler on 21 June, when both Hindenburg and General Blomberg told him that he should bring ‘the revolutionary troublemakers … to reason’. Hitler had a powerful motivation to do as he was asked. He was aware that crushing Röhm would help his chances of becoming head of state after Hindenburg’s death. What better demonstration would Germans need of his commitment to the nation than turning on his own supporters?
Hitler ordered Röhm to convene a meeting of Stormtrooper leaders at the spa town of Bad Wiessee on 30 June. Early that morning, while they were still asleep, Hitler arrived with an entourage that included two dozen SS men. He stormed up to Röhm’s room and arrested him while he was still in his pyjamas. Thirteen Stormtrooper leaders, including Röhm, were then taken thirty miles north to prison in Munich. The next day, Röhm, having declined the opportunity to commit suicide, was shot by two SS men, Theodor Eicke and his junior colleague Michael Lippert.
The choice of Eicke to lead the murder squad was significant. Like Reinhard Heydrich he owed his career entirely to Heinrich Himmler. A dangerous revolutionary, Eicke had been sentenced to prison in 1932 for plotting to use bombs against the Nazis’ political enemies. He had escaped by fleeing to Italy while on bail, only to return after Hitler came to power. Thinking that he had previously been betrayed by Josef Bürckel, a Nazi Gauleiter, he sought revenge but was captured and sent to a mental asylum. Bürckel considered Eicke ‘syphilitic and completely mad’, although a doctor at the asylum pronounced him sane. Shortly afterwards, Himmler stepped in and saved Eicke’s career by appointing him commandant of the concentration camp at Dachau.
Once again Himmler’s ability to find recruits in unlikely places paid dividends, as Eicke proved uniquely suited to the task. ‘He hates his enemies behind the barbed wire,’ said one of Eicke’s SS colleagues at Dachau, Max von Dall’Armi. ‘He speaks of their destruction and annihilation. He instils this hatred into the SS through speeches and conversations. Eicke is a fanatical SS officer and ardent National Socialist for whom there is no compromise.’ Dall’Armi also recalled Eicke’s saying that ‘SS men must hate … The heart in their breasts must be turned to stone.’
Eicke repaid Himmler for rescuing him from the mental asylum with his unquestioned loyalty. Not only did he throw himself into the reorganization of Dachau, making it the ‘model’ camp within the Nazi system, infamous for its ordered brutality, but he was willing to fulfil whatever special tasks the Reichsführer SS gave him. That is why, in the early evening of 1 July 1934, Eicke found himself inside cell 474 at Munich’s Stadelheim prison pointing a loaded gun at Ernst Röhm. ‘I am proud’, he allegedly said, ‘that I shot this faggot swine with my own hands.’ Back at Dachau, Eicke and his men gloried in the chance to kill the other Stormtroopers who were delivered to them, turning the whole event into a bacchanal and drinking barrel-loads of beer.
At his own headquarters in Munich, Hitler had told a group of his followers that Röhm had been planning a coup. He omitted to mention that there was no real evidence that this was the case. Röhm had shown no inclination to go against Hitler. Rather than thwarting a coup in turning against Röhm, Hitler had acted out of his own narrow self-interest, realizing that his career was at risk if he displeased Blomberg and Hindenburg. Röhm’s death also offered him other benefits – it destroyed the power base of the Stormtroopers and reassured the army that Hitler was committed to their pre-eminence as a military force.
The sheer lawlessness of what became known as the Night of the Long Knives was remarkable. For this wasn’t just an action against the Stormtroopers; Hitler also relished the opportunity to eliminate those who had previously angered him, including General Schleicher, Gregor Strasser and many others. Altogether around 150 people lost their lives.
The accused were never allowed a chance to plead their innocence before a court of law, just summarily dispatched. The SS even killed people in error. On the evening of 30 June they snatched the music critic of one of Munich’s leading newspapers from his flat as he was playing the cello. His wife told the SS there must be some mistake and started searching for documents to prove her husband’s identity. She stopped when the SS pointed their guns at her. Two days later she learnt that he had been shot at Dachau ‘by accident’. The SS had mistaken him for another journalist of the same name.
The killers were similarly reckless when they went to kill General Kurt von Schleicher, the man who had been Chancellor of Germany just the year before. They killed not only Schleicher but his wife as well. She had started screaming when she saw her husband targeted. Afterwards the Gestapo reported to Himmler that Schleicher had died while ‘resisting arrest’ and his wife had been killed in the ensuing firefight. The phrases ‘resisting arrest’ and ‘attempting to escape’ were to be used as all-purpose justifications for murder throughout the twelve years of Nazi rule. Another euphemism the Nazi security forces employed was ‘suicide’ – this was how Gregor Strasser’s death was described after he had been shot on the night of 30 June in his cell in Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin.
Hitler’s justification for these killings would have fallen apart at the merest investigation. Not only was there no substantive evidence that a coup was imminent, but the list of non-Stormtroopers who had been killed demonstrated that this was an obvious settling of old scores. The marginalized Schleicher and Strasser, for instance, were hardly leaders of a credible plot to overthrow the regime.
On 3 July, Hitler did his best to explain to his cabinet why the killings had been necessary. He told them that Röhm had betrayed him and that Strasser and Schleicher had been seeking to overthrow the government. After Blomberg thanked Hitler, the whole cabinet agreed that the actions were ‘justified as defence of the state’. There was to be no retrospective investigation into the truth of Hitler’s claims.
Hindenburg, no doubt much to Hitler’s relief, also expressed his gratitude that these ‘treasonable intrigues’ had been quashed and that Hitler had ‘saved the German nation from serious danger’. Hitler thus managed to fend off the risk to his Chancellorship from the combination of Hindenburg, Blomberg and Papen.
In a final stunning display of hypocrisy, Hitler also claimed to be shocked by the evidence of homosexuality within the Stormtrooper movement, even though he had known about Röhm’s sexual proclivities for years. Immediately after Röhm’s arrest, he said that he wanted ‘every mother to be able to give her son to the SA, to the party or the Hitler Youth without fear that he might become ethically or morally corrupt’.
The reaction of army officers to the Night of the Long Knives was predictable. The aristocratic Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg, then twenty-seven years old, spoke for many of his comrades when he later said that Röhm ‘wanted to make it his army. Of course he didn’t say it like that, but it was becoming increasingly clear. That came on top of our simple rejection of the SA because of their ways, because of their behaviour, because, well you can call it mob rule if you want … But the revolution eats its own children, that’s always been the case, hasn’t it?’ Above all, what mattered to officers like Kielmansegg was the imprimatur of President Hindenburg: ‘He had given his blessing to Hitler’s behaviour. This was the important thing for us. You know, for the army, Hindenburg was not Hitler.’
Kielmansegg’s words were another vindication of Hitler’s tactic of leaching off the reputation of Hindenburg during the first year and a half of his Chancellorship. It was psychologically much easier for Kielmansegg and his colleagues to support the new regime because ‘Hindenburg was not Hitler’. This endorsement by the aged Field Marshal was crucial.
Hitler waited nearly two weeks before he spoke to the Reichstag deputies about the killings. It was a potentially sensitive moment given that he had presided over the murder of several of their Reichstag colleagues. But his speech on 13 July was defiant. He not only gave detailed – if spurious – reasons for his actions, he even said that ‘If someone holds it against me why we didn’t call on the courts of law for the sentencing, I can only say: in this hour I was responsible for the destiny of the German nation and therefore I was Supreme Judge of the German people!’
Göring echoed Hitler’s words, telling Reichstag deputies that ‘if today, foreign countries think that chaos is happening in Germany, the German Volk will reply with a single cry: “All of us always approve what our Führer does.”’ Even one of Germany’s leading legal theorists, Professor Carl Schmitt, supported Hitler’s action in an article called ‘Der Führer schützt das Recht’ (The Führer protects justice). Hitler was indeed, said Schmitt, the supreme judge of right and wrong.
All semblance of the previous rule of law was gone. But what is still more notable is that Hitler’s popularity in Germany increased after the Night of the Long Knives. The Nazi control over the press meant that the killings could be spun as Hitler’s heroic attempt to restore order in the country. He had used the minimum necessary force, people read in the newspapers, to prevent violent disorder. Moreover, he had been prepared to punish his own erstwhile supporters for the greater good of the nation. Was not this dramatic evidence of how he saw himself as governing for all Germans – or at least those deemed racially acceptable – not just those who had voted Nazi?
Reports reaching members of the Social Democratic Party, who had been forced into exile to escape persecution, made gloomy reading. ‘Large, evidently very large, sections of the population are even extolling Hitler for his ruthless determination, and only a very small portion has been set thinking or been shocked,’ read one summary of the information they received from Germany. ‘Large sections of the working class have also become enslaved to the uncritical deification of Hitler.’
It was an astonishing demonstration of what can happen when people have access to only one voice across all media. With German radio stations and newspapers all parroting the same government line, millions of people not only forgave Hitler for his crime but lauded him for it.
Destroy the rule of law. Eliminate the free press. Suborn the police and the army. Hitler demonstrated that would-be dictators should do all three as soon as they can. Then they have a chance to reap benefits similar to the ones he enjoyed, from a population that has no one else to turn to for justice or information or protection but the newly corrupted institutions of the state.
Less than three weeks after Hitler declared to Reichstag deputies that he was ‘Supreme Judge of the German people’, President Hindenburg died, and Hitler was about to become the undisputed leader of the country.
Goebbels had called the previous year for a ‘mobilization of mind and spirit in Germany’. Now, in August 1934, that task could begin in earnest.