How Hitler REALLY came to power, by Leslie Wilson

Photo: Bundesarchiv

People keep saying: 'Hitler came to power by democratic means.' Well, did he? I'm grounding this blog on a reading of Richard J Evans's impressive book 'The Coming of the Third Reich,' published in 2003. I thought it was time to revisit the 1932-1933 era, and what I find is not what I expected, which shows that it's worth checking facts before rushing into virtual print. I had always understood that  left and centre parties failed to grasp the threat Hitler represented, and to unite against him. That was an element in the problem, but the narrative is a good deal more nuanced and complex than that - and contains some frightening resonances with our own times.

The Wall Street crash and subsequent depression hit Germany's fragile economy harder than it hit others, partly because of the withdrawal of US money from Germany business. A fifth of the German male population were out of work: this is probably a conservative estimate, as women weren't included. If you want to read a fictional account of this situation and how hopeless it felt, you can't do better than Hans Fallada's 'Little man, what now?' Or else consider the photograph which I have seen of people queuing up to have their pets put to sleep (by a charity) because they could no longer even afford to feed their children. Consider the men who trudged along Germany's roads from city to city, in a fruitless search for work, sleeping rough, in growing despair.

Unemployed men, by Walter Maisak

Many of  those workers turned to the Communist party, and the sudden rise of Communism, which saw the situation as a crisis of capitalism which might lead to its ultimate fall, terrified many middle-class Germans. At the same time, Nazism, which had been a small fringe party, also started to grow. The large number of unemployed men with nothing to do, were a reservoir on which the extremist parties could draw. Nazis and Communists clashed in street battles; the Nazis were at least as violent as the Communists, but the Communists often got all the blame. It has to be said, however, that the extreme left were just as keen to destroy the democratic system as the extreme Right were.

The Social Democratic party, the original workers' party, had lost credibility due to their cooption of right-wing forces, when they were in power, to suppress Communists. However, in 1930, when in coalition with the People's Party, the Social Democrats refused to support cuts to unemployment benefit which the People's Party wanted (because the country needed to try and balance the books). That was the end of the coalition, and it meant that the ageing aristocrat President Hindenburg and his political allies saw a chance 'to establish an authoritarian regime through the use of the Presidential power of rule by decree.' The army, which had previously reported to the cabinet, had been given the right to report directly to the President. This meant that Hindenburg, himself a World War 1 military hero, had the troops at his personal disposal. Evans sees 1930 as the beginning of the end of Weimar democracy. 'Rule by decree' meant that legislation could be imposed directly, by the President, without having to go through the Reichstag.

There was still a Chancellor, however, Heinrich Brüning, a monarchist (and not a constitutional one) and allied to the increasingly authoritarian Catholic Centre party. To clarify; he represented those forces in German society who had been hostile to democracy from 1918, when the German revolution unseated the Kaiser.

Heinrich Brüning: Bundesarchiv

By 1930, as the extremist representation in the Reichstag grew, proceedings were often unable to go forward because '107 brown-shirted and uniformed Nazi deputies joined 77 disciplined and well-organised Communists, chanting, shouting, interrupting, and demonstrating their total contempt for the legislature at any juncture.' In February, 1931, the Reichstag dissolved itself for six months due to the impossibility of carrying on.

'Power,' Evans says, 'drained from the Reichstag with frightening rapidity.' It shifted to Hindenburg's circle, and to the streets, where violence was escalating. My mother remembered, as a child, mattresses being put into the windows at her grandfather's house, because the bullets were flying in the street. My grandfather, who was a policeman, was regularly deployed to suppress these riots. (One thing Evans doesn't mention is that though in other parts of Germany the police tended to support the Nazis, in Upper Silesia, where my grandparents lived, this was not the case. Given that the Nazi vote was consistently low in that province, this is perhaps not surprising, and my grandfather found himself having to control his men when they wanted to beat up the Nazis. He was a Social Democrat himself, and firmly believed that the role of a policeman was to keep order.)

Meanwhile, Brüning was imposing savage cuts. One of Germany's problems was the payment of reparations under the Treaty of Versailles. However, in 1931, the Hoover Moratorium suspended those payments. This should have given the political leeway for government job-creation schemes, and now the far right couldn't assert that any tax increase would only go towards the reparations. But Brüning, obsessed with fear of inflation, did nothing, and continued with his programme of cuts, saying publicly that the Depression could be expected to last till 1935. He became known as the 'Hunger Chancellor.' Brüning's successor, Von Papen, was equally addicted to austerity.

The Nazi vote continued to grow, helped by an astute propaganda campaign masterminded by the propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels. It had its effect - not surprisingly, when you consider that postwar advertisers studied Goebbels's methods. One can imagine what he would have done with the Internet and social media. 'What the Nazis succeeded in doing' says Evans, 'was to reduce political dialogue to a series of slogans. Voters were confronted 'with a stark choice: either the old forces of betrayal and corruption, or a national rebirth to a glorious future…Visual images, purveyed not only through posters and magazine illustrations, but also through mass demonstrations and marches in the streets, drove out rational discourse and verbal argument in favour of easily assimilated stereotypes that mobilised a whole range of feelings, from resentment and aggression to the need for security and redemption.' (Evans). They yelled about 'November criminals,' 'red bosses,' 'Jewish wire-pullers', the 'red murder pack.'

Goebbels: Bundesarchiv

Perhaps this sounds familiar? I find it deeply worrying, because it demonstrates how easily people can be morally stampeded by snap phrases, and manipulated through their fear of complex understanding and analysis. ''I'm delighted at Hitler's lack of a programme,'' one woman wrote in her diary, ''for a programme is either lies, weakness, or designed to catch silly birds. The strongman acts from the necessity of a serious situation and can't allow himself to be bound.'' At a time when 'strong stable leadership' is being offered to British voters as an inducement, it should give us pause for thought. Of course, Hitler did have a programme, as anyone who could wade through the turgid pages of Mein Kampf could find out, and as the world found out when it was too late.

ballot paper for Presidential election

However, when Hitler stood for the Presidency against Hindenburg, he lost (less catastrophically than the Communist, Thälmann, who got 10% in the final vote. Hitler got 37%, and Hindenburg 53%. The Social Democrats supported Hindenburg, because there was no-one else they could support. This did no good either to their morale or their credibility, nor did it help when, in order to support law and order in the country, they withdrew their opposition to the cuts. Meanwhile, the new chancellor was as determined to create an autocracy as Hitler was.

'Papen's self-appointed task,' writes Evans, 'was to roll back history, not just Weimar democracy but everything that had happened in European politics since the French Revolution, and re-create in the place of modern class conflict the hierarchical basis of ancien regime society.' One of his government's first acts, having abolished the guillotine as a means of execution and restored the axe instead, was to ban left-liberal and social democratic newspapers. They lifted a previous ban on the brownshirts, hoping that they would thus be 'tamed' and could be used as an auxiliary army. Instead the street battles quickly reached record new levels. When my grandparents looked at the situation, they must have thought the country was on the verge of civil war.

In 1932, Von Papen's government suspended the Social Democratic government of Prussia on the grounds that it was no longer capable of maintaining law and order (in the face of the brown violence that Papen himself had unleashed). The Social Democrats accepted this, mainly because it was against their principles to use violence. If the leftist Reichsbanner organisation (which the Nazis later accused my grandfather of belonging to; I have no way of knowing if he actually did) had taken up arms - well, they might have been smashed by Rightists. Or there might have been civil war. Easy to condemn the Social Democrats when you have the benefit of hindsight, and when you aren't facing that decision yourself. They tried to use the legal route to protest, and the law supported them in part. But they were restricted to representing Prussia in the Upper Chamber, to the irritation of the Right. In any case, the Social Democrats had suffered severe electoral defeat, and they knew they couldn't mobilise their trades union membership against Papen, because there were so many unemployed men who could have been brought in to break strikes.

'After 20th July 1932, the only realistic alternatives,' writes Evans, 'were a Nazi dictatorship or a conservative, authoritarian regime backed by the army.'

President Hindenburg

And yet, by election time in November 1932, Nazi support was waning. They had over-extended themselves and run out of funds, and, more dangerously as far as they were concerned, the Depression was bottoming out. Von Papen had resigned and had been replaced by General Kurt von Schleicher. 'By this time, the constitution had in effect reverted to what it had been in the Bismarckian Reich, with governments being appointed by the Head of State, without reference to parliamentary majorities or legislatures… Yet the problem remained that any government which tried to change the constitution in an authoritarian direction without the legitimacy afforded by the backing of a majority in the legislature would run a serious risk of starting a civil war.' And the largest party in the Reichstag were the Nazis.

So: did Hitler came to power by democratic means? I hope that this blog shows that it's a bit more complicated than that. The final decision to offer the chancellorship to Hitler (he had refused to take any lesser role in a coalition government) was driven by the realistic fear of a coup by the paramilitary Steel Helmets organisation (Stahlhelm), supported by landed interests and industrialists who wanted to continue wage and benefit cuts and feared a nationalisation of the steel industry by Schleicher. Some expected Schleicher himself to stage a coup, after he asked President Hindenburg to give him extra-constitutional powers to overcome the crisis, and was refused. Hitler's appointment as Chancellor did at least confer a shred of constitutionality on the decision Hindenburg made.

Hitler's cabinet. Goering is to his left. Papen standing to his right. Bundesarchiv

The Nazis did not fill this new government: Hitler was Chancellor, Wilhelm Frick was Minister of the Interior, and Hermann Goering was Reich Minister Without Portfolio and Acting Prussian Minister of the Interior, which gave him control over the police. This meant that the Nazis had control over law and order - or, as it soon turned out, lawlessness and violence. The Right felt that they could control Hitler. History shows they were wrong. But the real seizure of power followed the Reichstag fire, and the wave of terror that was then unleashed on Germany was anything but democratic.

Is there a lesson here for us? Over-simplistic parallels are the kind of things the Nazis dealt in, that Donald Trump, for example, deals in. But I would say this. By the time Hitler took power, Germany was already primed for him.In my lifetime, since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Britain, I have seen politics move steadily to the Right, and the further they move in that direction, the more the mainstream political parties chase them rightwards. Policies which were once the preserve of the National Front are now mainstream conservative discourse. The Nazis' success was partly fuelled by sloganism and rabble-rousing, which also dominate the modern political scene. The other parties tried adopting punchy slogans and visual images, but they couldn't equal the Nazis in this respect.

Perhaps the principal lesson is that economic hardship and austerity bred Nazism; this should definitely serve as a warning to us today.


A footnote: Though the Nazis had a majority of seats in the Reichstag, this did not translate, ever, into a majority of the vote. The best they ever did was in the final election of March 1933, after the Reichstag fire, when voter intimidation was in full swing, and they polled 43.9%. But considering the authoritarian inclinations of some of the other parties, this would hardly indicate any great liberal resistance to Nazism. There were liberals,though, in the political, rather than the economic neo-liberal sense of the word. Many of them were dragged into camps and prisons, and many were murdered there. Some emigrated. A few went undercover to resist as best they could. We may honour their names, but the years leading up to 1933 were catastrophic, for many people who would otherwise have been decent human beings, either out of fear, or persuasion, or apathy, were sucked into supporting a filthy and murderous political system which was to lead to the death of millions. Most human beings are not as heroic as they'd like to believe they could be.

Social democrats in Oranienburg concentration camp. Bundesarchiv.

Why weren't all the Germans like Maria von Maltzan? By Leslie Wilson

Nazi boycott of Jewish shops. Photo: German Federal Archive

One month after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag building went up in flames. The arson was blamed on Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist, and he was executed for it a year later. It seems that most historians agree that van der Lubbe did set the building on fire - but what is beyond doubt is that it was a great opportunity for Hitler, who persuaded the President of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, to suspend civil liberties. In the aftermath, Communists and Social Democrats were arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Some of them never emerged from the 'wild' concentration camps the SA (Brownshirts) set up. Some of them never got so far. The Social Democrat Minister-President of Mecklenburg, Johannes Stelling, was tortured to death and his body was tied up in a sack and thrown into a river. Twelve other Social Democrats were thrown in the same night. Paul Löbe, the former President of the Reichstag, was kidnapped, arrested, and put into a camp. Social Democratic councillor and officials in Braunschweig resigned their posts when they were threatened with violence; one refused and was beaten to death, and this pattern was repeated across Germany. Trades Unions and other 'Marxist' organisations (like the Schrader League that my grandfather had belonged to) were dissolved, often after the premises had been trashed and the administrators beaten or murdered.

And of course, the Nazis began to attack the Jews. Maria von Maltzan, a young German aristocrat, reponded to the boycott of Jewish businesses (which happened in April 1933), in characteristic fashion: 'Posters were fixed to Jewish shops with the words: 'Germans, don't buy from Jews!' I couldn't resist just going into such a little shop, with uniformed boycott supervisors standing in front of it. They stopped me at once and asked what I wanted to buy.' She told them she wanted to pay a bill. Once she was inside, the shopkeeper, an elderly Jewish woman, said to her: ''For God's sake, you're putting yourself in pointless danger!' Maltzan's response was: 'I hadn't thought of that for a moment.'

Maria von Maltzan, from book jacket

Maria von Maltzan was an exceptional person, stubborn, and if not fearless, a risk-taker. One can imagine how easily other people would be deterred by the heavies standing outside the Jewish business, particularly since they probably knew exactly what they were capable of. However, even Maltzan quickly realised that she did need to be careful. The Gestapo interrogated her as a communist sympathiser and a friend of Jews. Possibly she was saved from the worst by her aristocratic status and her father's reputation as a German war hero. Nevertheless, she soon learned that as a person involved in resistance, she couldn't be cautious enough.

And once she had achieved her doctorate in natural history, in Munich, she couldn't apply for any posts in research establishments or biological institutes, because such posts were reserved for Nazi party members, and she wouldn't join the Party.

I have been reading a book which I can't praise enough: Richard J Evans's 'The Third Reich in History and Memory.' It is a collection of essays, elegantly and accessibly written, and in the essay entitled: 'Coercion and Consent', he considers and rebuts the contention of historians that the vast majority of the German people supported Hitler and that an extensive apparatus of terror wasn't necessary.

This is based on the observation that the Gestapo, as an organisation, was far smaller than the Stasi in the so-called 'German Democratic Republic', and that after 1933 the concentration camps (as opposed to the death camps in the East) were used for criminals and 'anti-social elements.' However, these historians are ignoring the role of the courts in prosecuting anyone who stepped out of line, and many of these people ended up in prisons and penitentiaries.

This struck an immediate chord with me, having sat one afternoon in the German historical Institute reading reports from a German court (I think it was Hamburg). The example that stuck in my mind was the man who had joked in an air-raid shelter that Hitler had invaded France to get back his ball, which had been shot off in the First World War. The story about Hitler's missing ball was of course commonplace in Britain, and perhaps the man had got it from secretly listening to the BBC. In any case, he got a hefty prison sentence, and there were many other such cases.

In 1935, 23,000 inmates of state prisons and penitentiaries were classified as political offenders. Others were just guillotined. Contrary to what David Cesarani claimed in the Letters Page of the Guardian when 'Alone in Berlin' was published, the judicial murder of the elderly couple in Fallada's book was far from exceptional.

Ploetzensee prison Berlin: photo ThoKay

When, shortly before her death, I asked my grandmother what it was like to live under the Nazis, she glanced over her shoulder before she answered; so I saw the 'German glance', which her contemporaries in the West had been able to abandon. My grandmother's ongoing mental illness, her hours of brooding and inner anguish, had preserved it intact. What she remembered, first and foremost, from living under the Nazis, was fear. She told me then about Nazi women coming to the house and inspecting everything and then saying: 'You're scum. You'll end up in concentration camp.' That must have been in 1933, when my grandfather was fighting for his job. However, the 'German glance' was necessary, if you were going to say anything incautious, in a world where the Nazi surveillance apparatus extended to the lowest level officials, the 'Blockwart' whose job it was to collect and transfer information about everyone living in his small area. Nazi womens' organisations, schools, and the Hitler Youth, all kept tabs on the population. Bruno Bettelheim undoubtedly had this in mind when he remarked that the whole of Germany was a concentration camp.

Maria von Maltzan couldn't take up the career she wanted because of her political views; other people were threatened with the loss of their jobs if they stepped out of line. My grandfather was one of millions controlled by their jobs (he also had a mentally-ill wife and I would think her safety, every time she was taken into mental hospital, was guaranteed by his being a senior police officer. If he had been a dissident, she might have been murdered as so many patients were.) Nazism was no different from any other totalitarian state; people were controlled through their jobs.

Of course there were people who were enthusiastic about the Nazi state. The unpleasant refugee Czekalla in my novel 'Last Train from Kummersdorf,' talks big about killing people in Russia, and finally mutters that he was meant to be a big landlord out there. Some people will go along with all kinds of abuses for personal benefit - and the Nazi system made it its business to bring out the worst that the human race is capable of. Brutality, racial hatred, callousness, were promoted as virtues in Nazi Germany. Sebastian Haffner, in his 'Defying Hitler' describes how he and his fellow lawyers were taken off to a kind of boot camp and given military training. (this seems to have been standard practice, with professionals) 'It was remarkable,' he observed, 'how comradeship actively decomposed all the elements of individuality and civilisation.' We all know that soldiers commit horrific crimes, both off their own bat, or because they are told to. In his study of German police units who were taken off to murder Jews, Christopher Browning shows how powerful the sense of peer pressure was, in persuading the policemen not to step out, where the option of doing so was given them. ''Who would have dared,' one policeman declared emphatically, to 'lose face' before the assembled troops.' It's a situation I explored in 'Last Train from Kummersdorf' where the lad Hanno tells the girl Effi how his friends were tormenting an old Jewish man, and he walked away from it - and felt guilty afterwards.

photo: Wikimedia Commons

I once gave a talk to a group of schoolchildren about how people could be brought to participate in mass murders, and when I told them about this, the boys, in particular, all nodded reluctantly, and understood exactly what I was talking about. It's what happens in the playground when children are bullied, and I don't think I'm trivialising it when one considers that bullied children often kill themselves.

However, one must also remember that one motive for establishing the 'controlled' situation of the extermination camps and the gas chambers was that the troops who had been carrying out killings were getting post-traumatic stress disorder, which suggests that they did have some kind of conscience about committing murder. And also, the men who stepped out of murder duty were often self-employed, and didn't feel they needed to worry about their future work prospects after the war.

At this point, I can imagine someone saying: 'Oh, yes, but you're fuzzing ethical issues. People are always responsible for their actions.'

And this, according to Richard Evans, is a key issue. 'Anything that implies constraints on the free will of historical actors puts a potentially serious obstacle in the way of establishing their culpability.' In other words, if one questions the validity of the 'consent' of ordinary Germans to Hitler, one provides perpetrators with the excuse that they acted under duress, which could get them off in the courtroom.

I'm not a lawyer, but I can see the ethical problem. It seems to me, though, that those men who took part in the murders of Jews in eastern Europe definitely did commit murder. And if you have done such a thing, it cannot be changed, even if you acted through fear, or, in the case of the younger men, were so conditioned by propaganda and bad teaching that you had no ethical equipment to stop you doing this. You've still done something bad and it cannot be undone. But I think the greater responsibility lies with the people who planned for this to happen.

The idea of willing Nazi supporters, about a nation who were eager to invade other countries (in fact the initial response to the outbreak of war was largely fear and gloom) has been a part of the story the British have been telling themselves about the war for the whole of my life. A few years ago, I went with a Jewish friend to watch the documentary about Belsen which appalled the British when it was shown after the war (it's not easy to watch now, either). The commentator said: 'If you hadn't fought the war, this might have been you.' (It wasn't at any stage stated that the poor people in the camp and the mass graves were mainly Jewish.)

mass grave, Bergen-Belsen. Photo Lieutenant Alan Moore

The fact that the Germans were deemed to be particularly monstrous, peculiarly inhumane and cruel, gave extra lustre to the war that had been fought against them, and undoubtedly made people feel their sufferings had been worth while.

There's something else, though. If you discount the fact that Nazism was a terror state - and I still hear people and read people doing so, even nowadays - it may be a reassurance. 'They' were different, 'they' came from a corrupt culture. If you assert that Nazism could have been fought by simple acts of refusal (there were quite a few, and many of them ended in the deaths of the dissidents), then naturally, it couldn't possibly happen anywhere else, like here. I think that's a very dangerous illusion. If we are convinced, for example, that British people wouldn't stand for that kind of thing, we may ignore the fact that similar structures of surveillance and criminalisation of dissent are being set up, not hypothetically, but now, as I am typing these words.

I think the danger in Britain is not of a sudden slashing clampdown, as in 1933 in Germany, but a slow creeping paralysis that makes it harder and harder for anyone to dissent. Where that may lead is hard to tell because no more than Germans in 1933 are we capable of looking at history from the other end and seeing what is going to happen. However, just consider that people who oppose fracking have recently been described by Tory politicians as 'extremists.' I will say no more.