The_Coming_of_the_Third_Reich

‘for an outsider, a non-German who never experienced Nazism, it is perhaps too easy to criticise, to expect standards of behaviour which it was well-nigh impossible to attain in the circumstances.’15 loc: 189

Meinecke blamed the rise of the Third Reich above all on Germany’s growing obsession with world power from the late nineteenth century onwards, beginning with Bismarck and getting more intense in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the First World War. A militaristic spirit had spread through Germany, he thought, giving the army a balefully decisive influence over the political situation. Germany had acquired impressive industrial might; but this had been achieved by an over-concentration on a narrowly technical education at the expense of broader moral and cultural instruction. loc: 207

Meinecke concluded tentatively that there was something flawed in the German nation-state from the very moment of its foundation in 1871. loc: 214

key questions which, as he predicted, have continued to occupy people ever since. How was it that an advanced and highly cultured nation such as Germany could give in to the brutal force of National Socialism so quickly and so easily? Why was there such little serious resistance to the Nazi takeover? How could an insignificant party of the radical right rise to power with such dramatic suddenness? Why did so many Germans fail to perceive the potentially disastrous consequences of ignoring the violent, racist and murderous nature of the Nazi movement? loc: 223

High cultural achievements across the centuries did not render a descent into political barbarism more inexplicable than their absence would have done; loc: 236

If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship. loc: 238

many commentators argued that the rise and triumph of Nazism were the inevitable end-products of centuries of German history. In this view, which was put forward by writers as varied as the American journalist William L. Shirer, the British historian A. J. P. Taylor and the French scholar Edmond Vermeil, the Germans had always rejected democracy and human rights, abased themselves before strong leaders, rejected the concept of the active citizen, and indulged in vague but dangerous dreams of world domination.23 loc: 257

while ideas do have a power of their own, that power is always conditioned, however indirectly, by social and political circumstances, a fact that historians who generalized about the ‘German character’ or ’the German mind’ all too often forgot.27 loc: 277

Surely, they argued, in the light of the general collapse of European democracy in the years from 1917 to 1933, the coming of the Nazis should be seen, not as the culmination of a long and uniquely German set of historical developments, but rather as the collapse of the established order in Germany as elsewhere under the cataclysmic impact of the First World War.29 In this view, the rise of industrial society brought the masses onto the political stage for the first time. The war destroyed social hierarchy, moral values and economic stability right across Europe. The Habsburg, the German, the Tsarist and the Ottoman Empires all collapsed, and the new democratic states that emerged in their wake quickly fell victim to the demagogy of unscrupulous agitators who seduced the masses into voting for their own enslavement. loc: 291

Nazism, while far from being the unavoidable outcome of the course of German history, certainly did draw for its success on political and ideological traditions and developments that were specifically German in their nature. These traditions may not have gone back as far as Martin Luther, but they could certainly be traced back to the way German history developed in the course of the nineteenth century, and above all to the process by which the country was turned into a unified state under Bismarck in 1871. loc: 324

a mere fifty years separated Bismarck’s foundation of the German Empire in 1871 from the electoral triumphs of the Nazis in 1930-32. loc: 442

Here was the great and decisive leader whose lack many Germans felt acutely at this crucial juncture in their country’s fortunes. loc: 456

Too few Germans subsequently remembered that it was Bismarck who was responsible for defining politics as ‘the art of the possible.’ loc: 459

For more than a millennium before the century began, Central Europe had been splintered into myriad autonomous states, some of them powerful and well organized, like Saxony and Bavaria, others small or medium-sized ‘Free Cities’, or tiny principalities and knighthoods which consisted of little more than a castle and a modestly sized estate. These were all gathered together in the so-called Holy Roman Reich of the German Nation, founded by Charlemagne in 800 and dissolved by Napoleon in 1806. This was the famous ‘thousand-year Reich’ loc: 465

They came to believe that the quickest way to rid Germany of its many great and petty tyrannies was to sweep away the individual member states of the Confederation and replace them with a single German polity founded on representative institutions and guaranteeing the elementary rights and freedoms - freedom of speech, freedom of the press and so on - which were still denied in so many parts of Germany. Popular discontent generated by the poverty and starvation of the ‘Hungry Forties’ gave them their chance. In 1848, revolution broke out in Paris and flashed across Europe. Existing German governments were swept away and the liberals came to power. loc: 476

But they were unable to gain control over the armies of the two leading states, Austria and Prussia. This proved decisive. By the autumn of 1848, the monarchs and generals of the two states had recovered their nerve. They refused to accept the new constitution, and, after a wave of radical-democratic revolutionary activity swept across Germany the following spring, they forcibly dissolved the Frankfurt Parliament and sent its deputies home. loc: 483

the fortunes of the liberals had undergone a dramatic transformation once more by the beginning of the 1860s. Far from being a complete return to the old order, the post-revolutionary settlement had sought to appease many of the liberals’ demands while stopping short of granting either national unification or parliamentary sovereignty. Trial by jury in open court, equality before the law, freedom of business enterprise, abolition of the most objectionable forms of state censorship of literature and the press, the right of assembly and association, and much more, were in place almost everywhere in Germany by the end of the 1860s. And, crucially, many states had instituted representative assemblies in which elected deputies had freedom of debate and enjoyed at least some rights over legislation and the raising of state revenues. loc: 492

It was precisely the last right that the resurgent liberals used in Prussia in 1862 to block the raising of taxes until the army was brought under the control of the legislature, as it had, fatally, not been in 1848. This posed a serious threat to the funding of the Prussian military machine. In order to deal with the crisis, the Prussian King appointed the man who was to become the dominant figure in German politics for the next thirty years - Otto von Bismarck. loc: 498

he also saw that after the frustrations of 1848, many liberals would be prepared to sacrifice at least some of their liberal principles on the altar of national unity loc: 508

In a series of swift and ruthless moves, Bismarck allied with the Austrians to seize the disputed duchies of Schleswig-Holstein from the Kingdom of Denmark, then engineered a war over their administration between Prussia and Austria which ended in complete victory for the Prussian forces. loc: 510

The crushing of the French armies at Sedan and elsewhere was followed by the proclamation of a new German Empire, loc: 518

the decision to call the new state ‘the German Reich’ inevitably conjured up memories of its thousand-year predecessor, the dominant power in Europe for so many centuries. loc: 522

The word ‘Reich’ conjured up an image among educated Germans that resonated far beyond the institutional structures Bismarck created: the successor to the Roman Empire; the vision of God’s Empire here on earth; the universality of its claim to suzerainty; in a more prosaic but no less powerful sense, the concept of a German state that would include all German speakers in Central Europe loc: 526

Formally speaking, the new Reich was a loose confederation of independent states, much like its predecessor had been. Its titular head was the Emperor or Kaiser, the title taken over from the old head of the Holy Roman Reich and ultimately deriving from the Latin name ‘Caesar’. He had wide-ranging powers including the declaration of war and peace. loc: 533

the constitution did not accord to the national parliament the power to elect or dismiss governments and their ministers, and key aspects of political decision-making, above all on matters of war and peace, and on the administration of the army, were reserved to the monarch loc: 538

Karl Marx described the Bismarckian Reich, in a convoluted phrase that captured many of its internal contradictions, as a ‘bureaucratically constructed military despotism, dressed up with parliamentary forms, loc: 543

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the expanding Prussian state had organized itself along largely military lines, with the neo-feudal system of landowners - the famous Junkers - and serfs, intermeshing neatly with the military recruiting system for officers and men.12 loc: 548

It was above all in order to protect the autonomy of the Prussian officer corps from liberal interference that Bismarck was appointed in 1862. He immediately announced that ‘the great questions of the day are not decided by speeches and majority resolutions - that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 - but by iron and blood’.13 loc: 552

Military force and military action created the Reich; and in so doing they swept aside legitimate institutions, redrew state boundaries and overthrew long-established traditions, with a radicalism and a ruthlessness that cast a long shadow over the subsequent development of Germany. They also thereby legitimized the use of force for political ends to a degree well beyond what was common in most other countries loc: 558

Officers enjoyed many social and other privileges and expected the deference of civilians when they met on the street. Not surprisingly, it was the ambition of many a bourgeois professional to be admitted as an officer in the army reserve; while, for the masses, compulsory military service produced familiarity with military codes of conduct and military ideals and values.15 loc: 564

In times of emergency, the army was entitled to establish martial law and suspend civil liberties, loc: 567

Non-commissioned officers, that is, those men who stayed on after their term of compulsory military service was over and served in the army for a number of years, had an automatic right to a job in state employment when they finally left the army. This meant that the vast majority of policemen, postmen, railwaymen and other lower servants of the state were ex-soldiers, who had been socialized in the army and behaved in the military fashion to which they had become accustomed. loc: 572

By the time of the First World War, most of the key positions in the officer corps were held by professionals, and the aristocracy was dominant mainly in traditional areas of social prestige and snobbery such as the cavalry and the guards, loc: 583

military arrogance was strengthened by the colonial experience, when German armed forces ruthlessly put down rebellions of indigenous peoples loc: 586

after his enforced resignation in 1890, the myth emerged - encouraged not least by the disgruntled ex-Chancellor and his followers - of Bismarck himself as a charismatic leader who had ruthlessly cut the Gordian knots of politics and solved the great questions of the day by force. It was Bismarck’s revolutionary wars in the 1860S that remained in the German public memory, not the two subsequent decades in which he tried to maintain the peace in Europe in order to allow the German Reich to find its feet. loc: 596

The myth of the dictatorial leader was not the expression of an ancient, ingrained aspect of the German character; it was a much more recent creation. loc: 605

Bismarck inaugurated what liberals dubbed the ‘struggle for culture’, a series of laws and police measures which aimed to bring the Catholic Church under the control of the Prussian state. loc: 609

this massive assault on the civil liberties of some 40 per cent of the population of the Reich was cheered on by Germany’s liberals, who regarded Catholicism as so serious a threat to civilization loc: 615

The struggle eventually died down, leaving the Catholic community an embittered enemy of liberalism and modernity and determined to prove its loyalty to the state, not least through the political party it had formed in order, initially, to defend itself against persecution, the so-called Centre Party. loc: 617

Bismarck struck another blow against civil liberties with the Anti-Socialist Law, passed by the Reichstag after two assassination attempts on the aged Kaiser Wilhelm loc: 619

Once more, however, the liberals were persuaded to abandon their liberal principles in what was presented to them as the national interest. loc: 621

as Germany’s industrialization gathered pace and the industrial working class increased ever more rapidly in numbers, so socialist candidates won an ever-growing share of the vote. loc: 627

it overtook the Centre Party as the largest single party in the Reichstag. The repression of the Anti-Socialist Law had driven it to the left, and from the beginning of the 1890s onwards it adhered to a rigid Marxist creed loc: 631

the Social Democratic movement struck terror into the hearts of the respectable middle and upper classes. A deep gulf opened up between the Social Democrats on the one hand and all the ’bourgeois’ parties on the other. This unbridgeable political divide was to endure well into the 1920s and play a vital role in the crisis that eventually brought the Nazis to power. loc: 637

Combating the Social Democrats became the business of a whole generation of judges, state prosecutors, police chiefs and government officials before 1914. loc: 650

Thus Germany before 1914 had not two mainstream political parties but six - the Social Democrats, the two liberal parties, the two groups of Conservatives, and the Centre Party, reflecting among other things the multiple divisions of German society, by region, religion and social class.28 In a situation where there was a strong executive not directly responsible to the legislature, this weakened the prospect of party-politics being able to play a determining role in the state. loc: 663

Far from causing a general disillusion with politics, the competition of all these rival political parties helped heat up the political atmosphere until it reached positively feverish dimensions by 1914. loc: 668

Political discussion and debate turned increasingly after the beginning of the twentieth century to the topic of Germany’s place in Europe and the world. Germans were increasingly aware of the fact that Bismarck’s creation of the Reich was incomplete in a number of different ways. loc: 680

it included substantial ethnic and cultural minorities, loc: 682

above all there were millions of Poles, inhabiting parts of the former Kingdom of Poland annexed by Prussia in the eighteenth century. loc: 684

The notion that ethnic minorities were entitled to be treated with the same respect as the majority population was a view held only by a tiny and diminishing minority of Germans. loc: 688

the Reich Chancellors who came into office after Bismarck saw their country as a second-class nation when compared with Britain and France, both of which had major overseas empires loc: 692

A start was made on the construction of a massive battle fleet, whose long-term aim was to win colonial concessions from the British, loc: 698

These increasingly ambitious dreams of world power were articulated above all by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, loc: 701

He had little awareness of the precarious and adventurous route by which Bismarck had achieved unification in 1871. Following the Prussian historians of his day, he thought of the whole process as historically preordained. loc: 703

all of these features of the Germany that Bismarck created could be observed to a greater or lesser degree in other countries as well. loc: 712

the belief that war was justified to achieve political aims, in particular the creation of a land empire, was common to many European powers, loc: 721

Much has been written by historians about various aspects of Germany’s supposed backwardness at this time, its alleged deficit of civic values, its arguably antiquated social structure, its seemingly craven middle class and its apparently neo-feudal aristocracy. loc: 727

This was not how most contemporaries saw it at the time. Well before the outbreak of the First World War, Germany was the Continent’s wealthiest, most powerful and most advanced economy. loc: 728

Yet beneath its prosperous and self-confident surface, it was nervous, uncertain and racked by internal tensions. 41 For many, the sheer pace of economic and social change was frightening and bewildering. loc: 739

he stole money from the funds collected to pay for the children’s Christmas party at his school. Soon enough, his misdemeanour was discovered and he was dismissed from his post. This deprived him of his last remaining source of income. loc: 758

Looking around for someone to blame for his misfortunes, his attention quickly focused on the Jews.44 loc: 761

The last remaining legal impediments to full and equal legal rights were swept away with German unification in 1871. loc: 765

Success was slowly dissolving the identity of the Jewish community as an enclosed religious group.46 loc: 773

Excluded for centuries from traditional sources of wealth such as landowning, they remained outside the ranks of the Reich’s establishment as informal social discrimination continued to deny them a place in key institutions such as the army, the universities and the top ranks of the civil service; loc: 776

Those who remained were concentrated in the larger towns and cities, with a quarter of Germany’s Jews living in Berlin by 1910, and nearly a third by 1933. loc: 782

By and large, then, the Jewish story in the late nineteenth century was a success story, and Jews were associated above all with the most modern and progressive developments in society, culture and the economy.54 loc: 799

the Jews symbolized cultural, financial and social modernity. loc: 804

In 1873, the city’s economy was dealt a hammer-blow when the frantic round of spending and investing that had accompanied the euphoria of the Reich’s foundation came to an abrupt end. A worldwide economic depression, sparked by the failure of railway investments in the United States, brought widespread bankruptcies and business failures in Germany. loc: 805

In their incomprehension of the wider forces that were destroying their livelihood, those most severely affected found it easy to believe the claims of Catholic and conservative journalists that Jewish financiers were to blame. loc: 807

Adolf Stocker. loc: 810

Stocker founded a Christian Social Party that fought elections in the 1880s on an explicitly antisemitic platform. loc: 811

Max Libermann von Sonnenberg, who helped organize a national petition for the removal of Jews from public positions in 1880. loc: 812

another set of sensational and equally unfounded claims, this time declaring that a Jewish arms manufacturer had supplied the army with rifles that were deliberately faulty, in order to further a Franco-Jewish conspiracy to undermine German military effectiveness. loc: 818

Travelling round their farms, he told them that their misfortunes, brought on them in fact by a world depression in agricultural prices, had been caused by the Jews, a distant and to them obscure religious minority who lived far away in the big towns and financial centres of Europe and the Reich. loc: 822

By the early 1890s the threat of such antisemites to the electoral hegemony of the German Conservative Party in rural districts loc: 826

voted onto its programme a demand for the combating of the ‘widely obtruding and decomposing Jewish influence loc: 828

This proved in the end to be a turning-point in the fortunes of Germany’s motley collection of political antisemites. loc: 830

By the early 1900s, the antisemites had been undermined by the effective coalition of the Berlin Christian Social movement with the Conservative Party, and stymied in Catholic areas by the willingness of the Centre Party to engage in a similar kind of antisemitic rhetoric. loc: 836

Wilhelm Marr, whose pamphlet The Victory of Jewdom over Germandom Viewed from a Non-confessional Standpoint, published in 1873, was the first to insist that, as he put it in a later work: ‘There must be no question here of parading religious prejudices when it is a question of race and when the difference lies in the “blood”’.59 loc: 857

Marr contrasted Jews not with Christians but with Germans, loc: 860

Marr went on to invent the word ‘antisemitism’ and, in 1879, to found the League of Antisemites, the world’s first organization with this word in its title. It was dedicated, as he said, to reducing the Jewish influence on German life. loc: 862

his view that: ‘All our social, commercial, and industrial developments are built on a Jewish world view.’60 loc: 865

his third wife, whom he divorced after a brief and disastrous relationship, was half-Jewish, and he blamed her in part for his lack of money, since he had to pay her substantial sums to bring up their child. loc: 868

Marr concluded from this - boldly elevating his personal experience into a general rule of world history - that racial purity was admirable, racial mixing a recipe for calamity. loc: 869

Eugen Dühring, for example, equated capitalism with the Jews and argued that socialism had to be aimed chiefly at removing the Jews from financial and political influence. loc: 874

nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke argued that the Jews were undermining German culture, and popularized the phrase ‘the Jews are our misfortune’, loc: 875

the vast majority of respectable opinion in Germany, left and right, middle class and working class, remained opposed to racism of this kind. loc: 884

The worst the Social Democrats could be accused of was not taking seriously enough the threat posed by antisemitism, and of allowing a few antisemitic stereotypes to creep into a small number of cartoons printed in their entertainment magazines.65 loc: 896

The antisemitic parties remained a fringe, protest phenomenon and largely disappeared shortly after the turn of the century. loc: 906

One of the reasons for their disappearance lay in the adoption of antisemitic ideas by the mainstream parties whose constituents included the economically imperilled lower-middle-class groups to which the antisemites had originally appealed - the Conservatives and the Centre Party. loc: 908

For the much larger, though under the Reich arguably less influential, Centre Party, the Jews, or rather a distorted and polemical image of them, symbolized liberalism, socialism, modernity - all the things the Church rejected. loc: 913

The antisemites succeeded in placing ‘the Jewish question’ on the political agenda, so that at no time was Jewish participation in key social institutions not a matter for discussion and debate. Yet this was all relatively low-level, even by the standards of the time. loc: 920

But some of the antisemites’ propaganda claims were beginning to gain a hearing in the political mainstream loc: 929

the antisemitic parties had introduced a new, rabble-rousing, demagogic style of politics that had freed itself from the customary restraints of political decorum. loc: 931

the assembling, on the fringes of political and intellectual life, of many of the ingredients that would later go into the potent and eclectic ideological brew of National Socialism. loc: 935

authors developed a new language of vehemence and violence in their diatribes against the Jews. loc: 939

a call for the restoration of a hierarchical society led by a ‘secret Kaiser’ who would one day emerge from the shadows to restore Germany to its former glory.72 loc: 943

Such ideas were taken up and elaborated by the circle that gathered around the widow of the composer Richard Wagner loc: 944

propagate pseudo-Germanic national myths, in which heroic figures from Nordic legend were to serve as model leaders for the German future. loc: 947

After Wagner’s death, his widow turned Bayreuth into a kind of shrine, at which a band of dedicated followers would cultivate the dead Master’s sacred memory. The views of the circle she gathered round her at Bayreuth were rabidly antisemitic. loc: 957

Ludwig Schemann, a private scholar who translated Gobineau’s treatise on racial inequality into German loc: 960

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, loc: 961

Gobineau put forward his argument that racial survival could only be guaranteed by racial purity, such as was supposedly preserved in the German or ‘Aryan’ peasantry, and that racial intermingling spelled cultural and political decline.74 loc: 966

Chamberlain who had the greatest impact, however, with his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, loc: 968

Chamberlain portrayed history in terms of a struggle for supremacy between the Germanic and Jewish races, the only two racial groups that retained their original purity in a world of miscegenation. loc: 969

his most important contribution in this respect was to fuse antisemitism and racism with Social Darwinism. loc: 974

anthropologist Ludwig Woltmann, who argued in 1900 that the Aryan or German race represented the height of human evolution and was thus superior to all others. Therefore, he claimed, the ‘Germanic race has been selected to dominate the earth’. loc: 982

The Germans, in the view of some, needed more ‘living-space’ —the German word was Lebensraum— and it would have to be acquired at the expense of others, most likely the Slavs. loc: 984

they sought the restoration of a rural ideal in which German settlers would lord it over ‘inferior’ Slav peasants, just as they had done, so historians were beginning to tell them, in East Central Europe in the Middle Ages. loc: 987

all saw war as a means of preserving or asserting the German race against the Latins and the Slavs. loc: 992

‘biological necessity’: ‘Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow.’ loc: 993

counteract the influence of society’s abandonment of the principle of the struggle for survival by caring for the weak, the unhealthy and the inadequate. loc: 1000

had to be counteracted by a scientific approach to breeding that would reduce or eliminate the weak and improve and multiply the strong. Among those who argued along these lines was loc: 1002

Most widely read of all was Ernst Haeckel, whose popularization of Darwinian ideas, The Riddle of the World, became a runaway best-seller when it was published in 1899. loc: 1006

Ploetz took a ruthlessly meritocratic line on eugenic planning, arguing, for example, that a panel of doctors should attend all births and determine whether the baby was fit to survive or should be killed as weak and inadequate. loc: 1021

children’s illnesses should be left untreated so that the weak could be eliminated from the chain of heredity. loc: 1023

The triumphs of German medical science in discovering the bacilli that caused diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis in the nineteenth century had given it unparalleled intellectual prestige loc: 1033

it had brought about a widespread medicalization of society, in which ordinary people, including an increasing proportion of the working class, had begun to adopt hygienic practices loc: 1036

The concept of hygiene began to spread from medicine to other areas of life, including not only ‘social hygiene’ but also, crucially, ‘racial hygiene’. loc: 1037

Several fundamental principles united virtually everyone in this motley crowd of scientists, doctors and propagandists for racial hygiene. The first was that heredity played a significant role in determining human character and behaviour. The second, which followed on from this, was that society, led by the state, should manage the population in order to increase national efficiency. loc: 1044

Thirdly, however these terms were understood, the racial hygiene movement introduced an ominously rational and scientific categorization of people into those who were ‘valuable’ to the nation and those who were not. loc: 1047

Finally, such a technocratically rationalistic approach to population management presupposed an entirely secular, instrumental approach to morality. loc: 1051

Fundamentally, racial hygiene was born of a new drive for society to be governed by scientific principles irrespective of all other considerations. loc: 1056

Both antisemitism and racial hygiene were to be key components of Nazi ideology. They were both part of a general secularization of thought in the late nineteenth century, loc: 1059

variety of dissatisfactions born of a feeling that Germany’s spiritual and political development had come to a halt and needed pushing forward again. loc: 1062

called for the creation of a new society ruled by a band of brothers, an elite of vigorous young men who would rule the state rather like a medieval knightly brotherhood. loc: 1083

the youth movement, in which young, mostly middle-class men devoted themselves to hiking, communing with nature, singing nationalist songs around camp fires and pouring scorn on the staid politics, hypocritical morality and social artificiality of the adult world. loc: 1087

members reclaimed runes and sun-worship as essential signs of Germanness, and adopted the Indian symbol of the swastika as an ‘Aryan’ device, loc: 1093

serious attempts had begun to weld together some of the ideas of extreme nationalism, antisemitism and the revolt against convention into a new synthesis, and to give it organizational shape. loc: 1103

in German-speaking Austria, another version of radical antisemitism was provided by Georg Ritter von Schönerer, loc: 1108

The year after its defeat by Prussia in 1866, the Habsburg monarchy had restructured itself into two equal halves, Austria and Hungary, bound together by the person of the Emperor, Franz Josef, and his central administration in Vienna. That administration was staffed overwhelmingly by German-speakers, and the six million or so Austrian Germans reconciled themselves to their expulsion from the German Confederation by identifying strongly with the Habsburgs and regarding themselves as the Empire’s ruling group. loc: 1110

He regarded the Hungarians and the other nationalities in the Habsburg monarchy as brakes on the progress of the Germans, who would, he thought, do far better economically and socially in a union with the German Reich. loc: 1116

He proclaimed antisemitism, indeed, ‘the greatest achievement of the century’. loc: 1130

Describing himself as a pagan, Schönerer spearheaded an anti-Catholic movement under the slogan ‘away from Rome’, and coined the pseudo-medieval greeting ‘hail!’—Heil!—using it in Parliament, loc: 1131

Schonerer’s followers called him ‘the Leader’ (Führer), loc: 1134

The common language and common culture with Germany, and the fact that Austria had been part of the ‘Holy Roman Reich of the German Nation’ for over a thousand years, and then of the German Confederation until its rude expulsion by Bismarck in 1866, meant that intellectual and political influences crossed the border without too much difficulty. loc: 1148

Schönerer’s Pan-Germanism doomed him to failure while the Habsburg monarchy continued to exist. But if it should ever fall, then its German-speaking minorities would be confronted in an acute form with the question of whether they wanted to join the German Reich or form a separate state on their own. loc: 1155

the accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1888 quickly led to a serious weakening of Bismarck’s position as Reich Chancellor. loc: 1159

Carl Peters was a classic colonial adventurer of the late nineteenth century, whose exploits quickly became the stuff of legend. loc: 1163

pursuing his quest to found a great German Empire in Africa. loc: 1169

Bismarck felt obliged to recognize his East African venture and declare a German protectorate loc: 1172

founded a General German League, renamed the Pan-German League in 1894. The aim of the new organization was to push vigorously for German expansion abroad and the Germanization of national minorities at home. loc: 1176

devoted itself to the destruction of Polish identity in Germany’s eastern provinces. loc: 1179

More nationalist associations were to follow. The most significant, perhaps, was the Navy League, founded in 1898 with money from the arms manufacturer Krupp, loc: 1183

a degree of social anxiety was an important driving force. Identification, perhaps over-identification, with the German nation gave all the leading figures in the nationalist associations, whatever their background, a sense of pride and belonging, and an object for commitment and mobilization. loc: 1196

the nationalist associations generally agreed that Bismarck’s work of building the German nation was woefully incomplete and urgently needed to be pushed to its conclusion. loc: 1201

nationalists’ beliefs loc: 1203

The Jews were subverting German art, destroying German creativity, corrupting the German masses. loc: 1207

Social Democrats would be banned and their leading officials, parliamentary deputies, newspaper editors and union secretaries would be expelled loc: 1208

Internal pacification, the nationalists argued, would include the suppression of minority cultures loc: 1211

the Pan-Germans and their allies advocated a massive arms build-up, greater even than that already launched by the Navy Laws from 1898 onwards. This would be followed by a war in which Germany would conquer Europe and annex German-speaking areas loc: 1214

Pan-Germans and their nationalist allies founded their ideology on a world-view that had struggle, conflict, ‘Aryan’ ethnic superiority, antisemitism and the will to power as its core beliefs. loc: 1221

The German people, they believed, were surrounded by enemies, from the ‘Slavs’ and ‘Latins’ encircling Germany from without, to the Jews, Jesuits, socialists and sundry subversive agitators and conspirators undermining it from within. loc: 1225

Only by a return to the racial roots of the German nation in the peasantry, the self-employed artisan and small businessman, and the traditional nuclear family, could the situation be rescued. loc: 1230

A new Bismarck was needed, tough, ruthless, unafraid to pursue aggressive policies at home and abroad, if the nation was to be saved. loc: 1232

Jolted into radical action by the Social Democratic election victory of 1912, following on what they regarded as the humiliating outcome for Germany of an international crisis over Morocco the previous year, the usually quarrelsome nationalist associations joined forces in support for the newly founded Defence League, loc: 1235

it achieved a membership of 90,000 within two years of its foundation in 1912, giving the Pan-Germans the kind of mass base they had always failed to create for themselves. loc: 1239

In August 1913 the Agrarian League, a huge pressure-group of large and small landowners with very close ties to the Conservatives, joined with the Central Association of German Industrialists and the national organization of artisans and handicraftsmen to form the ‘Cartel of Productive Estates’. Not only did the Cartel have a membership running into the millions, it also incorporated many of the central aims and beliefs of the Pan-Germans, loc: 1242

elimination of the Reichstag, the suppression of the Social Democrats and the pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy up to and including the launching of a major war of conquest. loc: 1245

the new prominence of the nationalist associations from 1912 onwards put huge pressure on the German government. loc: 1252

All this was necessary because, he said, the whole life of Germany was dominated by ‘the Jewish spirit’, which was superficial, negative, destructively critical and materialistic. It was time for the true German spirit to re-emerge - deep, positive and idealistic. All this was to be brought about by an effective coup d’état from above, secured by the declaration of a military state of siege and the introduction of martial law. loc: 1260

Antisemitic stereotypes had thus penetrated to the highest levels of the state, reinforced in the Kaiser’s case by his own reading of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, loc: 1274

Germany went into the First World War in an optimistic mood, fully expecting to win, loc: 1279

The mood of invincibility was buoyed up by the massive growth of the German economy over the previous decades, and fired on by the stunning victories of the German army in 1914-15 on the Eastern Front. loc: 1283

These achievements made the reputation of Hindenburg as a virtually invincible general. A cult of the hero quickly developed around him, loc: 1291

The pair’s triumphs in the East contrasted sharply with the stalemate in the West, loc: 1294

the two most successful generals, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who took over the reins of power in 1916. The ‘Hindenburg Programme’ attempted to galvanize and reorganize the German economy to bend it to the overriding purpose of winning the war. loc: 1301

Hindenburg and Ludendorff established a ‘silent dictatorship’ in Germany, with military rule behind the scenes, severe curbs on civil liberties, central control of the economy and the generals calling the shots in the formulation of war aims and foreign policy. loc: 1305

From 1917, the mobilization of the world’s richest economy began to weigh heavily on the Allied side, and by the end of the year American troops were coming onto the Western Front in ever increasing numbers. loc: 1313

All this, however, was happening in a state and society that Lenin knew to be economically backward and lacking in modern resources. More advanced economies, like that of Germany, had in his view more developed social systems, in which revolution was even more likely to break out than had been the case in Russia. Indeed, Lenin believed that the Russian Revolution could scarcely survive unless successful revolutions of the same type took place elsewhere as well. loc: 1335

So the Bolsheviks formed a Communist International (‘Comintern’) to propagate their version of revolution in the rest of the world. loc: 1339

The middle and upper classes were alarmed by the radical rhetoric of the Communists and saw their counterparts in Russia lose their property and disappear into the torture chambers and prison camps of the Cheka. loc: 1347

Democrats everywhere were conscious from the outset that Communism was intent on suppressing human rights, dismantling representative institutions and abolishing civil freedoms. loc: 1350

Terror led them to believe that Communism in their own countries should be stopped at any cost, loc: 1351

In Hungary, a short-lived Communist regime under Béla Kun took power in 1918, tried to abolish the Church, and was swiftly overthrown by the monarchists led by Admiral Miklós Horthy. The counter-revolutionary regime proceeded to institute a ‘White terror’ in which thousands of Bolsheviks and socialists were arrested, brutally maltreated, imprisoned and killed. Events in Hungary gave Central Europeans for the first time a taste of the new levels of political violence and conflict that were to emerge from the tensions created by the war. loc: 1354

Lenin and the Bolsheviks quickly negotiated a much-needed peace settlement to give themselves the breathing-space they required to consolidate their newly won power. The Germans drove a hard bargain, annexing huge swathes of territory from the Russians at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk early in 1918. loc: 1359

the huge blood-letting that Ludendorff’s spring offensive had caused in the German army opened the way for the Allies, reinforced by massive numbers of fresh American troops and supplies, to breach German lines and advance rapidly along the Western Front. Morale in the German army started to collapse, and ever-larger numbers of troops began to desert or surrender to the Allies. The final blows came as Germany’s ally Bulgaria sued for peace and the Habsburg armies in the South began to melt away loc: 1363

The shock waves sent out by the news of Germany’s defeat were therefore all the greater. loc: 1369

The creation of the German Reich and its rise to economic might and Great Power status had created expectations in many people, expectations that, it was clear by this time, the Reich and its institutions were unable to fulfil. loc: 1374

Massive recriminations about where the responsibility for Germany’s defeat should lie only deepened political conflict. Sacrifice, privation, death, on a huge scale, left Germans of all political hues bitterly searching for the reason why. The almost unimaginable financial expense of the war created a vast economic burden on the world economy which it was unable to shake off for another thirty years, and it fell most heavily upon Germany. loc: 1386

no one was prepared for the peace terms to which Germany was forced to agree in the Armistice of 11 November 1918. loc: 1399

provisions were almost universally felt in Germany as an unjustified national humiliation. loc: 1404

many Germans refused to believe that their armed forces had actually been defeated. loc: 1406

many people began to believe that the army had only been defeated because, like Wagner’s fearless hero Siegfried, it had been stabbed in the back by its enemies at home. loc: 1408

Defeat in war brought about an immediate collapse of the political system loc: 1416

Ludendorff also reckoned that if the terms were not so acceptable to the German people, the burden of agreeing to them would thereby be placed on Germany’s democratic politicians rather than on the Kaiser or the army leadership. loc: 1421

The army simply melted away as the Armistice of 11 November was concluded, and the democratic parties were left, as Ludendorff had intended, to negotiate, if negotiate was the word, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. loc: 1426

The creation of a new Polish state, reversing the partitions of the eighteenth century in which Poland had been gobbled up by Austria, Prussia and Russia, meant the loss to Germany of Posen, much of West Prussia, and Upper Silesia. loc: 1433

the constituent nations of the Habsburg Empire broke away at the very end of the war to form the nation-states of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, or to join new or old neighbouring nation-states such as Poland and Romania, loc: 1440

The Austrians wanted union; the Germans were prepared to accept union; the principle of national self-determination demanded union. The fact that the Allies forbade union remained a constant source of bitterness in Germany loc: 1457

Article 231, which obliged Germany to accept the ‘sole guilt’ for the outbreak of the war loc: 1462

The idea took root in Germany that the whole concept of war crimes, indeed the whole notion of laws of war, was a polemical invention of the victorious Allies based on mendacious propaganda about imaginary atrocities. loc: 1467

the Treaty also obliged the army to be restricted to a maximum strength of 100,000, and banned the use of tanks, heavy artillery and conscription. loc: 1474

The German navy was effectively dismantled and barred from building any large new ships, and Germany was not allowed to have an air force at all. loc: 1476

The sense of outrage and disbelief that swept through the German upper and middle classes like a shock wave was almost universal, loc: 1480

In many ways, the peace settlement of 1918-19 was a brave attempt at marrying principle and pragmatism in a dramatically altered world. In other circumstances it might have stood a chance of success. But not in the circumstances of 1919, when almost any peace terms would have been condemned by German nationalists who felt they had been unjustly cheated of victory. loc: 1493

encouraged a hatred of the politicians in Berlin who had accepted this state of affairs, and a rejection of German democracy for failing to do anything about it. loc: 1504

The Pan-Germans had greeted the outbreak of war in 1914 with unbounded enthusiasm, loc: 1507

in September 1917, he launched the German Fatherland Party, whose programme centred on annexationist war aims, authoritarian constitutional changes, loc: 1516

the myth of the ‘front generation’ of 1914-18, soldiers bound together in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice in a heroic cause which overcame all political, regional, social and religious differences. loc: 1536

ex-soldiers and their resentments did play a crucial part in fostering a climate of violence and discontent after the war was over, and the shock of adjusting to peacetime conditions pushed many towards the far right. loc: 1566

a new willingness to use violence was conditioned by the experience, real or vicarious, of the war.147 loc: 1568

‘The Steel Helmets proclaim the battle against all softness and cowardice, which seek to weaken and destroy the consciousness of honour of the German people through renunciation of the right of defence and will to defence.’ It denounced the Treaty of Versailles and demanded its abrogation, it wanted the restoration of the black-white-red national flag of the Bismarckian Reich, and it ascribed the economic problems of Germany to ‘the deficiency in living-space and the territory in which to work’. loc: 1584

Germany failed to make the transition from wartime back to peacetime after 1918. Instead, it remained on a continued war footing; at war with itself, and at war with the rest of the world, as the shock of the Treaty of Versailles united virtually every part of the political spectrum in a grim determination to overthrow its central provisions, restore the lost territories, end the payment of reparations and re-establish Germany as the dominant power in Central Europe once more.150 Military models of conduct had been widespread in German society and culture before 1914; but after the war they became all-pervasive; the language of politics was permeated by metaphors of warfare, the other party was an enemy to be smashed, and struggle, terror and violence became widely accepted as legitimate weapons in the political struggle. loc: 1594

The First World War legitimized violence loc: 1601

all sides organized armed squads of thugs, fights and brawls became commonplace, and beatings-up and assassinations were widely used. loc: 1606

On the extreme left, revolutionaries led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg saw in the events of November 1918 the opportunity to create a socialist state run by the workers’ and soldiers’ councils that had sprung up all over the country as the old Imperial system disintegrated. loc: 1634

Social Democrats feared that the revolutionaries might institute the kind of ‘red terror’ that was now taking place in Russia. Afraid for their lives, and conscious of the need to prevent the country from falling into complete anarchy, they sanctioned the recruitment of heavily armed paramilitary bands loc: 1637

In the early months of 1919, when the extreme left staged a poorly organized uprising in Berlin, the Free Corps, egged on by the mainstream Social Democrats, reacted with unprecedented violence and brutality. loc: 1640

The depth of the Free Corps’ hatred of the Revolution and its supporters was almost without limit. The language of their propaganda, their memoirs, their fictional representations of the military actions they took part in, breathed a rabid spirit of aggression and revenge, often bordering on the pathological. loc: 1653

socialists and democrats of any hue were no better than traitors—the ‘November criminals’ or ‘November traitors’ as they were soon dubbed, the men who had first stabbed the army in the back, then in November 1918 committed the double crime of overthrowing the Kaiser and signing the Armistice. loc: 1658

Yet such ideas still remained those of a minority even after 1918, and the use of physical force to put them into effect was still confined to a tiny, extremist fringe. loc: 1675

somebody had to take over the reins of government after the Kaiser’s abdication and the collapse of the Reich created by Bismarck. The Social Democrats stepped into the breach. A group of leading figures in the labour movement emerged in the confusion of early November 1918 to form a revolutionary Council of People’s Delegates. loc: 1685

Council was led by Friedrich Ebert, loc: 1689

accepting the party’s Marxist ideology but concentrating his efforts on the day-to-day improvement of working-class life loc: 1695

In collaboration with the Centre Party and the left-wing liberals, now renamed the Democrats, Ebert and his associates in the Council of People’s Delegates organized nationwide elections to a Constituent Assembly early in 1919, loc: 1708

the Social Democrats, the left-liberal Democrats and the Centre Party gained an overall majority in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. loc: 1713

In place of the Kaiser there was a Reich President who was to be elected, loc: 1717

extensive emergency powers which he was granted under the constitution’s Article 48. In times of trouble, he could rule by decree and use the army to restore law and order loc: 1719

Ebert, as the Republic’s first President, made very extensive use of this power, employing it on no fewer than 136 separate occasions. loc: 1721

There were virtually no effective safeguards against an abuse of Article 48, since the President could threaten to use the power given him by Article 25 to dissolve the Reichstag should it reject a Presidential decree. loc: 1727

In the end, Ebert’s excessive use, and occasional misuse, of the Article widened its application to a point where it became a potential threat to democratic institutions. loc: 1733

His concern for a smooth transition from war to peace led him to collaborate closely with the army without demanding any changes in its fiercely monarchist and ultra-conservative officer corps, loc: 1736

The unending wave of hatred poured over Ebert by the extreme right had its effect, not merely in undermining his position but also in wearing him down personally, both mentally and physically. loc: 1747

he died, aged 54, on 28 February 1925. loc: 1749

The elections to the post of President that followed were a disaster for the democratic prospects of the Weimar Republic. loc: 1750

Hindenburg was a bulky, physically imposing man whose statuesque appearance, military uniform, war service medals and legendary reputation - mostly undeserved - for winning the great Battle of Tannenberg and for guiding Germany’s military destiny thereafter, made him into a much-revered figurehead, loc: 1756

By 1930 at the latest, it had become clear that the Presidential power was in the hands of a man who had no faith in democratic institutions and no intention of defending them from their enemies.11 loc: 1771

changes of government in the Weimar Republic were very frequent. Between 13 February 1919 and 30 January 1933 there were no fewer than twenty different cabinets, each lasting on average 239 days, loc: 1784

made for weak government, since all they could settle on was the lowest common denominator and the line of least resistance. loc: 1787

The ability of the Reich government to act firmly and decisively, however, was always compromised by another provision of the constitution, namely its decision to continue the federal structure which Bismarck had imposed on the Reich in 1871 in an effort to sugar the pill of unification for German princes loc: 1836

Three political parties were identified with the new political system - the Social Democrats, the liberal German Democratic Party, and the Centre Party. loc: 1852

From 1920 onwards they were thus in a permanent minority in the Reichstag, outnumbered by deputies whose allegiance lay with the Republic’s enemies to the right and to the left. loc: 1855

The main strength of the Social Democrats lay in Prussia, the state that covered over half the territory of the Weimar Republic and contained 57 per cent of its population. Here, in a mainly Protestant area with great cities such as Berlin and industrial areas like the Ruhr, they dominated the government. Their policy was to make Prussia a bastion of Weimar democracy, loc: 1867

removing them from power in Germany’s biggest state became a major objective of Weimar democracy’s enemies by the early 1930s.27 loc: 1870

the German Democratic Party, was a somewhat more enthusiastic participant in government, loc: 1879

Victims of the rightward drift of middle-class voters, they never recovered. loc: 1882

Of the three parties of the. ‘Weimar coalition’, only the Centre Party maintained its support throughout, loc: 1896

it devoted much of its time to fighting pornography, contraception and other evils of the modern world, and to defending Catholic interests loc: 1899

Pope Pius XII, he profoundly distrusted the political liberalism of many Catholic politicians and saw a turn to a more authoritarian form of politics as the safest way to preserve the Church’s interests from the looming threat of the godless left. loc: 1903

Securing the future existence of the Church was paramount in such a situation. Like many other leading Catholic politicians, Kaas considered that this was only really possible in an authoritarian state where police repression stamped out the threat from the left. loc: 1913

Thus, even the major political props of democracy in the Weimar Republic were crumbling by the end of the 1920s. Beyond them, the democratic landscape was even more desolate. No other parties offered serious support to the Republic and its institutions. loc: 1922

Capitalism, they hoped, would inevitably collapse and the ‘bourgeois’ republic would be replaced by a Soviet state along Russian lines. It was the duty of the Communist Party to bring this about as soon as possible. loc: 1932

This implacable opposition to the Republic from the left was more than balanced by rabid animosity from the right. The largest and most significant right-wing challenge to Weimar was mounted by the Nationalists, loc: 1941

a party that made it clear from the outset that it regarded the Weimar Republic as utterly illegitimate and called for a restoration of the Bismarckian Reich and the return of the Kaiser. loc: 1945

tacit and sometimes explicit condoning of the assassination of key Republican politicians by armed conspiratorial groups loc: 1947

It demanded among other things the restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy, compulsory military service, a strong foreign policy directed at the revision of the Treaty of Versailles, the return of the lost overseas colonies and the strengthening of ties with Germans living in other parts of Europe, especially Austria. loc: 1956

The widespread feeling after 1923 that the threat of a Bolshevik revolution had receded meant that the bourgeois parties were no longer so willing to compromise with the Social Democrats in the interests of preserving the Republic as a bulwark against Communism.39 loc: 1987

political violence, though it fell short of the open civil war that characterized much of the Republic’s opening phase, still continued at an alarmingly high level throughout the mid-1920s.40 loc: 1990

The Weimar Republic was also weakened by its failure to win the whole-hearted support of the army and the civil service, both of which found it extremely difficult to adjust to the transition from the authoritarian Reich to the democratic Republic in 1918. loc: 1994

right-wing General Hans von Seeckt. loc: 2010

he epitomized the traditions of the Prussian officer class. But he was also a political realist who saw that the possibilities of overthrowing the Republic by force were limited. He aimed therefore to keep the army united and free from parliamentary control waiting for better times. In this he had the full support of his fellow-officers.42 loc: 2013

Under Seeckt’s leadership, the army was far from being a neutral organization, standing aloof from the party-political fray, whatever Seeckt might have claimed.44 Seeckt did not hesitate to intervene against the elected government when he believed that it went against the Reich’s interests. loc: 2019

A law unto itself for most of the time, the army did its best during the 1920s to circumvent the restrictions placed upon it by the Treaty of Versailles. loc: 2028

The disloyalty of the army, and the repeated intrigues of its leading officers against civilian governments, boded ill for the Republic’s continued viability in a real crisis.49 loc: 2037

the higher civil service in particular had long been accustomed to regard itself as the true ruling caste, above all in Prussia. loc: 2060

efforts at creating a civil service loyal to the principles of democracy as well as imbued with a sense of duty in serving the government of the day proved insufficient in the end. loc: 2072

the Republic did too little to ensure that civil servants at whatever level were actively committed to the democratic political order and would resist any attempt to overthrow it. loc: 2080

the vast majority of civil servants had little genuine loyalty to the constitution to which they had sworn their allegiance. loc: 2092

from the start it was beset by economic failures of a dimension unprecedented in German history. loc: 2103

From 1916 onwards, expenditure had far exceeded the revenue that the government had been able to raise from loans or indeed from any other source. loc: 2104

Germany that was the defeated nation and Germany that had to foot the bill. loc: 2108

The government had been printing money without the economic resources to back loc: 2108

Industrial production was only 42 per cent in 1919 of what it had been in 1913, and the country was producing less than half the grain it had produced before the war. loc: 2115

inflation proved to be unstoppable. It took over 1,000 marks to buy a US dollar in August 1922, 3,000 in October, and 7,000 in December. The process of monetary depreciation was taking on a life of its own. The political consequences were catastrophic. The German government could not make the required reparations payments any longer, since they had to be tendered in gold, whose price on the international market it could no longer afford to meet. loc: 2130

hyperinflation on a truly staggering scale, loc: 2138

Money lost its meaning almost completely. loc: 2145

‘In the shops the prices are typewritten and posted hourly. loc: 2155

At the height of the hyperinflation, over 90 per cent of the expenditure of an average family went on food.67 loc: 2161

The threat of starvation, particularly in the area occupied by the French, where passive resistance was crippling the transport networks, was very real.69 Malnutrition caused an immediate rise in deaths from tuberculosis.70 loc: 2166

Germany was grinding to a halt. Businesses and municipalities could no longer afford to pay their workers or buy supplies for public utilities. loc: 2199

in Germany, prices had reached a billion times their prewar level, a decline that has entered the annals of economic history as the greatest hyperinflation ever. loc: 2219

for those who depended on a fixed income, the. results were ruinous. Creditors were embittered. The economic and social cohesion of the middle class was shattered, as winners and losers confronted one another across new social divides. loc: 2229

growing fragmentation of the middle-class political parties in the second half of the 19 20S, rendering them helpless in the face of demagogic assaults from the far right. loc: 2230

As money lost its value, goods became the only thing worth having, and a huge crime wave swept the country. loc: 2238

Violence, or the threat of violence, sometimes made itself evident in spectacular ways. loc: 2248

Almost everybody seemed to be concentrating on stealing small amounts of food and supplies in order to stay alive. loc: 2251

Traditional moral values appeared to many to be in decline along with traditional monetary values.91 The descent into chaos - economic, social, political, moral - seemed to be total.92 loc: 2256

Weimar culture developed its fascination with criminals, embezzlers, gamblers, manipulators, thieves and crooks of all kinds. Life seemed to be a game of chance, survival a matter of the arbitrary impact of incomprehensible economic forces. In such an atmosphere, conspiracy theories began to abound. loc: 2263

Much of the cynicism that gave Weimar culture its edge in the mid-1920s and made many people eventually long for the return of idealism, self-sacrifice and patriotic dedication, loc: 2265

It debased the language of politics, already driven to hyperbolic overemphasis by the events of 1918-19. It lent new power to stock fantasy-images of evil, not just the criminal and the gambler, but also the speculator and, fatefully, the financially manipulative Jew.94 loc: 2270

Among the groups widely regarded as winners in the economic upheavals of the early 1920s were the big industrialists and financiers, a fact that caused widespread resentment against ‘capitalists’ and ‘profiteers’ in many quarters of German society. loc: 2274

Once they had cottoned on to the fact that the inflation was going to continue, many industrialists purchased large quantities of machinery with borrowed money that had lost its value by the time they came to pay it back. loc: 2290

the sharp deflation that was the inevitable outcome of currency stabilization brought serious problems for industry, which had in many cases invested in more plant than it needed. Bankruptcies multiplied, loc: 2294

major companies sought refuge in a wave of mergers and cartels, loc: 2296

Mergers and cartels were designed not only to achieve market dominance but also to cut costs and increase efficiency. loc: 2300

Adjusting to the new economic situation after stabilization in any case meant retrenchment, cost-cutting and job losses. loc: 2313

under the twin impacts of rationalization and generational population growth, unemployment had reached a million; in March 1926, it topped three million.102 In the new circumstances, business lost its willingness to compromise with the labour unions. loc: 2317

To the employers it began to seem as if the whole structure of the Weimar Republic was ranged against them.103 loc: 2327

new mood of hostility towards the unions and the Social Democrats among many employers in the second half of the 1920s was unmistakeable loc: 2342

Financial scandals of this kind were exploited more generally by the far right to back up claims that Jewish corruption was exerting undue influence on the Weimar state and causing financial ruin to many ordinary middle-class Germans.106 loc: 2351

People arguably suffered from an excess of political engagement and political commitment. loc: 2372

Note: This is an interesting concept: excess of political engagement as an indication of political fragmentation Edit

no area of society or politics that was immune from politicization. loc: 2377

politically oriented press, which together made up about a quarter of all newspapers. loc: 2381

What was undermining the political press in the 1920s was, above all, the rise of the so-called ‘boulevard papers’, cheap, sensational tabloids that were sold on the streets, particularly in the afternoons and evenings, rather than depending on regular subscribers. Heavily illustrated, with massive coverage of sport, cinema, local news, crime, scandal and sensation, these papers placed the emphasis on entertainment rather than information. loc: 2402

Scandal-sheets undermined the Republic with their sensational exposure of real or imagined financial wrongdoings loc: 2410

Alongside the vibrant radical literary culture of Berlin there was another literary world, appealing to the conservative nationalist part of the middle classes, rooted in nostalgia for the lost Bismarckian past and prophesying its return with the longed-for collapse of the Weimar Republic. loc: 2420

Oswald Spengler’s The Fall of the West, which divided human history into natural cycles of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and located early twentieth-century Germany in the winter phase, characterized by ‘tendencies of an irreligious and unmetaphysical urban cosmopolitanism‘, in which art had suffered a ‘preponderance of foreign art-forms’. loc: 2422

his claim that this heralded the beginning of an imminent transition to a new spring, that would be ‘agricultural-intuitive’ and ruled by an ‘organic structure of political existence‘, leading to the ’mighty creations of an awakening, dream-laden soul’.116 Other writers gave the coming period of revival a new name that was soon to be taken up with enthusiasm by the radical right: the Third Reich. loc: 2426

The ideal of the Reich had arisen, he proclaimed, with Charlemagne and been resurrected under Bismarck: loc: 2430

the Third Reich was a dream: it would require a nationalist revolution to make it reality. loc: 2432

widespread sense of cultural crisis, and not just among conservative elites. loc: 2447

theatre became the vehicle for radical experimentation and left-wing agitprop.124 loc: 2457

A sense of aesthetic disorientation was prompted amongst many cultural conservatives loc: 2472

Cabaret shows added to all this an element of biting, anti-authoritarian political satire and aroused pompous conservatives to anger with their jokes about the ‘nationalist and religious sentiments and practices of Christians and Germans’, loc: 2499

railed against its supposed primitivism as a product of what he called ‘nigger blood’, loc: 2505

Jazz and swing seemed to be the crest of a wave of cultural Americanization, in which such widely differing phenomena as Charlie Chaplin films and the modern industrial methods of ‘Fordism’ and ’Taylorism’ were viewed by some as a threat to Germany’s supposedly historic identity. loc: 2505

Mass housing schemes and designs for modern living challenged the conservative ideal of folk-based style and aroused fierce debate. For cultural critics on the right, the influence of America, symbol par excellence of modernity, signified a pressing need to resurrect the German way of living, German traditions, German ties to blood and soil.130 loc: 2509

we no longer found an honest German people, but a mob stirred up by its lowest instincts. loc: 2515

The sexual freedom evidently enjoyed by the young in the big cities was a particular source of disapproval in the older generation. loc: 2524

Berlin in particular, as it grew rapidly to the size and status of a cosmopolitan metropolis, had already become the centre for a variety of social and sexual subcultures, loc: 2532

Critics linked these trends to what they saw as the looming decline of the family, caused principally by the growing economic independence of women. loc: 2534

rapid emergence of a service sector in the economy, with its new employment possibilities for women, loc: 2535

nationalists and Pan-Germans began to clamour for women’s return to home and family in order to fulfil their destiny of producing and educating more children for the nation. loc: 2544

Nationalist hostility was driven by more than crude moral conservatism. Germany had lost 2 million men in the war, and yet the birth rate was still in rapid decline. loc: 2564

To many people, such campaigns seemed part of a deliberate plot to destroy the fertility and fecundity of the German race. Was it not, conservatives and radical nationalists asked, all the consequence of female emancipation and the morally subversive advocacy of sexuality untrammelled by any desire to procreate? loc: 2572

feminists seemed to be little better than national traitors loc: 2575

Feminism was on the defensive, and the middle-class women who were the mainstay of its support were deserting their traditional liberal milieu for parties of the right. loc: 2581

the ‘youth movement’, a disparate but rapidly growing collection of informal clubs and societies that focused on activities such as hiking, communing with nature and singing folk songs and patriotic verses while sitting around camp fires. loc: 2587

contempt for what its leading figures saw as the moral compromises and dishonesties of adult political life. The movement fostered a distrust of modern culture, city life and formal political institutions. loc: 2591

the overwhelming majority of the independent youth organizations were still hostile to the Republic and its politicians, nationalist in outlook and militaristic in character and aspirations.142 loc: 2595

Under the Wilhelmine Reich, the Kaiser’s personal influence was exercised in favour of displacing liberal traditions of German education, based on classical models, with patriotic lessons focusing on German history and the German language. By 1914 many teachers were nationalist, conservative and monarchist in outlook, while textbooks and lessons pursued very much the same kind of political line. loc: 2600

In the end, neither those teachers who were liberal or Social Democratic nor those who were conservative and monarchist seem to have exercised much influence on the political views of their pupils, and many of their political ideas were dismissed by their charges as lacking in any relevance to what they perceived as the daily realities of life under the Weimar Republic. For young men who subsequently became Nazis, the beginnings of political commitment often lay more in political rebellion against the rigidities of the school system loc: 2607

Universities were still elite institutions after the war, and drew almost all their students from the middle classes. Particularly powerful were the student duelling corps, conservative, monarchist and nationalist to a man. loc: 2617

The Student Unions formed a national association and began to have some influence in areas such as student welfare and university reform. But they too fell under the influence of the far right. loc: 2622

the chances of the swelling numbers of graduates finding a place in the job market began to decline; from 1930 they were almost non-existent.146 loc: 2630

The vast majority of professors, as their collective public declarations of support for German war aims in 1914-18 had shown, were also strongly nationalist. loc: 2632

Well before the end of the 1920s, the universities had become political hotbeds of the extreme right. loc: 2638

an elite to which racism, antisemitism and ideas of German superiority were almost second nature; loc: 2641

For such young men, violence seemed a rational response to the disasters that had overtaken Germany. loc: 2643

We were rudely pushed out of our childhood and not shown the right path. The struggle for life got to us early. Misery, shame, hatred, lies, and civil war imprinted themselves on our souls and made us mature early.149 loc: 2650

Weimar’s radically modernist culture was obsessed, to what many middle-class people must have felt was an unhealthy degree, by deviance, murder, atrocity and crime. loc: 2656

The criminal became an object of fascination as well as fear, fuelling respectable anxieties about social order and adding to middle-class distaste at the inversion of values that seemed to be at the centre of modernist culture. loc: 2662

Many judges in office during the 1920s had thus been members of the judiciary for decades, and had imbibed their fundamental values and attitudes in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II. loc: 2672

complaint that the political parties were exploiting the judicial system for their own purposes and creating new laws with a specific political bias. loc: 2682

judges were unwilling to readjust their attitudes when the political situation changed. Their loyalty was given, not to the new Republic, but to the same abstract ideal of the Reich which their counterparts in the officer corps continued to serve; an ideal built largely on memories of the authoritarian system of the Bismarckian Reich.156 loc: 2688

they sided overwhelmingly with those right-wing offenders who claimed also to be acting in the name of this ideal, loc: 2692

while only 3 2 people had been condemned for treason in the last three peacetime decades of the Bismarckian Reich, over 10,000 warrants were issued for treason in the four - also relatively peaceful - years from the beginning of 1924 to the end of 1927, loc: 2701

Judges almost invariably showed leniency towards an accused man if he claimed to have been acting out of patriotic motives, whatever his crime.164 loc: 2726

If there was one achievement through which the Weimar Republic could claim the loyalty and gratitude of the masses, it was the creation of a new welfare state. loc: 2752

The Weimar constitution itself was full of far-reaching declarations of principle about the importance of family life and the need for the state to support it, the government’s duty to protect young people from harm, the citizen’s right to work, and the nation’s obligation to provide everybody with a decent home. loc: 2765

But for all its elaboration, it failed in the end to live up to the grandiose promises made in the 1919 constitution; and the gap between promise and delivery ended by having a major effect on the legitimacy of the Republic in the eyes of many of its citizens. loc: 2776

According to one estimate, this was the equivalent of one death for every 35 inhabitants of the Reich. This was nearly twice the proportion of war deaths in the United Kingdom, loc: 2780

About 2.7 million men came back from the war with wounds, amputations and disabilities, to form a permanent source of discontent loc: 2783

pensions to nearly 800,000 disabled former soldiers and 360,000 war widows, and supporting over 900,000 fatherless children and orphans, loc: 2789

payment of pensions took up a higher proportion of state expenditure than anything loc: 2791

Such massive expenditure might have been feasible in a booming economy, but in the crisis-racked economic situation of the Weimar Republic it was simply not possible without printing money and fuelling inflation, loc: 2794

Weimar welfare administration quickly became an instrument of discrimination and control, loc: 2802

The anonymous, rule-bound welfare bureaucracy insulted his individuality. Such feelings were far from uncommon among welfare claimants, particularly where their claim for support resulted from the sacrifices they had made during the war. loc: 2825

new policies that began to eat away at the civil liberties of the poor and the handicapped. As the social welfare administration mushroomed into a huge bureaucracy, so the doctrines of racial hygiene and social biology, loc: 2831

Legal officials in many parts of Germany now made liberal use of terms such as ‘vermin’ or ‘pest’ to describe criminals, denoting a new, biological way of conceptualizing the social order as a kind of body, from which harmful parasites and alien micro-organisms had to be removed if it was to flourish. loc: 2851

in a short book in which they coined the phrase ‘a life unworthy of life’, that what they called ‘ballast existences’, people who were nothing but a burden on the community, should simply be killed. loc: 2860

many doctors and welfare officers still doubted the ethical legitimacy or social effectiveness of such a policy. The very considerable influence of the Catholic Church and its welfare agencies was also directed firmly against such policies. loc: 2865

After the war, the widespread belief on the right that the German army had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by revolutionaries in 1918 translated easily into antisemitic demagogy. loc: 2964

Most Jewish Germans supported the solid liberal parties of the centre, or to a lesser extent the Social Democrats, rather than the revolutionary left, loc: 2970

Nevertheless, the events of 1918-19 gave a boost to antisemitism on the right, convincing many waverers that racist conspiracy theories about the Jews were correct after loc: 2972

Antisemitism had always surged at times of economic crisis, and the economic crises of the Weimar Republic dwarfed anything that Germany had witnessed before. loc: 2976

A fresh source of conflict arose in the gathering pace of immigration on the part of impoverished Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitic violence and civil war in Russia. loc: 2977

they nevertheless formed an easy target for popular resentments. loc: 2983

public outburst of violence was symptomatic of the new preparedness of antisemites, like so many other groups on the fringes of German politics, to stir up or actively employ violence and terror to gain their ends, loc: 2992

the language of antisemitism became embedded in mainstream political discourse as never before. loc: 2998

the rhetoric of the Nationalists, the second largest party after the Social Democrats during the middle years of the Republic, was shot through with antisemitic phrases. loc: 3001

Catholic antisemitism also took on new vigour in the 1920s, animated by fear of the challenge of Bolshevism, loc: 3005

Kurt Eisner loc: 3015

born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1867. loc: 3019

He was identified with the right-wing fringe of the Social Democratic Party, loc: 3020

When things began to fall apart on November 1918, it was Eisner who, thanks to his gift for rhetoric and his disdain for political convention, took the lead in Munich. loc: 3023

Eisner proclaimed Bavaria a Republic and established a revolutionary government staffed by Majority and Independent Social Democrats, with himself at its head. But his government failed utterly in the basic tasks of maintaining food supplies, providing jobs, demobilizing the troops and keeping the transport system going. loc: 3028

Eisner was everything the radical right in Bavaria hated: a bohemian and a Berliner, a Jew, a journalist, a campaigner for peace during the war, and an agitator who had been arrested for his part in the January strikes of 1918. loc: 3034

He was, in short, the ideal object onto which the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend could be projected. loc: 3037

a young, aristocratic student, Count Anton von Arco-Valley, shot Eisner twice at point-blank range loc: 3038

unleashed a storm of violence in the Bavarian capital. loc: 3040

one of Eisner’s socialist admirers walked into the Parliament shortly afterwards, drew a gun, and in full view of all the other deputies in the debating chamber, fired two shots at Eisner’s severest critic, loc: 3043

A coalition cabinet headed by an otherwise obscure Majority Social Democrat, Johannes Hoffmann, was formed, but it was unable to restore order as massive street demonstrations followed Eisner’s funeral. In the power vacuum that ensued, arms and ammunition were distributed to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. loc: 3047

Once more, literary bohemianism had come to the fore, this time in the form of a dramatist rather than a critic. Only 25, Ernst Toller had made his name as a poet and, playwright. More of an anarchist than a socialist, Toller enrolled like-minded men in his government, loc: 3051

Bolsheviks Max Levien and Eugen Leviné pushed the ‘coffee house anarchists’ brusquely aside. Without waiting for the approval of the German Communist Party, they established a Bolshevik regime in Munich loc: 3063

the Communists set about expanding and training a Red Army, which soon numbered 20,000 well-armed and well-paid men. A series of proclamations announced that Bavaria was going to spearhead the Bolshevization of Europe; loc: 3068

The Majority Social Democrats in Bamberg clearly needed a serious fighting force at their disposal. Hoffmann signed up a force of 35,000 Free Corps soldiers under the leadership of the Bavarian colonel Franz Ritter von Epp, loc: 3072

Looting and theft were spreading across the city, and now it was blockaded by the Free Corps as well. loc: 3075

the Munich workers’ and soldiers’ councils passed a vote of no-confidence in the Communists, who had to resign, leaving the city without a government. loc: 3077

the Red Army began to take reprisals against hostages imprisoned in a local school, loc: 3078

included six members of the Thule Society, an antisemitic, Pan-German sect, loc: 3079

Naming itself after the supposed location of ultimate ‘Aryan’ purity, Iceland (‘Thule’), it used the ‘Aryan’ swastika symbol to denote its racial priorities. loc: 3079

The news of these shootings enraged the soldiers beyond measure. As they marched into the city, virtually unopposed, their victory became a bloodbath. loc: 3087

the official estimates gave a total of some 600 killed loc: 3094

A ‘White’ counter-revolutionary government eventually took over, and proceeded to prosecute the remaining revolutionaries loc: 3097

Munich became a playground for extremist political sects, loc: 3098

those who ran the new army were concerned to ensure that soldiers received the correct kind of political indoctrination, loc: 3102

He tried again to join the Academy of Art, and was rejected a second time. loc: 3131

He took with him, in all probability, two political influences from Linz. The first was the Pan-Germanism of Georg Ritter von Schonerer, loc: 3132

the second was an unquenchable enthusiasm for the music of Richard Wagner, whose operas he frequently attended in Linz; he was intoxicated by their romanticization of Germanic myth and legend, and by their depiction of heroes who knew no fear. loc: 3134

First, unable to come to terms with his failure to get into the Academy, Hitler conceived a violent hatred for bourgeois convention, the establishment, rules and regulations. loc: 3138

Rather than train or apply for a regular job, he lived an idle, chaotic, bohemian life, and spent his savings on going to Wagner operas. loc: 3140

Hitler undoubtedly loathed the Habsburg monarchy and its capital city, whose institutions had denied him the fulfilment of his artistic ambitions. He found Schönerer’ s demand that the German-speaking areas of Austria be absorbed into the German Empire irresistibly appealing loc: 3145

The racial mixing of Vienna was repulsive to him; only a racially homogeneous nation could be a successful one. loc: 3147

Hitler could scarcely ignore the everyday antisemitism of the kind of newspapers that were available in the reading-room of the Men’s Home, loc: 3149

his hatred of Jews only became visceral, personal and extreme at the end of the First World War.15 loc: 3154

‘The psyche of the great masses’, he wrote, ‘is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak ... The masses love a commander loc: 3160

‘I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror towards the individual and the masses loc: 3161

Perhaps the most important political lesson he derived from his time in Vienna, however, was a deep contempt for the state and the law. loc: 3169

Perhaps the most important political lesson he derived from his time in Vienna, however, was a deep contempt for the state and the law. There is no reason to disbelieve his later statement that as a follower of Schönerer he considered the Habsburg monarchy to be the oppressor of the Germanic race, forcing it to mix with others and denying it the chance of uniting with Germans in the Reich. ‘If the species itself is in danger of being oppressed or utterly eliminated,’ he wrote, ‘the question of legality is reduced to a subordinate rule.’ Racial self-preservation was a higher principle than legality, which could often be no more than a cloak for tyranny. loc: 3169

Racial self-preservation was a higher principle than legality, which could often be no more than a cloak for tyranny. Any means were justified in this struggle. loc: 3173

the ‘rotten state’ of the Habsburgs was completely dominated by parliamentarism, a political system for which Hitler acquired an abiding contempt loc: 3174

He conceived a special hatred for the Czechs, who were specially disruptive. loc: 3176

Like other Schwabing bohemians, he whiled away much of his time in coffee houses and beer-cellars, but he was an outsider to the real bohemian world as well as the world of respectable society, loc: 3188

The avant-garde aroused in Hitler only incomprehension and revulsion. loc: 3194

What Hitler did share with the Schwabing bohemians, however, was an inner contempt for bourgeois convention and rules, and a belief that art could change the world. loc: 3196

He was enlisted on 16 August, and was sent almost immediately to the Western Front. This was, he wrote later, a ‘release from the painful feelings of my youth’. For the first time, he had a mission he could believe in and follow, and a close-knit group of comrades with whom he could identify. loc: 3201

Temporarily blinded, he was sent to a military hospital at Pasewalk, in Pomerania in the German north-east, to recover. Here he learned in due course of the German defeat, the Armistice and the Revolution.20 loc: 3207

In My Struggle, Hitler described this as ‘the greatest villainy of the century’, the negation of all his hopes, rendering all his sacrifices futile. loc: 3209

Searching for an explanation, Hitler seized eagerly on the rapidly spreading story of the ‘stab-in-the-back’. The Jews, whom he already regarded with suspicion and distaste, must have been to blame, he thought. All the inchoate and confused ideas and prejudices he had so far garnered from Schönerer, Lueger, Wagner and the rest now suddenly fell into a coherent, neat and utterly paranoid pattern. loc: 3212

he looked to propaganda as the prime political mover: enemy war propaganda, undermining Germany’s will from without, Jewish, socialist propaganda spreading doubt and defeatism from within. loc: 3215

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be ... The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. loc: 3217

And it had to appeal to the emotions rather than to reason, because: ‘The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.’ Finally, propaganda had to be continuous and unvarying in its message. It should never admit a glimmer of doubt in its own claims, or concede the tiniest element of right in the claims of the other side.21 loc: 3222

The whole language of politics in Munich after the overthrow of the Communist regime was permeated by nationalist slogans, antisemitic phrases, reactionary keywords that almost invited the rabid expression of counter-revolutionary sentiment. loc: 3229

So readily did Hitler imbibe the ideas of such men that he was picked out by his superiors and sent as an instructor on a similar course in August 1919. Here for the first time he discovered a talent for speaking to a large audience. loc: 3236

his passion and commitment and his ability to communicate with simple, ordinary men. They also noted the vehemence of his antisemitism. loc: 3238

an ‘antisemitism of reason’, which had to aim at ‘the planned legislative combating and removal of the Jews’ privileges’. ‘Its final aim must unshakeably be the removal of the Jews altogether.’23 loc: 3241

he was sent to report on one of a large range of political groups that sprang up in Munich in this period, to see whether it was dangerous or whether it could be enrolled in the cause of counter-revolution. This was the German Workers’ Party, founded on 5 January 1919 by one Anton Drexler, loc: 3245

Drexler insisted that he was a socialist and a worker, opposed to unearned capital, exploitation and profiteering. But this was socialism with a nationalistic twist. loc: 3247

He directed his appeal not to industrial workers but to the ‘productive estates’, to all those who lived from honest labour.24 loc: 3249

Drexler’s party sought in the longer term to win the working class over from Marxism and enlist it in the service of the Pan-German cause. loc: 3252

The fledgling party was in fact another creation of the hyperactive Thule Society. loc: 3253

Hitler, still encouraged by his superior officers in the army, rapidly became the party’s star speaker. He built on his success to push the party into holding ever larger public meetings, mostly in beer-halls, advertised in advance by brash poster campaigns, and often accompanied by rowdy scenes. loc: 3261

Demagogy had restored to him the identity he had lost with the German defeat. He left the army and became a full-time political agitator. loc: 3263

he gained much of his oratorical success by telling his audiences what they wanted to hear. He used simple, straightforward language that ordinary people could understand, short sentences, powerful, emotive slogans. loc: 3275

There were no qualifications in what he said; everything was absolute, uncompromising, irrevocable, undeviating, unalterable, final. He seemed, as many who listened to his early speeches testified, to speak straight from the heart, and to express their own deepest fears and desires. Increasingly, too, he exuded self-confidence, aggression, belief in the ultimate triumph of his party, even a sense of destiny. loc: 3279

Without necessarily using overtly religious language, Hitler appealed to religious archetypes of suffering, humiliation, redemption and resurrection lodged deep within his listeners’ psyche; and in the circumstances of postwar and post-revolutionary Bavaria, he found a ready response.28 loc: 3284

Hitler’s speeches reduced Germany’s complex social, political and economic problems to a simple common denominator: the evil machinations of the Jews. loc: 3287

Such uncompromising radicalism lent Hitler’s public meetings a revivalist fervour that was hard for less demagogic politicians to emulate. loc: 3295

Hitler concentrated especially on rabble-rousing attacks on ‘Jewish’ merchants who were supposedly pushing up the price of goods: loc: 3299

the party changed its name in February 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party; hostile commentators soon abbreviated this to the word ‘Nazi’, loc: 3302

its rhetoric was frequently egalitarian, it stressed the need to put common needs above the needs of the individual, and it often declared itself opposed to big business and international finance capital. loc: 3304

from the very beginning, Hitler declared himself implacably opposed to Social Democracy and, initially to a much smaller extent, Communism: loc: 3306

The ‘National Socialists’ wanted to unite the two political camps of left and right into which, they argued, the Jews had manipulated the German nation. The basis for this was to be the idea of race. This was light years removed from the class-based ideology of socialism. loc: 3309

self-image as a movement rather than a party, to its much-vaunted contempt for bourgeois convention and conservative timidity. loc: 3312

By presenting itself as a ‘movement’, National Socialism, like the labour movement, advertised its opposition to conventional politics and its intention to subvert and ultimately overthrow the system within which it was initially forced to work. loc: 3317

By replacing class with race, and the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the leader, Nazism reversed the usual terms of socialist ideology. loc: 3319

Hitler’s early emphasis on attacking Jewish capitalism had been modified to bring in ‘Marxism’, or in other words Social Democracy, and Bolshevism as well. loc: 3326

Hitler declared in numerous speeches that the Jews were a race of parasites who could only live by subverting other peoples, above all the highest and best of all races, the Aryans. Thus they divided the Aryan race against itself, both organizing capitalist exploitation on the one hand and leading the struggle against it on the other.34 The Jews, he said in a speech delivered on 6 April 1920, were ‘to be exterminated’; loc: 3332

The ‘solution of the Jewish question’, he told his listeners in April 1921, could only be solved by ‘brute force’. loc: 3338

At the end of the First World War, General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s military dictator for the last two years or so of the conflict, thought it prudent to remove himself from the political scene for a while. loc: 3342

A Pan-German annexationist in 1914-18, and a rabid opponent of the Peace Settlement, he immediately began conspiring to overthrow the new Republican order. loc: 3346

Most devoted of all was the student Rudolf Hess, a pupil of the geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer at Munich University. loc: 3352

Antisemitism was a shared passion: Hess denounced the ‘pack of Jews’ who he thought had betrayed Germany in 1918, loc: 3357

Naive, idealistic, without personal ambition or greed, and, according to Haushofer, not very bright, Hess had an inclination to believe in irrational and mystical doctrines such as astrology; his dog-like devotion to Hitler was almost religious in its fervour; he regarded Hitler as a kind of Messiah. loc: 3360

introduced Hitler to an elaborate version of the common Pan-German theory of ‘living-space’, Lebensraum, with which Haushofer justified German claims to conquer Eastern Europe, loc: 3364

Alfred Rosenberg. loc: 3378

In 1930 Rosenberg was to publish his magnum opus, named The Myth of the Twentieth Century in homage to the principal work of his idol, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. loc: 3383

Rosenberg more than anyone probably turned Hitler’s attention towards the threat of Communism and its supposed creation by a Jewish conspiracy, loc: 3388

‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ now became a major target of Hitler’s hate. loc: 3390

the fledgling movement had an official Programme, composed by Hitler and Drexler with a little help from the ‘racial economist’ Gottfried Feder, and approved on 24 February 1920. loc: 3403

25 points included the demand for ‘the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany’, the revocation of the 1919 Peace Treaties, ‘land and territory (colonies) to feed our people‘, the prevention of ’non-German immigration’, and the death penalty for ‘common criminals, usurers, profiteers etc.’Jews were to be denied civil rights and registered as aliens, loc: 3404

It was a typical far-right document of its time. In practice, it did not mean very much, loc: 3410

Dissension there was, however, with other causes, principally Drexler’s efforts to merge the party with other far-right organizations loc: 3413

Hitler, fearing he would be submerged in the new movement, scotched the negotiations in April 1921 by threatening to resign. loc: 3416

few were prepared to do without the man whose demagogy had been the sole reason for the Party’s growth over the previous months. The merger plans were abandoned. loc: 3422

culminated in the demand that he should be made Party chairman ’with dictatorial powers’ and that the Party be purged of the ‘foreign elements which have now penetrated it’.44 loc: 3424

Hitler was at the centre of another beer-cellar brawl, with beer-mugs flying across the room as Nazis and Social Democrats traded blows. loc: 3433

a nationalist rally in Coburg in October 1922 culminated in a pitched battle with Social Democrats in which the Nazis eventually drove their opponents from the streets with their rubber truncheons.45 Not surprisingly, the Nazi Party was soon banned in most German states, loc: 3435

The new note of physical violence in the Nazi campaign reflected not least the rapid growth of the Party’s paramilitary wing, founded early in 1920 as a ‘hall protection’ group, soon renamed the ’Gymnastics and Sports Section’. With their brown shirts and breeches, jackboots and caps - a uniform that only found its final form in 1924 loc: 3440

Hermann Ehrhardt, former commander of a Free Corps brigade, had established an elaborate network of assassination squads that had carried out political murders all over Germany, including the killing of several leading Republican politicians, and the murder of a number of their own members whom they suspected as double agents. loc: 3447

Ehrhardt brought his Free Corps veterans into the Nazis’ ‘Gymnastics and Sports Section’ in August 1921; loc: 3455

The deal with Ehrhardt was brokered by Ernst Röhm, loc: 3457

Röhm’s penchant was for mindless violence, not political conspiracy. loc: 3465

He had nothing but contempt for civilians, and revelled in the lawlessness of wartime life. Drinking and carousing, fighting and brawling cemented the band of brothers among whom he found his place; loc: 3471

took the lead in building up the Party’s paramilitary wing movement, renamed the ‘Storm Division’ (Sturmabteilung, or SA) in October 1921. loc: 3475

The SA remained a formally separate organization, therefore, and Röhm’s relations with the Nazi Party’s leader always retained an uneasy loc: 3479

In 1922 the Nazis’ hopes were sharply raised when news came in of Benito Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ on 28 October, which had immediately led to the Fascist leader’s appointment as Prime Minister of Italy. loc: 3485

In 1919 he launched his Fascist movement, which used violent tactics, terror and intimidation against its left-wing opponents, loc: 3489

Mussolini’s example influenced the Nazi Party in a number of ways, notably in its adoption in late 1922 and early 1923 of the title of ‘Leader’ - Duce. in Italian, Führer in German - to denote the unquestionable authority of the man at the movement’s head. loc: 3495

growing cult of Hitler’s personality in the Nazi Party, loc: 3497

Mussolini’s main practical influence on Hitler at this period, however, was to convince him that the tactic of a march on the capital was the quickest way to power. loc: 3503

Fascism was violent, ceaselessly active, it despised parliamentary institutions, it was militaristic, and it glorified conflict and war. It was bitterly opposed not only to Communism but also, even more importantly, to socialism and to liberalism. loc: 3510

was masculinist and anti-feminist, seeking a state in which men would rule and women would be reduced mainly to the functions of childbearing loc: 3513

declaring its intention of sweeping away old institutions and traditions and creating a new form of human being, tough, anti-intellectual, modern, secular and above all fanatically devoted to the cause of his own nation and race. loc: 3515

The ‘march on Rome’ galvanized the nascent fascist movements of Europe loc: 3519

When the German government defaulted on reparations payments, and French troops occupied the Ruhr, nationalists in Germany exploded with rage and humiliation. The Republic’s loss of legitimacy was incalculable; loc: 3523

Nationalists had a. potent propaganda weapon in the presence of black French colonial troops amongst the occupying forces. loc: 3534

really opened the floodgates for lurid racist propaganda. loc: 3539

On the right, this became a potent symbol of Germany’s national humiliation loc: 3542

accession of a further group of new and very useful supporters to the Nazi movement. Among them was Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, loc: 3554

Hanfstaengl was able to introduce Hitler to influential people in Munich high society, including publishers, businessmen and army officers. Such circles found it amusing to patronize him, were entertained when he appeared at their elegant parties dressed in an army coat and carrying a dog-whip, and shared loc: 3561

October 1922 by the arrival in the Nazi Party, with his followers in Nuremberg, of Julius Streicher, loc: 3567

Impressed by Hitler’s progress, Streicher brought so many supporters into the Nazi Party that it virtually doubled in size overnight. loc: 3569

in acquiring Streicher, the Party also acquired a vicious antisemite whose extreme hatred of the Jews matched even Hitler’s, and a man of violence who carried a heavy whip in public and personally beat up his helpless opponents once he had achieved a position of power. loc: 3572

So extreme was the paper, and so obviously obsessive was its brutish-looking, shaven-headed editor, that Streicher never acquired a great deal of influence within the movement, loc: 3576

He may not have been an effective administrator, Hitler conceded, and his sexual appetite led him into all kinds of trouble, but Hitler always remained loyal to him. loc: 3584

As many moderate conservatives were to do later on, Knilling and his allies felt that the Nazis were a threat, and disliked their violence, but considered that their heart was in the right place and their idealism only needed to be used in a more productive and healthy way. loc: 3591

Ernst Röhm, quite independently from him, succeeded in getting the main paramilitary organizations in Bavaria together in a Working Community of Patriotic Fighting Leagues, which included some much larger groups than the Nazi brownshirts. These groups surrendered their weapons to the regular army, whose Bavarian units under General von Lossow were clearly readying themselves for the much-bruited march on Berlin and an armed confrontation with the French in the Ruhr, and they enrolled the paramilitaries as auxiliaries and started to train them. loc: 3597

Röhm’s role in the reorganized paramilitary movement was crucial, and he now resigned as head of the small Nazi stormtrooper organization in order to concentrate on it. He was succeeded by a man who was to play a key role in the subsequent development of the Nazi movement and the Third Reich: Hermann Goring. loc: 3605

His exploits as a pilot had earned him Germany’s highest military decoration, the Pour le mérite, and a popular reputation as a swashbuckling daredevil. loc: 3611

At this time, therefore, Goring was a dashing, handsome, romantic figure, whose exploits were celebrated in numerous adulatory popular books and magazine articles. loc: 3617

Ruthless, energetic and extremely egotistical, Goring nevertheless fell completely under Hitler’s spell from the very start. Loyalty and faithfulness were for him the highest virtues. loc: 3619

For Goring, the end always justified the means, and the end was always what he conceived of as the national interest of Germany, which he considered had been betrayed by Jews, democrats and revolutionaries in 1918. loc: 3621

he was as ruthless, as violent and as extreme as any of the leading Nazis. loc: 3625

The crisis finally came when the Reich government in Berlin was forced to resign on 13 August. loc: 3630

Stresemann realized that the campaign of passive resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr had to be ended, and the galloping hyperinflation brought under control. He instituted a policy of ‘fulfilment’, in which Germany would fulfil the terms of the Peace Settlement, loc: 3632

His policy met with notable success during the next six years, loc: 3635

to the extreme nationalists it was nothing more than national betrayal. loc: 3635

Aware that he would lose the support of the paramilitaries if he dithered any longer, and worried that Kahr was himself considering action, Hitler, now backed by Ludendorff, decided on a putsch. loc: 3644

Hitler and a body of heavily armed stormtroopers broke into a meeting addressed by Kahr in the Bürgerbräukeller, a beer-cellar just outside the centre of Munich. loc: 3647

Hitler took Kahr, Lossow and Seisser into an adjoining room and explained that he would march on Berlin, installing himself at the head of a new Reich government; Ludendorff would take over the national army. loc: 3650

while Hitler went into the city to try and sort things out, Ludendorff released Kahr and the other prisoners, who promptly backtracked on their enforced compliance with the plot and immediately got in touch with the army, the police and the media to repudiate Hitler’s actions. loc: 3657

Hitler and Ludendorff decided to march on the city centre. They gathered about two thousand armed supporters, loc: 3659

they marched through the centre of the city in the direction of the Ministry of War. At the end of the street they were met by an armed cordon of police. loc: 3662

For half a minute the air was filled with whizzing bullets as both sides let fly. loc: 3665

Altogether, fourteen marchers were shot dead, and four policemen. loc: 3667

The putsch had come to an ignominious end.70 loc: 3670

He knew that he could implicate a whole range of prominent Bavarian politicians in the putsch attempt, and expose the army’s involvement in training paramilitaries for a march on Berlin. loc: 3673

Hitler took the entire responsibility on himself, declaring that serving the interests of Germany could not be high treason. loc: 3683

Despite the fact that the participants in the putsch had shot dead four policemen and staged an armed and (in any reasonable legal terms) treasonable revolt against a legitimately constituted state government, both offences punishable by death, the court sentenced Hitler to a mere five years in prison for high treason, and the others were indicted to similar or even lighter terms. Ludendorff, as expected, was acquitted. loc: 3685

The court grounded its leniency in the fact that, as it declared, the participants in the putsch ‘were led in their action by a pure patriotic spirit and the most noble will’. The judgment was scandalous even by the biased standards of the Weimar judiciary. loc: 3688

Hitler also sat down to dictate an account of his life and opinions up to this point to two of his fellow-prisoners, his chauffeur Emil Maurice and his factotum Rudolf Hess, an account published the following year under the title, probably proposed by Amann, of My Struggle.74 loc: 3696

Those people who read it, probably a relatively small proportion of those who bought it, must have found it difficult to gain anything very coherent out of its confused mélange of autobiographical reminiscences and garbled political declamations. loc: 3703

Still, no one who read the book could have been left in any doubt about the fact that Hitler considered racial conflict to be the motor, the essence of history, and the Jews to be the sworn enemy of the German race, whose historic mission it was, under the guidance of the Nazi Party, to break their international power and annihilate them entirely. loc: 3705

Jews were now linked indissolubly in Hitler’s mind with ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘Marxism’, loc: 3710

Russia was where Germany’s conquest of ‘living-space’ would be made at the same time as the elimination of the ‘Jewish-Bolsheviks’ who he supposed ruled the Soviet loc: 3711

The soil now occupied by ‘Russia and her vassal border states’ would in future be given over to ‘the industrious work of the German plough’.76 loc: 3715

What remained central through all these tactical twists and turns, however, was the long-term drive for ‘living-space’ in the East, and the fierce desire to annihilate the Jews. loc: 3725

the genocidal quality of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews, or his paranoid conviction that they were responsible for all of Germany’s ills loc: 3728

The Jews were a ‘pestilence’, ‘worse than the Black Death’, a ‘maggot in the decomposing body of Germany’, loc: 3732

The failed putsch also taught him that he would not even be able to take the first step - the acquisition of supreme power in Germany itself - by relying on paramilitary violence alone. A ‘march on Rome’ was out of the question in Germany. It was essential to win mass public support, by the propaganda and public-speaking campaigns which Hitler knew were his forte. loc: 3737

Coming to power clearly required collaboration from key elements in the establishment, loc: 3743

In the next crisis, which was to occur less than a decade later, he made sure he had the army and the key institutions of the state either neutralized, or actively working for him, unlike in 1923.80 loc: 3744

Meanwhile, however, the situation of the Nazi Party seemed almost irretrievable in the wake of Hitler’s arrest and imprisonment. loc: 3746

Bavarian separatism and ultra-nationalist conspiracies gave way to more conventional regional politics. The situation calmed down as the hyperinflation came to an end and the policy of ‘fulfilment’ took hold in Berlin, bearing fruit almost immediately loc: 3748

He was not allowed to speak in public in most parts of Germany until 1927; he was still banned in Prussia, which covered over half the Weimar Republic’s land surface and contained the majority of its population, as late as 1928. The ultra-nationalist right was humiliated in the national elections of 1924. loc: 3760

Armed with his newly won prestige and self-confidence as the nationalist hero of the putsch and the subsequent trial, Hitler promptly refounded the Nazi Party, calling on his former followers to join it and (a key new point) to submit themselves unconditionally to his leadership. loc: 3768

First, as it became legal to reconstitute the brownshirt organization, he insisted that it be subordinated to the Party, and cut its links with the other paramilitary groups; Ernst Röhm, who rejected this view, was ousted, loc: 3772

secondly, Hitler worked steadily to undermine the continuing prestige of Ludendorff, who was not only a serious rival but was also rapidly becoming more extreme in his views. loc: 3775

the all-powerful military dictator of the First World War had been pushed out to the margins of politics by the upstart Nazi politician; the general had been displaced by the corporal. loc: 3782

With Ludendorff safely out of the way, Hitler had no serious rival on the extreme right any more. He could now concentrate on bringing the rest of the ultra-nationalist movement to heel. loc: 3784

While disparate groups in the south gravitated into the orbit of the Nazi Party, the various branches of the Party in northern and western Germany were undergoing something of a revival. The person mainly responsible for this was another Bavarian, Gregor Strasser, loc: 3785

Soon, Goebbels had become a Party organizer in the Rhineland. He developed into an effective orator, perhaps the most effective of all the Nazi speakers apart from Hitler himself, lucid, popular, and quick-witted in response to hecklers. loc: 3834

It was Joseph Goebbels as much as Gregor Strasser who was behind the north German challenge to the Munich Party leadership in 1925. But he too soon began to fall under Hitler’s spell, enthused by a reading of My Struggle loc: 3838

Hitler berated these men for going their own way in ideological matters, lectured them on his views of the Party’s policies, then offered to let bygones be bygones if they submitted unconditionally to his leadership. Goebbels was converted on the spot. Hitler, he confided to his diary, was ‘brilliant’. ‘Adolf Hitler,’ he wrote, thinking of the 1923 putsch, ‘I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius.’96 From now on he was entirely under Hitler’s spell; unlike some of the other Nazi leaders, he was to remain so right up to the end. loc: 3856

a Party rally, held in July 1926 and attended by up to 8,000 brownshirts and Party members. Its time was almost wholly taken up with rituals of obeisance to Hitler, the swearing of personal oaths of loyalty to him, and mass marches and displays, including the parading of the ‘Blood Flag’ loc: 3865

But at this point, though now united and disciplined under Hitler’s unquestioned leadership, the Nazi Party was still very small. loc: 3868

A new generation of younger Nazi activists played the most prominent role at these levels. They pushed aside the generation left over from prewar Pan-German and conspiratorial organizations, and outnumbered those who had taken an active part in the Free Corps, the Thule Society and similar groups. loc: 3876

Goebbels’s violence and extremism earned the Nazi Party in Berlin an eleven-month ban from the city’s Social Democratic authorities in 1927- 8; but they also won him the allegiance and admiration of younger activists loc: 3886

Hitler takes the view today more than ever that the most effective fighter in the National Socialist movement is the man who pushes his way through on the basis of his achievements as a leader. loc: 3893

In this way, Hitler thought, the most ruthless, the most dynamic and the most efficient would rise to positions of power within the movement. He was later to apply the same principle in running the Third Reich. It helped ensure that the Nazi Party at every level became ceaselessly active, constantly marching, fighting, demonstrating, mobilizing. loc: 3896

the Nazis turned instead to rural society in Protestant north Germany, where rising peasant discontent was spilling over into demonstrations and campaigns of protest. loc: 3902

Bankruptcies and foreclosures were already rising in number towards the end of the 1920s, and small farmers were turning to the extreme right in their despair.104 loc: 3908

The Nazi Party’s support amongst middling and small landowners skyrocketed. Soon, farmers’ sons were providing the manpower for stormtrooper units being despatched to fight the Communists in the big cities.111 loc: 3936

it also demonstrated that there was electoral capital to be won in local politics, where the Party now became much more active than before.113 loc: 3945

the campaign had revealed to many supporters of the Nationalists how much more dynamic the brown-shirted and jackbooted Nazis were than the frock-coated and top-hatted leaders of their own party.114 loc: 3953

Hitler was soon whipping up popular enthusiasm again, his charisma now reinforced by the leadership cult that had grown up around him within the Party. loc: 3955

1929, loc: 3961

By this time the Nazi Party had become a formidable organization, its regional, district and local levels staffed with loyal and energetic functionaries, loc: 3963

Not just women, young people, students, and school pupils, but also many other sectors of German society were catered for by specially designed Nazi organizations by the end of the 1920s. There were groups for civil servants, for the war-wounded, for farmers, and for many other constituencies, each addressing its particular, specifically targeted propaganda effort. loc: 4016

the Nazis still had a particular appeal to the lower middle classes at this time, to artisans, shopkeepers and the self-employed. loc: 4021

Strasser encouraged the establishment of this extremely elaborate structure of subdivisions within the movement, even if many of the different branches, like the Hitler Youth or the Factory Cell Organization, had very few members and did not seem to be going anywhere very fast. For he had a long-term aim in mind. All of this was intended to form the basis for the creation of a society run by Nazified social institutions once Hitler came to power. loc: 4030

In the shorter run, it helped the Party direct its electoral appeal towards virtually every constituency in German society, helping to politicize social institutions that had previously considered themselves more or less unpolitical in their nature. It meant that the Party would be able to expand with ease should it suddenly gain a rapid influx of new members. And the whole structure was held together by unconditional loyalty to a leader whose power was now absolute, and whose charisma was fed on a daily basis by the adulation of his immediate group of subordinates.129 loc: 4034

Far more important were durable popular antisemitic propagandists loc: 4052

popular pamphlets and tracts which were quite widely read amongst rank-and-file Nazis.131 loc: 4054

More significant still, however, was the inspiration provided by the basic elements of Nazi propaganda - the speeches by Hitler and Goebbels, the marches, the banners, the parades. At this level, ideas were more likely to be acquired through organs such as the Nazi press, election pamphlets and wall-posters than through serious ideological tracts. loc: 4061

in the 1920s and early 1930s, the most important aspect of Nazi ideology was its emphasis on social solidarity - the concept of the organic racial community of all Germans - followed at some distance by extreme nationalism and the cult of Hitler. Antisemitism, by contrast, was of significance only for a minority, and for a good proportion of these it was only incidental. loc: 4063

ideological antisemitism was strongest amongst the older generation of Nazis, loc: 4067

Men often came to the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party after serving at the front in 1914-18, then becoming involved in far-right organizations such as the Thule Society or the Free Corps.134 loc: 4069

the Free Corps were indeed, as has been said, the ‘vanguard of Nazism’, providing a good part of the leadership cadre of the Party loc: 4103

by this time a younger generation was entering the Party, the postwar generation, eager to emulate the now legendary exploits of the front-line soldiers. loc: 4105

Violence was like a drug for such men, loc: 4109

these clashes, rather than the actual ideas of the movement, were what gave his life significance. loc: 4114

‘the spirit of the frontline comradeship, risen from the smoke of the sacrificial vessels of the war, and finding its way into the hearts of the awakened German people’.142 loc: 4130

‘Old fighters’ such as these proudly listed the injuries and insults they had received at the hands of their opponents. The ‘persecution, harassment, scorn and ridicule’ they had to suffer only stiffened their resolve.143 loc: 4133

their feeling that they were under constant attack not just from the Social Democrats’ paramilitary affiliate, the Reichsbanner, but also in many areas from the police, who in Prussia at least were controlled by Social Democratic ministers loc: 4142

Their hatred for the ‘reds’ was almost without measure. loc: 4148

The brownshirts contrasted Communist criminality with what they saw as their own selfless idealism. loc: 4152

it is difficult to grasp the full extent of the stormtroopers’ fanaticism and hatred unless we accept that they often did feel they were making sacrifices for their cause. loc: 4162

Many people were won over to Nazism by Hitler’s demagogy. Now presented in dramatically staged mass rallies and huge open-air meetings, Hitler’s speeches at the end of the 1920s had a power greater than ever before. loc: 4172

The personality of the Leader had me totally in its spell. He who gets to know Adolf Hitler with a pure and true heart will love him with all his heart. loc: 4176

‘our Leader radiates a power which makes us all strong’, loc: 4180

Much of the Nazis’ appeal lay in their promise to end the political divisions that had plagued Germany throughout the Weimar Republic. loc: 4183

A substantial proportion of the Party’s members left after only a relatively short time in its ranks. Nevertheless, by the early 1930s it was beginning to extend its appeal beyond the lower middle class that had provided its backbone since its foundation. loc: 4195

By the early 1930s, however, the proportion of middle- and upper-class Party members in the Saxon Nazi Party was increasing, as the Party became more respectable. Slowly, the Nazis were escaping their modest and humble roots and beginning to attract members of Germany’s social elites.159 loc: 4207

Heinrich Himmler, loc: 4212

Young Heinrich’s diaries and reading notes show how strongly he imbibed the mythology of 1914, the idea of war as the summit of human achievement and the concept of struggle as the moving force of human history and human existence. loc: 4219

bitterly regretted not having been able to fight in the war and spent much of his later life trying to make good this crucial absence in his early life.160 loc: 4221

Himmler got away from the putsch without being arrested, and so had his opportunity to rise in the movement at a time when Hitler was in prison or banned from speaking and the Nazi Party was in disarray. loc: 4233

Hitler offered certainty, a leader to admire, a cause to follow. From 1925 onwards, when he joined the newly reconstituted Nazi Party, Himmler developed a boundless hero-worship of the Nazi leader; loc: 4239

In 1926 he married, and his wife, seven years older than he was, influenced him strongly in the direction of occultism, herbalism, homeopathy and other unconventional beliefs, loc: 4242

Himmler imbibed from Darré a fixed belief in the destiny of the Nordic race, the superiority of its blood over that of the Slavs, the need to keep its blood pure, and the central role of a solid German peasantry in ensuring the future of the Germanic race. loc: 4248

On 6 January 1929 Hitler appointed the faithful Himmler as head of his personal Protection Formation - Schutzstaffel, quickly known by its initials as the SS. This had its origins in a small unit formed early in 1923 to act as Hitler’s bodyguard and protect the Party headquarters. loc: 4252

from the first it was conceived as an elite formation, in contrast to the catch-all mass paramilitary movement of the brownshirts. loc: 4255

Over the objections of the brownshirt leadership, he persuaded Hitler to make the SS fully independent in 1930, giving it a new uniform, black instead of brown, and a new, strictly hierarchical, quasi-military structure. loc: 4262

Hitler turned the SS into a kind of internal party police. loc: 4264

Hitler had built up around him a crucial group of men whose devotion to him was wholly unconditional - men like Goebbels, Goring, Hess, Himmler, Rosenberg, Schirach and Streicher. Under their leadership, and thanks to Strasser’s organizational talent, the Nazi movement by the middle of 1929 had become an elaborate, well-organized political body whose appeal was directed to virtually every sector of the population. loc: 4270

It was determined to gain power on the basis of popular support at the polls and rampaging violence on the streets, then tear up the Peace Treaties of 1919, rearm, reconquer the lost territories in East and West and create ‘living-space’ for ethnic German colonization of East-Central and Eastern Europe. loc: 4276

The cult of violence, derived not least from the Free Corps, was at the heart of the movement. loc: 4279

also evolved a way of diverting legal responsibility from the Party leadership for acts of violence and lawlessness committed by brownshirts and other elements within the movement. loc: 4281

None of this could disguise the fact, however, that in the autumn of 1929, the Nazi Party was still very much on the fringes of politics. loc: 4289

The Republic seemed to have weathered the storms of the early 1920s—the inflation, the French occupation, the armed conflicts, the social dislocation - and to have entered calmer waters. It would need a catastrophe of major dimensions if an extremist party like the Nazis was to gain mass support. loc: 4295

German society seemed to be descending into a morass of misery and criminality. In this situation, people began to grasp at political straws: anything, however extreme, seemed better than the hopeless mess they appeared to be in now. loc: 4330

The German economy’s recovery after the inflation had been financed not least by heavy investment from the world’s largest economy, the United States. German interest rates were high, and capital flowed in; but, crucially, reinvestment mainly took the form of short-term loans. German industry came to depend heavily on such funds in its drive to rationalize and mechanize. loc: 4333

In the course of 1928, all leading industrialized countries began to impose monetary restrictions in the face of a looming recession. The United States began cutting its foreign lending. loc: 4339

There was virtually no growth in industrial production in Germany in 1928-9 and by the end of that winter unemployment had already reached nearly two and a half million. loc: 4343

American banks began withdrawing their funds from Germany at the worst possible moment, precisely when the already flagging German economy needed a sharp stimulus to revive it. loc: 4359

Unable to finance production, firms began to cut back drastically. Industrial production, already stagnant, now began to fall with breathtaking speed. loc: 4362

Unemployment rates now rose almost exponentially. With millions of people in the great cities unemployed, less money was available to spend on food, the already severe agricultural crisis deepened dramatically, and farmers were unable to escape foreclosure and bankruptcy as the banks called in the loans on which so many of them depended. loc: 4370

At the beginning of 1932, it was reported that the unemployed and their dependants made up about a fifth of the entire population of Germany, nearly thirteen million loc: 4380

As the Depression bit deeper, groups of men and gangs of boys could be seen haunting the streets, squares and parks of German towns and cities, lounging (so it seemed to the bourgeois man or woman unaccustomed to such a sight) threateningly about, a hint of potential violence and criminality always in the air. Even more menacing were the attempts, often successful, by the Communists to mobilize the unemployed for their own political ends. loc: 4398

The Communists were frightening to the middle classes, not merely because they made politically explicit the social threat posed by the unemployed on the streets, but also because they grew rapidly in numbers throughout the early 1930s. loc: 4408

jobless Communists railed against Social Democrats and trade unionists still in work, and Social Democrats grew increasingly alarmed at the violent and disorderly elements who seemed to be flocking to join the Communists. loc: 4420

The roots of Communist extremism ran deep. loc: 4426

The feeling that the Comintern was behind strikes, demonstrations and attempts at revolution in many parts of the world struck fear into many middle-class Germans, even though these activities were almost uniformly unsuccessful. loc: 4457

the party was often unable to hold the allegiance of most of its members for more than a few months at a time. loc: 4463

the Communist Party thus seemed a looming threat of unparalleled dimensions to many middle-class Germans in the early 1930s. A Communist revolution seemed far from impossible. loc: 4493

What one historian has called a ‘quasi-guerrilla warfare’ was being conducted in the poorer quarters of Germany’s big cities, and the Communists were slowly being beaten back into their heartlands in the slums and tenement districts by the continual brutal pressure of brownshirt violence. loc: 4502

A further wave of cuts came after 1929, with a cumulative reduction in civil service salaries of between 19 and 23 per cent between December 1930 and December 1932. Many civil servants at all levels were dismayed at the inability of their trade union representatives to stop the cuts. loc: 4512

Angered by the support given by Otto Strasser and his publishing house to left-wing causes such as strikes, Hitler summoned the leading men in the Party to a meeting in April 1930 and ranted against Strasser’s views. As a way of trying to neutralize Otto Strasser’s influence, he now appointed Goebbels Reich Propaganda Leader of the Party. loc: 4522

Having shed the last vestiges of ‘socialism’, Hitler now moved to build more bridges to the conservative right. loc: 4532

Hitler took serious steps to persuade industrialists that his Party posed no threat to them. loc: 4536

the solution to the economic woes of the moment, he said, was mainly political. Idealism, patriotism and national unity would create the basis for economic revival. loc: 4539

The senior industrialists were disappointed. loc: 4544

Nevertheless, Nazism now had a respectable face as well as a rough one, and was winning friends among the conservative and nationalist elites. loc: 4557

the People’s Party broke with the coalition over the Social Democrats’ refusal to cut unemployment benefits, and the government was forced to tender its resignation on 27 March 1930.35 loc: 4569

this marked the beginning of the end of Weimar democracy. From this point on, no government ruled with the support of a parliamentary majority in the Reichstag. loc: 4571

those who had President Hindenburg’s ear saw the fall of the Grand Coalition as a chance to establish an authoritarian regime through the use of the Presidential power of rule by decree. Particularly influential in this respect was the German army, loc: 4572

Despite the limitations placed by the Treaty of Versailles on its numbers and equipment, the army remained by a long way the most powerful, most disciplined and most heavily armed force in Germany. loc: 4576

Older officers, schooled in the stern traditions of Prussian monarchism, were generally resistant to the populist appeal of radical nationalist politics. Even here, however, there were some who openly favoured the Nazis, loc: 4586

younger officers were much more susceptible to Nazi propaganda. loc: 4588

The Nazi Party, he declared, had no intention of committing high treason or subverting the army from within. Its intention was to come to power by legal means, and he had expelled those, like Otto Strasser, who had urged it to carry out a revolution. The Party would win a majority in an election and form a legitimately constituted government. At that point, he said, to cheers from the public benches, the real traitors, the ‘November criminals’ of 1918, would be put on trial, and ‘heads will roll’. But until then, the Party would stay within the law. loc: 4595

Hitler’s reassurances dispelled the fears of many middle-class Germans about the Nazi Party’s intentions.39 loc: 4603

Sympathy with the Nazis meant co-operating with them, but such was the arrogance and self-importance of the army leaders that they still thought they could bend the Nazis to their will and enlist them as military and political auxiliaries, loc: 4611

there was no attempt to appoint a government that would rest on the democratic support of the parties represented in the Reichstag. Instead, a ‘cabinet of experts’ would be put in place, with the intention of bypassing the Reichstag through the use of Hindenburg’s power to rule by emergency decree. loc: 4616

Without the Social Democrats it had no parliamentary majority. But this did not seem to matter any more. loc: 4622

President’s nomination of Heinrich Brüning, loc: 4624

moving towards a more authoritarian position, more narrowly concerned with defending the interests of the Catholic Church. loc: 4627

he portrayed the restoration of the monarchy as his main purpose after becoming Chancellor. loc: 4629

He planned to reform the constitution by reducing the power of the Reichstag and combining the offices of Reich Chancellor and Prussian Minister-President in his own person, thus removing the Social Democrats from their dominance of Germany’s largest state. loc: 4633

Brüning also began to restrict democratic rights and civil liberties.44 loc: 4636

In effect, Brüning thus began the dismantling of democratic and civil freedoms that was to be pursued with such vigour under the Nazis. loc: 4641

Brüning’s major task was to deal with the rapidly deteriorating economic situation. He chose to do this by radically deflationary measures, above all by cutting government expenditure. loc: 4652

A fresh crisis hit the economy as the flight of capital reached new heights, leading to the collapse of the Darmstadt and National (or Danat) Bank, loc: 4674

crucially, he also hoped to use the continuing high unemployment rate to complete his dismantling of the Weimar welfare state, reduce the influence of labour and thus weaken the opposition to the plans he was now concocting to reform the constitution in an authoritarian, restorationist direction.55 loc: 4686

Brüning’s deflationary stance could not be shaken. The events of 1931 made the Depression even worse than before. And it showed no signs of ending. Brüning himself told people that he expected it to last until 1935. This was a prospect that many, and not just amongst the unemployed and the destitute, found too appalling to contemplate.58 loc: 4697

Brüning found himself the most unpopular Chancellor there had yet been in the Weimar Republic.61 loc: 4706

he used the threat of wielding Hindenburg’s power under Article 25 of the constitution to call new Reichstag elections to bring the Social Democrats, the major oppositional force, into line. When they joined with the Nationalists and the Communists in refusing to approve a starkly deflationary budget, he had no hesitation in putting this threat into action and brought about a dissolution of the Reichstag. loc: 4714

The election campaign was fought in an atmosphere of feverish, unprecedented excitement. Goebbels and the Nazi Party organization pulled out all the stops. loc: 4723

Hitler and his Party offered a vague but powerful rhetorical vision of a Germany united and strong, a movement that transcended social boundaries and overcame social conflict, a racial community of all Germans working together, a new Reich that would rebuild Germany’s economic strength and restore the nation to its rightful place in the world. loc: 4728

It was a message that summed up everything that many people felt was wrong with the Republic, and gave them the opportunity to register the profundity of their disillusion with it by voting for a movement that was its opposite in every respect. loc: 4731

The Nazis adapted according to the response they received; they paid close attention to their audiences, producing a whole range of posters and leaflets designed to win over different parts of the electorate. loc: 4739

The results of the Reichstag elections of September 1930 came as a shock to almost everyone, and delivered a seismic and in many ways decisive blow to the political system of the Weimar Republic. loc: 4746

the centrist and right-wing parties on which Brüning might possibly hope to build his government suffered catastrophic losses, loc: 4750

the political forces which could be expected to offer incessant and unremitting opposition to the Brüning government and all its works, in the belief that this would hasten the Republic’s demise, received a substantial boost from the 1930 elections. The Communists, buoyed up by their popularity among the unemployed, increased their mandate from 54 seats to 77. But the biggest shock was the increase in the Nazi vote. Only 0.8 million people had supported the National Socialists in the Reichstag election of 1928, giving the party a mere 12 seats in the national legislature. Now, in September 1930, their votes increased to 6.4 million, and no fewer than 107 Nazi deputies took up their seats in the Reichstag. loc: 4758

In some rural constituencies in the north the Nazi vote amounted to a landslide: loc: 4768

It was above all the Nazis who profited from the increasingly overheated political atmosphere of the early 1930s, loc: 4778

the Party’s appeal, in fact, was particularly strong amongst the older generation, who evidently no longer considered the Nationalists vigorous enough to destroy the hated Republic. loc: 4781

The Nazis did particularly well among women, loc: 4784

the Nazi Party did particularly well in Protestant north Germany, east of the Elbe, and much less well in the Catholic south and west. loc: 4793

The Nazi Party had established itself with startling suddenness in September 1930 as a catch-all party of social protest, appealing to a greater or lesser degree to virtually every social group in the land. Even more than the Centre Party, it succeeded in transcending social boundaries and uniting highly disparate social groups on the basis of a common ideology, above all but not exclusively within the Protestant majority community, as no other party in Germany had managed to do before. loc: 4830

expand the Nazi vote massively in a powerful expression of their dissatisfaction, resentment and fear.79 loc: 4838

In the increasingly desperate situation of 1930, the Nazis managed to project an image of strong, decisive action, dynamism, energy and youth loc: 4839

All this was achieved through powerful, simple slogans and images, frenetic, manic activity, marches, rallies, demonstrations, speeches, posters, placards and the like, which underlined the Nazis’ claim to be far more than a political party: they were a movement, sweeping up the German people and carrying them unstoppably to a better future. loc: 4842

What the Nazis did not offer, however, were concrete solutions to Germany’s problems, least of all in the area where they were most needed, in economy and society. loc: 4845

More strikingly still, the public disorder which loomed so large in the minds of the respectable middle classes in 1930, and which the Nazis promised to end through the creation of a tough, authoritarian state, was to a considerable extent of their own making. Many people evidently failed to realize this, blaming the Communists instead, loc: 4846

Voters were not really looking for anything very concrete from the Nazi Party in 1930. They were, instead, protesting against the failure of the Weimar Republic. loc: 485

the Communist daily, The Red Flag, responded with a new slogan issued to party cadres: ‘Beat the fascists wherever you find them!81 loc: 4864

connections between Communism and criminality that were likely to be forged at a time when the party based itself in the poor districts and ‘criminal quarters’ of Germany’s big cities. loc: 4877

Wessel was hardly cold in his grave before Goebbels began work on blowing his memory up into a full-scale cult. Innumerable articles in the Nazi press all over the country praised him as a ‘martyr for the Third Reich’. loc: 4885

Goebbels praised Wessel in terms that deliberately recalled Christ’s sacrifice for humankind - ‘Through sacrifice to redemption’. loc: 4889

That such an open celebration of brutal physical force could become the battle hymn of the Nazi Party speaks volumes for the central role that violence played in its quest for power. Cynically exploited for publicity purposes by manipulative propagandists like Goebbels, it became a way of life for the ordinary young brownshirt loc: 4903

constant clashes with rival paramilitaries on the streets. loc: 4915

Even in the relatively stable years of 1924-9, it was claimed that 29 Nazi activists had been killed by Communists, while the Communists themselves reported that 92 ‘workers’ had been killed in clashes with ‘fascists’ from 1924 to 1930. loc: 4917

In 1930 the figures rose dramatically, with the Nazis claiming to have suffered 17 deaths, rising to 42 in 1931 and 84 in 1932. In 1932, too, the Nazis reported that nearly ten thousand of their rank-and-file had been wounded in clashes with their opponents. The Communists reported 44 deaths in fights with the Nazis in 1930, 52 in 1931 and 75 in the first six months of 1932 alone, loc: 4922

one estimate in the Reichstag, not disputed by anybody, putting the number of dead in the year to March 1931 at no fewer than 300.88 The Communists played their part with as much vigour as the Nazis. loc: 4926

Facing this situation of rapidly mounting disorder was a police force that was distinctly shaky in its allegiance to Weimar democracy. loc: 4943

Rather like the army, they were serving an abstract notion of ‘the state’ or the Reich, rather than the specific democratic institutions of the newly founded Republic. loc: 4951

Communist strong-holds tended to be based in poor, slum areas that were the centres of organized crime. As far as the police were concerned, the Red Front-Fighters were thugs, loc: 4973

Prolonged fighting in Berlin in 1929 achieved fame as ‘Blood-May’, when 31 people, including innocent passers-by, were killed, mostly by police gunshots; loc: 4976

Reich Chancellor Brüning decided to use the police, however, to curb political violence on the right as well as the left, because the chaos on the streets was deterring foreign banks from issuing loans to Germany.100 loc: 4991

Hitler fired the brownshirt leader Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, who had failed to prevent this debacle, recalled Ernst Rohm from his Bolivian exile to take over the organization, and forced all the brownshirts to swear a personal oath of allegiance to him. Stennes was expelled, with the incidental consequence that many conservative businessmen and military leaders now became convinced that the Nazi movement had lost much of its subversive drive.101 loc: 4998

there remained very real tensions between the ceaseless activism of the stormtroopers and the political calculation of the Party leaders, which were to surface repeatedly in the future.102 More seriously, the Stennes revolt indicated that many brownshirts were keen to unleash revolutionary violence on a considerable scale, a lesson that was not lost on the nervous Reich government. loc: 5001

Brüning obtained a decree on 7 December banning the wearing of political uniforms and backed it with a strongly worded attack on Nazi illegality. loc: 5011

The ban on uniforms had little effect, since the brownshirts carried on marching, only dressed in white shirts instead, and violence continued during the winter. loc: 5014

persuaded a reluctant Hindenburg to issue a decree outlawing the stormtroopers on 13 April 1932. The police raided brownshirt premises all over Germany, confiscating military equipment and insignia. Hitler was beside himself with rage but impotent to act. Yet despite the ban, clandestine membership of the stormtroopers continued to grow loc: 5019

The new situation after the Nazis’ electoral breakthrough not only sharply escalated the level of violence on the streets, it also radically altered the nature of proceedings in the Reichstag. Rowdy and chaotic enough even before September 1930, it now became virtually unmanageable, loc: 5026

Power drained from the Reichstag with frightening rapidity, as almost every session ended in uproar and the idea of calling it together for a meeting came to seem ever more pointless. loc: 5030

By 1931, therefore, decisions were no longer really being made by the Reichstag. Political power had moved elsewhere - to the circle around Hindenburg, loc: 5037

greatly enhanced the influence of the army. loc: 5040

Schleicher’s aims and beliefs were clear enough: like many German conservatives in 1932, he thought that an authoritarian regime could be given legitimacy by harnessing and taming the popular might of the National Socialists. loc: 5047

Brüning’s dependence on the tacit toleration of his policies by the Social Democrats won him no credit at all among the circle around Hindenburg, loc: 5054

To men such as Schleicher, shifting the government’s mass support from the Social Democrats to the Nazis seemed increasingly to be the better option.111 loc: 5063

As 1932 dawned, the venerable Paul von Hindenburg’s seven-year term of office as President was coming to an end. In view of his advanced years - he was 84 - Hindenburg was reluctant to stand again, loc: 5066

Hindenburg had been far outflanked on the right; indeed, the entire political spectrum had shifted rightwards since the Nazi electoral landslide of September 1930. Once the election was announced, Hitler could hardly avoid standing as a candidate himself. loc: 5072

The Centre and the liberals backed Hindenburg, but what was particularly astonishing was the degree of support he received from the Social Democrats. This was not merely because the party considered him the only man who could stop Hitler - a point the party’s propaganda made repeatedly throughout the election campaign - but for positive reasons as well. The party leaders were desperate to re-elect Hindenburg because they thought that he would keep Brüning in office as the last chance of a return to democratic normality.114 loc: 5080

the Social Democrats were beginning to lose touch with political reality. loc: 5087

For the run-off, between Hitler, Hindenburg and Thälmann, the Nazis pulled out all the stops. Hitler rented an aeroplane and flew across Germany from town to town, delivering 46 speeches the length and breadth of the land. The effect of this unprecedented move, billed as Hitler’s ‘flight over Germany’, was electrifying. loc: 5101

What really mattered was the triumphant forward march of the Nazis. Hitler had not been elected, but his party had won more votes than ever before. It was beginning to look unstoppable.118 loc: 5106

the Nazi propaganda machine had proved its efficiency and its dynamism. loc: 5118

Brüning’s cardinal sin was to have failed to persuade the Nationalists to support Hindenburg’s re-election. When it became clear that they were backing Hitler, Brüning’s days were numbered. loc: 5122

In an atmosphere heavy with behind-the-scenes intrigue, with Schleicher undermining Groener’s standing with the army and Hitler promising to tolerate a new government if it lifted the ban on the brownshirts and called new elections to the Reichstag, Brüning rapidly became more isolated. loc: 5131

The man whom Hindenburg appointed as the new Reich Chancellor was an old personal friend, Franz von Papen. A landed aristocrat whose position in the Centre Party, for which he had sat as an obscure and not very active deputy in the Prussian Parliament, Papen was even further to the right than Brüning himself. loc: 5136

Even more than Brüning, he represented a form of Catholic political authoritarianism common throughout Europe in the early 1930s. loc: 5143

These events marked, explicitly as well as in retrospect, the end of parliamentary democracy in Germany. Most members of the new cabinet were without party affiliation, loc: 5148

Papen and his fellow-ideologues, including Schleicher, saw themselves as creating a ‘New State’, above parties, indeed opposed to the very principle of a multi-party system, with the powers of elected assemblies even more limited loc: 5149

Papen’s self-appointed task 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 régime society.126 loc: 5154

convincing liberal commentators that press freedom had finally been abolished.128 loc: 5162

Papen’s cabinet was made up of men with relatively little experience. So many of them were unknown aristocrats that it was widely known as the ‘cabinet of barons’. loc: 5163

Papen and Schleicher had agreed that they needed to win over the Nazis to provide mass support for the anti-democratic policies of the new government. They secured Hindenburg’s agreement to dissolve the Reichstag and call fresh elections, loc: 5165

also conceded Hitler’s demand for a lifting of the ban on the brownshirts. loc: 5168

Masses of stormtroopers flooded triumphantly back onto the streets, and beatings, pitched battles, woundings and killings, never entirely absent even during the period of the ban since the previous April, quickly reached record new levels. loc: 5171

Far from banning the paramilitaries again, however, Papen seized on the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Altona to depose the state government of Prussia, which was led by the Social Democrats Otto Braun and Carl Severing, on the grounds that it was no longer capable of maintaining law and order. loc: 5182

heavily armed combat troops took to the streets of Berlin, and a military state of emergency was declared throughout the capital city. The Social Democrat-controlled police force was simply pushed aside; loc: 5187

The law-abiding traditions of the Social Democrats compelled them to put a ban on any armed resistance loc: 5201

Papen’s coup dealt a mortal blow to the Weimar Republic. It destroyed the federal principle and opened the way to the wholesale centralization of the state. loc: 5209

After 20 July 1932 the only realistic alternatives were a Nazi dictatorship or a conservative, authoritarian regime backed by the army. The absence of any serious resistance on the part of the Social Democrats, the principal remaining defenders of democracy, was decisive. It convinced both conservatives and National Socialists that the destruction of democratic institutions could be achieved without any serious opposition. loc: 5210

the Social Democrats realized that an appeal to reason was not enough. ‘We have to work on feelings, souls and emotions so that reason wins the victory.’ In practice, reason got left far behind. loc: 5235

In adopting this style, the parties were placing themselves on the same ground as the Nazis, with whose swastika symbol, ‘Hail Hitler!’ greeting and simple, powerful slogans they found it very difficult to compete.139 loc: 5239

All over Germany, electors were confronted with violent images of giant workers smashing their opponents to pieces, kicking them aside, yanking them out of parliament, or looming over frock-coated and top-hatted politicians who were almost universally portrayed as insignificant and quarrelsome pygmies. Rampant masculinity was sweeping aside the squabbling, ineffective and feminized political factions. Whatever the intention, the subliminal message was that it was time for parliamentary politics to come to an end: loc: 5263

None of the other parties could compete with the Nazis on this territory. loc: 5268

On 31 July 1932, the Reichstag election revealed the folly of Papen’s tactics. Far from rendering Hitler and the Nazis more amenable, the election brought them a further massive boost in power, more than doubling their vote from 6.4 million to 13.1 million and making them by far the largest party in the Reichstag, with 230 seats, nearly a hundred more than the next biggest group, the Social Democrats, loc: 5287

The continued polarization of the political scene was marked by another increase for the Communists, loc: 5291

Most striking of all, however, was the almost total annihilation of the parties of the centre. loc: 5293

Left and right now faced each other in the Reichstag across a centre shrunken to insignificance: a combined Social Democrat/Communist vote of 13.4 million confronted a Nazi vote of 13.8 million, with all the other parties combined picking up a mere 9.8 million of the votes cast.144 loc: 5296

The election confirmed the Nazis’ status as a rainbow coalition of the discontented, with, this time, a greatly increased appeal to the middle classes, who had evidently overcome the hesitation they had displayed two years earlier, loc: 5301   • Delete this highlight

Note: Rainbow coalition of the discontented Edit

The negative correlation between the size of the Nazi vote in any constituency, and the level of unemployment, was as strong as ever. The Nazis continued to be a catch-all party of social protest, with particularly strong support from the middle classes, and relatively weak support in the traditional industrial working class and the Catholic community, loc: 5311

it was none the less something of a disappointment to its leaders. loc: 5316

The election therefore lent a fresh sense of urgency to the feeling that, as Goebbels put it, ‘something must happen. The time for opposition is over. Now deeds!’146 The moment to grasp for power had arrived, he added the following day, and he noted that Hitler agreed with his view. loc: 5321

Hitler insisted that he would only enter a government as Reich Chancellor. This was the only position that would preserve the mystique of his charisma amongst his followers. loc: 5326

emergency Presidential decree imposing the death penalty on anyone who killed an opponent in the political struggle out of rage or hatred. He intended this to apply above all to the Communists. loc: 5333

it was clearly a political murder under the terms of the decree, and five of the brownshirts were arrested, tried and sentenced to death in the nearby town of Beuthen. As soon as the verdict was announced, brownshirted Nazi stormtroopers rampaged through the streets loc: 5338

The murder now became an issue in the negotiations between Hitler, Papen and Hindenburg over Nazi participation in the government. loc: 5343

Hitler’s support for the brutal violence of the stormtroopers could not have been clearer. It was enough to intimidate Papen, loc: 5355

allowed a Communist motion of no-confidence in the government to go ahead. loc: 5365

The vote was so humiliating, and demonstrated Papen’s lack of support in the country so graphically, that the plan to abolish elections was abandoned. loc: 5366

the fact that many of the meeting-halls where Hitler spoke were now half-empty, and that the many campaigns of the year had left the Party in no financial condition to sustain its propaganda effort at the level of the previous election. loc: 5371

Faced with this kind of disillusion, it was not surprising that the Nazis did badly. The election, on a much lower turnout than in July, registered a sharp fall in the Party’s vote, loc: 5390

Overall, the Reichstag was even less manageable than before. One hundred Communists now confronted 196 Nazis across the chamber, both intent on destroying a parliamentary system they hated and despised. loc: 5405

Papen considered cutting the Gordian knot by banning both Nazis and Communists and using the army to enforce a Presidential regime, bypassing the Reichstag altogether. But this was not a practical possibility, for by this point, fatally, he had lost the confidence of the army loc: 5408

Schleicher quietly informed Papen that the army was unwilling to risk a civil war and would no longer give him its support. The cabinet agreed, and Papen, faced with uncontrollable violence on the streets and lacking any means of preventing its further escalation, was forced to announce his intention to resign. loc: 5416

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. loc: 5420

Schleicher was forced to take on the Chancellorship himself on 3 December. His ministry was doomed from the start. loc: 5424

Within the Nazi Party, voices now began to be raised criticizing Hitler for his refusal to join a coalition government except at its head. Chief among these was the Party’s Organization Leader, Gregor Strasser, loc: 5431

Hitler, however, was adamant that the Nazis should not join any government of which he was not the head. At a fraught meeting with Hitler, Strasser pleaded in vain for his point of view. Rebuffed once more, he resigned all his Party posts on 8 December in a fit of wounded pride. loc: 5438

Hitler addressed group after group of Party functionaries and convinced them of the rightness of his position, by casting Strasser in the role of traitor, loc: 5441

Hitler appointed himself Party Organization Leader and dismantled Strasser’s centralized structure of Party management just in case someone else should take it over. loc: 5449

coalition of conservative forces began to form around Hindenburg with the aim of getting rid of Schleicher, whose announcement that he favoured neither loc: 5472

Frantic negotiations finally led to a plan to put Hitler in as Chancellor, with a majority of conservative cabinet colleagues to keep him in check. loc: 5488

Schleicher and the army only ever considered a putsch for the eventuality of Papen returning to the Reich Chancellery, and this was only because they thought that Papen’s appointment might well lead to the outbreak of civil war. Keen to avoid this situation arising, however, Schleicher now saw a Hitler Chancellorship as a welcome solution, loc: 5497

Finally, at about half past eleven on the morning of 30 January 1933, Hitler was sworn in as Reich Chancellor. The government of which he was head was dominated numerically by Papen and his fellow conservatives. loc: 5503

Hermann Goring was appointed Reich Minister Without Portfolio and Acting Prussian Minister of the Interior, which gave him direct control over the police in the greater part of Germany. loc: 5510

The Nazis could thus manipulate the whole domestic law-and-order situation to their advantage. If they moved even with only a modicum of skill, the way would soon be free for the brownshirts to unleash a whole new level of violence against their opponents on the streets. loc: 5511

That Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor was no ordinary change of government became immediately clear, as Goebbels organized a torchlit parade of brownshirts, Steel Helmets and SS men through Berlin, beginning at seven in the evening on 30 January 1933 loc: 5521

As the columns of uniformed paramilitaries marched past, the aged Hindenburg came to the first-floor window of his official residence to take the salute. loc: 5532

Befuddled or not, Hindenburg was presented by the Nationalist press as the central figure in the jubilation, loc: 5540

Hermann Goring compared the crowds to those who had gathered to celebrate the outbreak of the First World War. The ‘mood’, he said, ‘could only be compared with that of August 1914, when a nation also rose up to defend everything it possessed.’ The ‘shame and disgrace of the last fourteen years’ had been wiped out. The spirit of 1914 had been revived. loc: 5544

From 30 January onwards, German society was to be put as quickly as possible on a permanent war footing. loc: 5552

20,000 brownshirts followed one another like waves in the sea, their faces shone with enthusiasm in the light of the torches. ‘For our Leader, our Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, a threefold Hail!’ They sang ‘The Republic is shit’ ... Next to us a little boy 3 years of age raised his tiny hand again and again: ‘Hail Hitler, Hail Hitler-man!’ ‘Death to the Jews’ was also sometimes called out and they sang of the blood of the Jews which would squirt from their knives. loc: 5571

The horror it inspired in me was almost imperceptibly spiced with an intoxicating joy. ‘We want to die for the flag’, the torch-bearers had sung... I was overcome with a burning desire to belong to these people for whom it was a matter of death and life ... I wanted to escape from my childish, narrow life and I wanted to attach myself to something that was great and fundamental. loc: 5585

For such respectable middle-class people, the violence that accompanied the marches seemed incidental and not particularly threatening. But for others, Hitler’s appointment already presaged disaster. loc: 5588

Communists, in particular, knew that the Hitler government was likely to crack down hard on their activities. loc: 5592

In a number of towns and cities there was a good deal of preparedness on the part of rank-and-file members of the labour parties to collaborate in the face of the Nazi threat. But neither the Communists nor the Social Democrats did anything to co-ordinate protest measures on a wider scale. loc: 5608

By i February 1933 the Communist press was already reporting a ‘wave of banning orders in the Reich‘, and a ‘storm over Germany’ in which ’Nazi terror bands’ were murdering workers and smashing up trade union premises and Communist Party offices. loc: 5617

the authority that came with Hitler’s position as Reich Chancellor was considerable. Just as important was the fact that the Nazis held both the Reich and the Prussian Ministries of the Interior. With these went extensive powers over law and order. loc: 5636

the new Minister of Defence, General Werner von Blomberg, appointed at the army’s behest the day before Hitler took office, was far more sympathetic to the Nazis than either Papen or Hindenburg realized. loc: 5640

Narrowly military in his outlook, and almost entirely ignorant of politics, he was putty in the hands of someone like Hitler. loc: 5645

Hitler underlined his respect for the army’s neutrality in an address to senior officers on 3 February 1933. He won their approval with his promises to restore conscription, destroy Marxism and fight the Treaty of Versailles. The officers present made no objection as he held out to them the intoxicating long-term prospect of invading Eastern Europe and ‘Germanizing’ it by expelling scores of millions of native Slav inhabitants. loc: 5649

The army’s neutrality meant, of course, its non-interference, and Hitler went out of his way to tell the officers that the ‘internal struggle’ was ‘not your business’. loc: 5651

Blomberg became a member of the newly created Reich Defence Council, a political body which effectively bypassed the army leadership and put military policy in the hands of Hitler, who chaired it, and a small group of leading ministers. loc: 5660

Almost immediately, the Nazis capitalized on this carefully engineered situation and unleashed a campaign of political violence and terror that dwarfed anything seen so far. loc: 5665

Bands of stormtroopers began attacking trade union and Communist offices and the homes of prominent left-wingers. loc: 5668

Goring, acting as Prussian Minister of the Interior, ordered the Prussian police on 15-17 February to cease its surveillance of the Nazis and associated paramilitary organizations loc: 5672

This gave the stormtroopers the green light to go on the rampage without any serious interference from the formal state guardians of law and order. loc: 5675

The Social Democrats and trade unions were almost as hard hit as the Communists in the mounting Nazi repression of the second half of February 1933. loc: 5685

‘The Social Democrats and the entire Iron Front’, declared the party’s daily paper Forwards on 30 January 1933, ‘are placing themselves, in relation to this government and its threat of a putsch, with both feet firmly on the ground of the constitution and of legality. They will not take the first step away from this ground.’ loc: 5700

With every day that passed, the state-sponsored terror to which Social Democrats were subjected grew steadily worse. loc: 5705

As the month progressed, however, gangs of brownshirts began to break up Social Democratic meetings and beat up the speakers and their audiences. loc: 5710

Nazi stormtroopers could now beat up and murder Communists and Social Democrats with impunity. loc: 5715

The police and the army were no longer trying to hold the ring between paramilitaries of the right and the left. Encouraged by the conservatives around Hugenberg and Seldte, they had swung decisively over to the support of the former. loc: 5721

Social Democrats and the Communists were still not prepared to work together in a last-ditch defence of democracy. And even had they done so, their combined forces could never have hoped to match the numbers, the weaponry and the equipment of the army, the brownshirts, the Steel Helmets and the SS. loc: 5724

Reichstag elections that had been one of Hitler’s conditions for accepting the office loc: 5733

Hitler proclaimed on many occasions during the election campaign that the Nazi movement’s main enemy was ‘Marxism’. ‘Never, never will I stray from the task of stamping out Marxism ... There can only be one victor: either Marxism or the German people! And Germany will triumph!’ This referred, of course, to the Communists and the Social Democrats. loc: 5734

The movement, he said on 10 February 1933, would be ‘intolerant against anyone who sins against the nation’. loc: 5739

Already in mid-February, twenty Centre Party newspapers had been banned for criticizing the new government, public meetings were forbidden in a number of localities by the authorities, and a wave of dismissals or suspensions of civil servants and administrators known to be Centre Party members had begun, loc: 5750

while the brownshirts unfolded this campaign of violence on the ground, Hitler and the leading Nazis were making it clear in their more unguarded moments that the coming election would be the last, and that, whatever happened, Hitler would not resign as Chancellor. loc: 5764

‘It will not deter us should the German people abandon us in this hour. We will adhere to whatever is necessary to keep Germany from degenerating.’ loc: 5768

What would his government do to change this parlous situation? His answer avoided any specific commitments at all. loc: 5777

Instead, he declared that his programme was to rebuild the German nation without foreign aid, ‘according to eternal laws valid for all time’, on the basis of the people and the soil, not according to ideas of class. loc: 5778

I cherish the firm conviction that the hour will come at last in which the millions who despise us today will stand by us and with us will hail the new, hard-won and painfully acquired German Reich we have created together, the new German kingdom of greatness and power and glory and justice. Amen. loc: 5789

What Hitler was promising Germany was, therefore, in the first place the suppression of Communism and, beyond that, of the other Weimar parties, principally the Social Democrats and the Centre Party. Other than that he had nothing much concrete to offer. loc: 5792

‘I’m delighted at Hitler’s lack of a programme,’ wrote Louise Solmitz 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.’ loc: 5794

Hitler’s dramatic and emotional claim that all he needed was four years was designed to heighten the feeling in his listeners that he was engaged in a Christ-like pilgrimage of self-sacrifice. loc: 5797

unprecedented flow of funds from industry. loc: 5800

Hitler, who once more declared that democracy was incompatible with business interests, loc: 5803

If the government failed to win, it would be compelled to use force to achieve its ends, he threatened. loc: 5804

Goring reminded his listeners that the forthcoming election would be the last, not just for the next four years but probably for the next hundred. loc: 5807

The relative inaction of the Communists reflected above all the party leadership’s belief that the new government - the last, violent, dying gasp of a moribund capitalism - would not last more than a few months before it collapsed. loc: 5824

Communist inaction, therefore, was the product of Communist over-confidence, and the fatal illusion that the new situation posed no overwhelming threat to the party. But to the leading Nazis it suggested something more sinister: the Communists were preparing in secret for a nationwide uprising. loc: 5839

rumours amongst his well-connected friends that the Nazis were planning a fake assassination attempt on Hitler in order to justify a ‘bloodbath’ in which they would mow down their enemies. loc: 5847

young Dutch construction worker Marinus van der Lubbe loc: 5852

1931 to join a radical anarcho-syndicalist organization which elevated ‘propaganda by the deed’ into its main principle of action. loc: 5856

A believer in direct action since his anarcho-syndicalist days, he decided to protest against the bourgeois state and its increasing suppression of the labour movement. The unemployed themselves, he discovered in his visits to labour exchanges, were sunk deep in apathy, incapable of mounting their own protest. Somebody had to do it for them. loc: 5861

Seeking out the supreme symbol of the bourgeois political order that, he thought, had made his life and that of so many other unemployed young men a misery, he decided to burn down the Reichstag. loc: 5871

mass of documentary evidence confirming his story that he had been acting alone. loc: 5894

Goring walked towards me. In his voice lay the whole ominous emotionalism of that dramatic hour: ‘This is the beginning of the Communist uprising! Now they’ll strike out! There’s not a minute to waste!’ loc: 5898

Hitler turned to the assembled company. loc: 5900

‘There will be no more mercy now; anyone who stands in our way will be butchered. The German people won’t have any understanding for leniency. Every Communist functionary will be shot where he is found. The Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. Everybody in league with the Communists is to be arrested. Against Social Democrats and Reichsbanner too there will be no more mercy!’ loc: 5902

A few hours after the Reichstag fire, police squads began to dig out lists of Communists prepared some months or even years previously for the eventuality of a ban on the party, and set off in cars and vans to haul them out of bed. loc: 5913

he now suggested an emergency decree to provide legal cover for the arrests and to deal with any further acts of violence by the Communists. loc: 5920

suspended several sections of the Weimar constitution, particularly those governing freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly and association. It allowed the police to detain people in protective custody indefinitely and without a court order, loc: 5929

Hitler made plain his intention of proceeding ruthlessly and with little regard to the niceties of the law. The struggle against the Communists, he said, ‘must not be made dependent on judicial considerations’. loc: 5935

cabinet agreed to present the decree to Hindenburg, who signed it despite the fact that it ceded a significant part of his powers to the Hitler government. loc: 5944

Paragraph 2 allowed the government to take over the federated states if public order was endangered. These two paragraphs, valid ‘until further notice’, provided the legal pretext for everything that was to follow in the next few months.66 The Nazi seizure of power could now begin in earnest. loc: 5950

The Reichstag fire decree was launched amidst a barrage of propaganda in which Goring and the Nazi leadership painted a drastic picture of an imminent ‘German Bolshevik Revolution’ accompanied by outrages and atrocities of every kind. loc: 5953

Ordinary middle-class citizens like Louise Solmitz shuddered to think of the fate that Germany had so narrowly escaped, and were impressed by the proofs of the dastardly Communist plot that Goring provided loc: 5955

Goebbels’s propaganda now set loose the pent-up fury of the brownshirts against their Communist opponents. loc: 5961

It was not just about the purely human ‘you or me’, ‘you or us’, it was about wiping the lecherous grin off the hideous, murderous faces of the Bolsheviks for all time, and protecting Germany from the bloody terror of unrestrained hordes. loc: 5967

within a few months most of the local functionaries were no longer active, and many rank-and-file members had been terrorized into silence. loc: 5985

Increasingly, therefore, the courts treated membership of the party after 3o January 1933, occasionally even before that, as a treasonable activity. loc: 6005

Hitler’s stormtroopers now ruled the cities, loc: 6008

Not only the Communists, but anybody who had ever spoken out against Hitler’s movement, was in danger. loc: 6014

They roared along Berlin’s main streets, weapons on show and banners flying, advertising to everyone who was the boss now. loc: 6017

the leadership announced in extreme but unspecific terms that action was to be taken, and the lower echelons of the Party and its paramilitary organizations translated this in their own terms into specific, violent action. loc: 6022

It was able by and large to convince civil servants, police, prison administrators and legal officials - conservative nationalists almost to a man - that the forcible suppression of the labour movement was justified. So it persuaded them that they should not merely stand aside when the stormtroopers moved in, but should actively help them in their work of destruction. loc: 6028

the whole nature of the election was transformed. loc: 6035

the elections were held in an atmosphere of palpable terror. loc: 6036

The same combination of terror, repression and propaganda was mobilized in every other community, large and small, across the land. loc: 6048

Despite massive violence and intimidation, the Nazis themselves had still managed to secure only 43.9 per cent of the vote. loc: 6053

Seventeen million people voted Nazi, and another 3 million Nationalist. But the electorate numbered almost 45 million. loc: 6058

In 1919, three-quarters of the voters had backed the Weimar coalition parties. It had taken only fourteen short years for this situation to be effectively reversed. loc: 6067

The violence rose to new heights after the elections loc: 6069

This campaign of violence, unleashed by a brownshirt organization whose numbers were growing daily until they reached over two million by the summer of 1933, provided the essential context for the co-ordination of the federated states along the lines already put into practice by Papen in his takeover of Prussia the previous summer. loc: 6097

regional organizations of the brownshirts and the Nazi Party moved in to co-ordinate the state governments from below. Most of the federated states were ruled by minority governments, reflecting the almost total blockage of legislative bodies by this time, and they lacked the legitimacy to offer any more than token resistance. loc: 6104

Reich Interior Minister Frick then installed state commissioners who proceeded to dismiss existing police chiefs and appoint Nazis in their stead, and to replace elected government ministers with their own nominees. loc: 6110

tactical concessions predictably did nothing to slow down the regime’s drive to suppress the left. loc: 6125

The Communists and Social Democrats, taken together, represented nearly a third of the electorate. Yet they crumbled virtually without resistance. loc: 6126

The government was able to move against them on a nationwide basis because the Reichstag fire decree permitted it to override the sovereignty of the federated states in order to carry out the operation, using the precedent of Papen’s removal of the Social Democratic minority government in Prussia the previous summer. loc: 6127

Frick appointed Adolf Wagner, the Nazi Regional Leader of Upper Bavaria, as State Commissioner in the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior. More ominously still, Heinrich Himmler, the Munich-based leader of the SS, was also immediately appointed Provisional Police President. He ordered a large-scale round-up of oppositional figures that soon began to encompass non-Communist loc: 6137

Such was the scale of repression that state prisons and police cells proved completely inadequate. A new means of housing the Nazis’ political opponents in Bavaria had to be found. On 20 March, therefore, Himmler, announced to the press that ‘a concentration camp for political prisoners’ would be opened at Dachau, just outside Munich. loc: 6140

Initially run by a police detachment, the camp was put into the hands of the SS early in April, loc: 6146

the prisoners were exposed to arbitrary acts of cruelty and sadism in a world without regulations or rules. loc: 6152

Himmler’s act set a widely imitated precedent. Soon, concentration camps were opening up all over the country, augmenting the makeshift gaols and torture centres loc: 6153

in 1921, Hitler had already declared that they would imprison German Jews in ‘concentration camps’ loc: 6161

Dachau was not, therefore, an improvised solution to an unexpected problem of overcrowding in the gaols, but a long-planned measure that the Nazis had envisaged virtually from the very beginning. loc: 6166

The sheer scale of the repression can be gauged by the fact that the Communist Party leadership reported that 130,000 party members had been arrested and imprisoned by the end of 1933, and 2,500 had been murdered. loc: 6197

Even the most conservative, quasi-official reckoning put the total number of political arrests in Germany in 1933 at over 100,000, and the number of deaths in custody at nearly 600. loc: 6201

Yet many middle-class Germans appear to have accepted that the regime was justified in its violent repression of ‘Marxism’, of whatever variety. loc: 6207

Years of beatings and killings and clashes on the streets had inured people to political violence and blunted their sensibilities. loc: 6208

After his election victory, Hitler told the cabinet on 7 March that he would seek a further legal sanction in the form of an amendment to the constitution that would allow the cabinet to bypass both the Reichstag and the President and promulgate laws on its own. loc: 6224

For worried conservatives and traditionalists, including Reich President Hindenburg, who after all still possessed at least the formal power to sack Hitler and replace him with someone else, the Nazis therefore staged a reassuring ceremony to mark the state opening of the newly elected Reichstag. loc: 6236

The ritual was more important for the visual images it conveyed than for the speeches that were delivered. Here was Hitler appearing as a soberly dressed civilian statesman, humbly acknowledging the supremacy of the Prussian military tradition. loc: 6246

he introduced the long-planned measure that would enable the Reich Chancellor to prepare laws that deviated from the constitution without the approval of the Reichstag and without reference to the President. loc: 6257

What it meant, however, was that the Weimar constitution would be a dead letter, and the Reichstag would be shut out of the legislative process altogether. loc: 6259

the Nazis still needed the votes of the Centre Party to push the measure through. loc: 6266

These promises, combined with heavy pressure from the Vatican, proved sufficient to win the Centre Party deputies over to supporting the measure that in the long run was bound to mean their own political demise.110 loc: 6276

He ended, however, with an unmistakeable threat of violent repression should the measure be rejected. loc: 6287

‘They fear’, as Joseph Wirth, one of the party’s leading figures and a former Reich Chancellor himself, told the Social Democrats in private, ‘that if the Act is rejected, the Nazi revolution will break out and there will be bloody anarchy’.112 loc: 6290

the deputies voted 444 in favour and 94 against. loc: 6309

From this point on, Hitler and his cabinet ruled by decree, either using President Hindenburg as a rubber stamp, or bypassing him entirely, loc: 6313

Renewed in 1937 and again in 1939, it was made permanent by decree in 1943. loc: 6317

the regime now turned its attention to the Social Democrats and the trade unions. They had already been subjected to widespread arrests, beatings, intimidation, even murder, and to the occupation of their premises and the banning of their newspapers. Now the full fury of the Nazis was turned upon them. They were in no condition to resist. loc: 6321

they agreed to support Goebbels’s public declaration that May Day, traditionally the occasion for massive public demonstrations of the labour movement’s strength, would be a public holiday for the first time. This was a long-cherished desire of the labour movement. The unions agreed that it would be known as the ‘Day of National Labour’. loc: 6345

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people marched through the streets led by brass bands of stormtroopers playing the Horst Wessel Song and patriotic tunes. loc: 6353

In the evening, Hitler’s voice boomed out over the radio, assuring all German workers that unemployment would soon be a thing of the past.119 loc: 6355

The general atmosphere of looming violence and widespread intimidation had also played its part in bringing about the formal agreement of trade union leaders to participate.121 loc: 6364

In early April the Nazis had already begun secret preparations for a takeover of the entire trade union movement. loc: 6367

On 2 May 1933 brownshirts and SS men stormed into every Social Democratic-oriented trade union office in the land, took over all the trade union newspapers and periodicals, and occupied all the branches of the trade union bank. loc: 6373

all other union institutions placed themselves unconditionally under Hitler’s leadership. loc: 6378

The once-powerful German trade union movement had disappeared without trace virtually overnight.123 loc: 6379

Confident that the Social Democratic Party would no longer be able to call upon the unions to support any last-minute resistance it might decide to mount, the regime now began the endgame of closing the party down. loc: 6382

This measure deprived the party of any basis on which it could resurrect either its organization or its newspapers, periodicals and other publications. As a political movement it was effectively finished.125 loc: 6386

On 23 June 1933 Goebbels wrote triumphantly in his diary that the Social Democratic Party had been ‘dissolved. Bravo! The total state won’t have to wait for long now.’127 loc: 6407

over three thousand Social Democratic functionaries were arrested all over Germany, severely manhandled, tortured, and thrown into prisons or concentration camps. loc: 6410

the party was effectively hounded out of existence well before it fell under the same ban as the Communists on 14 July. In retrospect, its chances of survival had been diminishing rapidly for nearly a year. Decisive in this context was its failure to mount any effective opposition to the Papen coup of 20 July 1932; if there had been any moment when it might have stood up for democracy, that was it. loc: 6432

few in the summer of 1932 could have realized that the amateurish and in many ways rather ludicrous government of Franz von Papen would give way little more than six months later to a regime whose extreme ruthlessness and total disregard for the law were difficult for decent, law-abiding democrats to grasp. loc: 6435   • Delete this highlight

Note: Does this failure of the Social Democrat Party pretty much sum up the Nazi rise to power in 1932-1933? Edit

The labour movement had been brought to heel, the trade unions smashed, the Social Democratic and Communist Parties, whose combined vote considerably exceeded that of the Nazis in the last fully free elections to the Reichstag in November 1932, had been destroyed in an orgy of violence. loc: 6441

They were thus careful in the early months of 1933 to insist repeatedly on the adherence of the new government to the Christian faith. They declared that the ‘nationalist revolution’ intended to put an end to the materialist atheism of the Weimar left and to propagate a ‘positive Christianity’ instead, above confession and attuned to the Germanic spirit.132 loc: 6466

In pursuit of the promised Concordat which, they were assured, would preserve these gains, the German bishops withdrew their opposition to Nazism and issued a collective declaration of support for the regime in May. loc: 6471

The Fulda Bishops’ Conference on 1 June 1933 issued a pastoral letter welcoming the ‘national awakening’ and the new stress on a strong state authority, loc: 6477

The former Chancellor seemed to have little idea of the extent of the repression now bearing down upon his party’s members. Its newspapers were being banned or taken away from it. Its local and regional organizations were being closed down one by one. Its ministers in every state had been removed from office. loc: 6495

At a local level, one Catholic lay organization after another came under pressure to close down or join the Nazi Party, arousing widespread concern amongst the Church hierarchy. While Papen and Goebbels demanded the Centre Party’s dissolution with increasing vehemence in public, negotiations in Rome, joined towards the end of the month by Papen himself, produced an agreement that the party should cease to exist once the Concordat had been concluded.138 loc: 6506

The final text of the Concordat, agreed on 1 July with the approval of Papen and Kaas and signed a week later, included a ban on priests engaging in political activity. loc: 6509

Brüning now finally understood the writing on the wall. The party formally dissolved itself on 5 July, loc: 6512

What was left of the party press portrayed the end as the outcome not of external pressure but of an inevitable inner development which placed the Catholic community behind the new Germany in a historic transformation of the national polity. loc: 6515

The Church as a whole was turning against parliamentary democracy all over Europe in the face of the Bolshevik threat. In this situation, the dissolution of the party seemed a small sacrifice to make in the interests of what almost every leading figure involved saw as the securing of binding guarantees from the new regime for the continued autonomy of the Catholic Church and the full participation of Catholics in the new German order. loc: 6525

The Nationalists had entered the coalition on 30 January feeling that they were the senior partners in an alliance with an immature and inexperienced political movement that they would easily be able to control. Two months later, all this had changed. Amid privately expressed fears of the destructive consequences of a full-blown Nazi revolution, they now acknowledged helplessly the impossibility of preventing illegal actions against their own members by a government in which they were still a formal partner. loc: 6600

Hugenberg’s response to these attempts to undermine him was to threaten to quit the cabinet. He believed that by doing so he would invalidate the Enabling Act, since it applied only to what it called the ‘present government’. Already, however, the constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt, an influential supporter of the Nazis, had declared that by ‘present government’ the Act did not mean the particular group of ministers in office when it was passed, but the ‘completely different kind of government’ which had come into being with the end of the party-political system. Thus the ‘present government’, and with it the validity of the Enabling Act, would not be affected by the resignation of this minister or that; its nature was, rather, determined by its Leader.144 Hugenberg’s threat was an empty one, another example of the futility of legalistic reasoning in the face of Nazi pressure. loc: 6611

On 30 May 1933 some of the Nationalist leaders met with Hitler to complain about the growing pressure on them to surrender their autonomy. They were met with a ‘hysterical outburst of rage’ in which the Nazi leader shouted that he would let his ‘SA open fire and arrange a bloodbath lasting three days long ... until there’s nothing left’, if the Nationalist paramilitaries did not wind themselves up of their own accord. loc: 6622

On 26 April 1933, after lengthy negotiations, Franz Seldte, the Steel Helmets’ leader, joined the Nazi Party and placed the Steel Helmets under Hitler’s political leadership with the guarantee that they would continue to exist as an autonomous organization of war veterans. loc: 6649

They were forcibly incorporated into the SA, while still retaining enough of a vestige of their previous autonomy to dissuade them from resisting. loc: 6660

By the summer of 1933 the creation of a one-party state was virtually complete. Only Hindenburg remained as a potential obstacle to the achievement of total power, a senile cypher seemingly without any remaining will of his own, whose office had been neutralized by the provisions of the Enabling Act. loc: 6668

wide-ranging assault on what the Nazis portrayed as the Jewish movement to subvert the German family. Sex and procreation were to be indissolubly linked, at least for the racially approved. loc: 6692

destroy every branch of Weimar Germany’s lively and intricately interconnected congeries of pressure-groups for sexual freedom, the reform of the abortion law, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the public dispensing of contraceptive advice and anything else that they thought was contributing to the continued decline of the German birth rate. loc: 6694

acting, somewhat bizarrely, on the basis of the Reichstag fire decree ‘for the protection of people and state’. If nothing else, the raids illustrated how the decree could be used as legitimation for almost any kind of repressive action by the authorities. loc: 6699

The Nazis argued that the entire system of social medicine developed by the Weimar state was geared towards preventing the reproduction of the strong on the one hand, and shoring up the families of the weak on the other. Social hygiene was to be swept away; racial hygiene was to be introduced in its stead. loc: 6712

The urgent problem of mass unemployment was being tackled in the first place by coercion. loc: 6744

drafting in young unemployed people from the towns to work on the land for board and lodging and nominal pay. loc: 6745

Local administrators responsible for the homeless in Hamburg had been claiming since 1931 that they were making life unpleasant for the destitute and forcing them to seek support elsewhere. loc: 6747

Poverty and destitution, already stigmatized before 1933, were now beginning to be criminalized as well. loc: 6751

Since the Nazis regarded crime, and particularly organized crime, as heavily dominated by Jews, loc: 6756

Driving the whole process forward was the massive outburst of violence unleashed by the stormtroopers, the SS and the police in the first half of 1933. loc: 6777

Far from being directed against particular, widely unpopular minorities, the terror was comprehensive in scope, affecting anyone who expressed dissent in public, from whatever direction, against deviants, vagrants, nonconformists of every kind. loc: 6780

The Nazi takeover of the federated states provided a key component in this process. Just as important was the ‘co-ordination’ of the civil service, loc: 6786

replaced twelve Police Presidents by mid-February. From March onwards, the violence of the stormtroopers was rapidly forcing politically unacceptable city officials and local mayors out of office - 500 leading municipal civil servants and seventy Lord Mayors by the end of May. Laws eliminating the autonomy of the federated states and providing for each one to be run by a Reich Commissioner appointed in Berlin - all except one were Nazi Party Regional Leaders - meant that there were few obstacles left after the first week of April to the ‘co-ordination’, or, in other words, Nazification of the civil service at every level. loc: 6790

The first aim of the new decree was to regularize and impose centralized order on the widespread forcible ejection of civil servants and officials from their offices by local and regional brownshirt and Party actions. The law provided for the dismissal of untrained officials appointed after 9 November 1918, of ‘non-Aryan’ civil servants (defined on 11 April as having one or more ‘non-Aryan’, in other words, Jewish grandparent, and on 30 June as including any civil servant married to a non-Aryan), and of anyone whose previous political activity did not guarantee political reliability, loc: 6802

Many civil servants did indeed rush to preserve their jobs by becoming members of the Nazi Party, loc: 6812

Between 30 January and 1 May 1933, 1.6 million people joined the Nazi Party, dwarfing the existing Party membership, loc: 6814

Soon, lawyers were falling over themselves to join the Nazi Party, as the state Justice Ministers began to make it clear that promotion and career prospects would be harmed if they did not. loc: 6835

These measures were part of a massive and wide-ranging purge of German social institutions in the spring and early summer of 1933. loc: 6839

Leading businessmen and corporations founded the Adolf Hitler Donation of the German Economy. This was supposed to bring an end to the frequent, sometimes intimidatory extortions exacted from businesses by local SA and Party groups by instituting a regular and proportional system of payments by industrialists to Nazi Party funds. loc: 6850

its foundation did nothing all the same to prevent lesser Party and SA bosses from continuing to extort smaller sums from businesses at a local level. loc: 6853

Hitler had gone out of his way to reassure its representatives on 23 March that he was not going to interfere with their property and their profits, loc: 6855

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. loc: 6900

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. loc: 6905

every club and association had to have a majority of Nazis or Steel Helmets on its executive committee. loc: 6911

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; loc: 6929

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. loc: 6935

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? loc: 6938   • Delete this highlight

Note: why had the majority caved in so rapidly? Edit

‘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.’ loc: 6941

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 loc: 6946

The disruption of Busch’s concert and rehearsal gave regional state commissioners the pretext for banning concerts and operas on the grounds that they might give rise to public disorder. The disorder was fomented, of course, by the Nazis themselves, a neat illustration of the dialectic that drove the seizure of power onward from both above and below. loc: 6963

Every city precinct, every small town or larger village had its musical clubs, its choirs, its tradition of amateur music-making that was central not just to middle-class life but also to the cultural practice of the working classes as well. The Nazis had not been the only party on the right to feel that this great tradition was being undermined by the musical modernism of the Weimar Republic, which they attributed in their usual crude way to ‘Jewish subversion’. Now was their chance to put the situation to rights. loc: 6968

Shortly afterwards, the Reich Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service led to the dismissal not only of Jewish conductors such as Jascha Horenstein in Düsseldorf, but also of singers, and opera and orchestra administrators. Jewish professors in state music academies (most notably, the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Franz Schreker, both teachers at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin) were also dismissed. Music critics and musicologists were sacked from their official posts and ousted from the German press; loc: 6988

Musical associations of all kinds, right down to male voice choirs in working-class mining villages and music appreciation societies in the quiet suburbs of the great cities, were taken over by the Nazis and purged of their Jewish members. loc: 6996

the regime focused on expunging obviously avant-garde composers and their works from the repertoire. loc: 6999

Hitler and Goebbels were putting in place the means by which passive supporters would be won over to become active participants in the ‘National Socialist revolution’, and waverers and the sceptical would be brought round to a more co-operative frame of mind. loc: 7014

we want rather to work on people until they have become addicted to us loc: 7019

There would be a ‘spiritual mobilization’ comparable to the massive military mobilization of 1914. And in order to bring this mobilization about, Hitler’s government put into effect its most original institutional creation, the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, loc: 7023

Goebbels justified it by defining propaganda as the art, not of lying or distorting, but of listening to ‘the soul of the people’ and ‘speaking to a person a language that this person understands’.12 loc: 7032

the primary purpose of Goebbels’s new Ministry, as Hitler declared on 23 March 1933, was to centralize control of all aspects of cultural and intellectual life. ‘The government’, he declared, ‘will embark upon a systematic campaign to restore the nation’s moral and material health. loc: 7037

They will be harnessed to help preserve the eternal values which are part of the integral nature of our people.’14 What those values were, of course, would be defined by the regime. The Nazis acted on the premise that they, and they alone, through Hitler, had an inner knowledge and understanding of the German soul. loc: 7040

The millions of Germans who had refused to support the Nazi Party - a majority, as we have seen, even in the semi-democratic elections of 5 March 1933 - had been seduced, they believed, by ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism and Marxism, the ‘Jewish‘-dominated press and media, the ‘Jewish’ art and entertainment of Weimar culture, and other similar, un-German forces which had alienated them from their inner German soul. The Ministry’s task was thus to return the German people to its true nature. The people, declared Goebbels, had to start ‘to think as one, to react as one, and to place itself in the service of the government with all its heart’.15 loc: 7042

The new Ministry has no other aim than placing the nation unamimously behind the idea of the national revolution. loc: 7050

the Ministry established separate departments for propaganda, radio, the press, film, theatre, and ‘popular enlightenment’ and secured a blanket authority from Hitler, issued on 30 June 1933, declaring it responsible not only for all these spheres of activity but also for the general public relations representation of the regime as a whole, including to the foreign press. This gave Goebbels the power to override the objections of other departments of state which considered that the Propaganda Ministry was infringing on their own sphere of interest. loc: 7067

the process of co-ordination in the cultural sphere involved a general purging of Jews from cultural institutions, and a rapidly escalating offensive against Communists, Social Democrats, leftists, liberals, and anyone of an independent cast of mind. loc: 7076

The Nazi revolution was not just about eliminating opposition, therefore; it was also about transforming German culture.19 loc: 7085   • Delete this highlight

Note: The nazi revolution was about transforming German culture. Edit

Goebbels brought the great conductor and his orchestra to heel not by open confrontation, but by more underhand means. The Depression had deprived the Berlin Philharmonic of most of its state and municipal subsidies. The Reich government made sure that no more were forthcoming until the orchestra was on the verge of bankruptcy. At this point, Furtwängler appealed directly to Hitler himself, who, scandalized that the country’s greatest orchestra was in danger of having to wind up its affairs, ordered it to be taken over by the Reich. loc: 7131

The creation of what the Nazis regarded as a truly German musical culture also involved the elimination of foreign cultural influences such as jazz, which they considered to be the offspring of a racially inferior culture, loc: 7137

Nazi musical writers condemned ‘nigger-music’ as sexually provocative, immoral, primitive, barbaric, un-German and thoroughly subversive. It confirmed the widespread Nazi view of American degeneracy, loc: 7140

stamping down on everyday - or everynight - pleasures would have been counter-productive, even if the Nazis had been able to do it.28 Only where singers were overtly political, as in Berlin’s famous cabaret venues, did the stormtroopers move in seriously, forcing a mass exodus of Jewish performers and silencing or removing singers and comedians of Communist, Social Democratic, liberal or generally leftist persuasion. loc: 7156

The Nazis soon co-ordinated the German Cinema Owners’ Association. Unionized film workers were Nazified, and on 14 July Goebbels established the Reich Film Chamber to oversee the entire movie industry. loc: 7177

Under the new conditions of censorship and control, a minority of people in the motion picture industry preferred to seek their fortune in the freer atmosphere of Hollywood. loc: 7181

Goebbels was very conscious of the power of radio. During the election campaign of February-March 1933, he had succeeded in blocking all attempts by parties other than the Nazis and the Nationalists to get party-political broadcasts transmitted. Soon, he had secured the replacement of the two existing Reich radio commissioners by his own appointments, and obtained a decree from Hitler on 30 June 1933 vesting control of all broadcasting in the hands of the Propaganda Ministry. loc: 7202

Goebbels immediately enforced a massive purge of broadcasting institutions, loc: 7206

newspapers remained of central importance for the dissemination of news and opinion. They presented an obstacle to the Nazi policy of co-ordination and control more formidable by far than that posed by the film and radio industries. Germany had more daily newspapers than Britain, France and Italy combined, and many more magazines and periodicals of every conceivable type. There were independent papers and periodicals at national, regional and local level, representing the whole range of political views loc: 7219

Direct force and police measures were one way of bringing the press to heel. loc: 7227

By this time the press had already been cowed into submission. Non-Nazi journalists could only make their views known by subtle hints and allusions; readers could only glean their meaning by reading between the lines. loc: 7235

In the meantime, the Nazis were busily arresting Communist and pacifist journalists as fast as they could. loc: 7242

Under the circumstances of rapidly growing Nazi censorship and control, few writers were able to continue producing work of any quality in Germany after 1933. loc: 7288

By the end of 1933 there was scarcely a writer of any talent or reputation left in Germany. loc: 7299

The loss of so many prominent writers of one kind and another was accompanied by a similar exodus among artists and painters. There was also a parallel here to the wave of persecution that swept the German musical world at the same time. In the art world, however, it was fuelled in addition by the strong personal antipathy shown towards modernism by Hitler, who considered himself an artist at heart. loc: 7308

Point 25 of the Nazi Party Programme of 1920, which stated: ‘we demand the legal prosecution of all tendencies in art and literature of a kind likely to disintegrate our life as a nation.’47 loc: 7316

Anything that was not obviously, slavishly representational was liable to arouse hostile comment. Art, according to the Nazis, had to spring, like everything else, from the soul of the people, so ‘every healthy SA-man’ was as capable of reaching a just conclusion on its value as any art critic was.49 loc: 7324

In the course of 1933, local and regional Party bosses sacked twenty-seven art gallery and museum curators, replacing them with Party loyalists who immediately had modernist works removed from exhibition loc: 7340

art was anything but unpolitical in Germany at this time, for the radical modernist movements of the Weimar years, from Dadaism to the Bauhaus itself, had propagated the view that art was a means of transforming the world; the Nazis were only adapting this cultural-political imperative to their own purposes. loc: 7368

It has been estimated that around 2,000 people active in the arts emigrated from Germany after 1933.57 They included many of the most brilliant, internationally famous artists and writers of their day. Their situation was not made any easier by Goebbels’s subsequent decision to deprive them of their German citizenship. For many such exiles, statelessness could mean considerable hardship, difficulty in moving from one country to another, problems in finding work. Without papers, officialdom often refused to recognize their existence. loc: 7373

The damage done to German cultural life was enormous. Scarcely a writer of international stature remained, hardly an artist or painter. A whole galaxy of leading conductors and musicians had been forced to leave, and some of Germany’s most talented film directors had gone. Some flourished in exile, others did not; all knew that the difficulties culture and the arts faced under the Third Reich were going to be greater than anything most of them encountered abroad. loc: 7381

People noted, either from going to see the play or from reading about it in the press, that one of the main characters, Friedrich Thiemann, played by Veit Harlan, rejected all intellectual and cultural ideas and concepts, arguing in a number of scenes with the student Schlageter that they should be replaced by blood, race and sacrifice for the good of the nation. loc: 7400

In the course of one such argument, Thiemann declared: ‘When I hear “culture”, I release the safety catch of my Browning!’60 To many cultured Germans, this seemed to sum up the Nazis’ attitude to the arts, and the phrase quickly went the rounds, loc: 7403

Heidegger, by the late Weimar years, had come to believe in the need for a renewal of German life and thought, the advent of a new age of spiritual unity and national redemption. By the early 1930s he was beginning to think he had found the answer to what he was looking for in National Socialism.62 loc: 7416

Heidegger delivered his inaugural address as Rector. Speaking to the assembled professors and brown-shirted Nazi dignitaries, he declared that ‘“academic freedom” would no longer be the basis of life in the German university; for this freedom was not genuine, because it is only negative. It means a lack of concern, arbitrariness of views and inclinations, a lack of anchorage in doing things or not doing them.’ It was time, he said, for the universities to find their anchor in the German nation and to play their part in the historic mission it was now fulfilling. loc: 7428

With concepts such as these being used by the university’s new Rector, it was clear that academic freedom, however it was defined, was definitely a thing of the past.64 To give symbolic emphasis to this, at the end of the ceremony the attending professors and guests sang the Horst Wessel Song, loc: 7435

Heidegger soon set about bringing his university into line. loc: 7439

Those Jews forced to sever their connection with the university included Heidegger’s own assistant Werner Brock and his mentor Edmund Husserl, loc: 7449

A patriotic nationalist who had lost his son on the battlefield in the First World War, Husserl had considered himself a personal friend of Heidegger, and was deeply upset at his treatment. ‘The future alone will judge which was the true Germany in 1933,’ he wrote on 4 May, ‘and who were the true Germans—those who subscribe to the more or less materialistic-mythical racial prejudices of the day, or those Germans pure in heart and mind, heirs to the great Germans of the past whose tradition they revere and perpetuate.’67 loc: 7451

Heidegger told students: ‘The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law. Study to know: from now on, all things demand decision, and all action responsibility. loc: 7456

universities—Heidegger resigned his post in April 1934, though he continued to be a supporter of the Third Reich and consistently refused to reconsider or apologize for his actions in 1933-4 right up to his death in 1976.71 loc: 7471

The Nazi leadership had a relatively easy time with the universities, because, unlike in some other countries, these were all state-funded institutions and university staff were all civil servants. They were thus directly affected by the law of 7 April 1933, which provided for the dismissal of politically unreliable state employees. loc: 7474

By 1934, some 1,600 out of 5,000 university teachers had been forced out of their jobs. Most of the university teachers who were dismissed lost their posts for political reasons; about a third were sacked because they were classified as Jewish.72 A mass exodus of academics took place; loc: 7478

World-famous scientists were dismissed from their posts in Germany’s universities and research institutes if they were Jewish or had Jewish wives or were known critics of the Nazis. They included twenty past or future Nobel laureates, loc: 7485

Most of those non-Jewish scientists who remained, with Max Planck at their head, attempted to preserve the integrity and political neutrality of scientific research by paying lip-service to the regime. loc: 7510

Werner Heisenberg, a physicist awarded the Nobel Prize for his development of quantum mechanics, argued that it was important to remain in Germany to keep scientific values intact. But in time it was to become clear that they were fighting a losing battle.80 loc: 7512

The vast majority of German professors remained in post. Overwhelmingly conservative in political orientation, they broadly shared the view of Hitler’s Nationalist coalition partners that Weimar democracy had been a disaster and that a restoration of old hierarchies and structures was long overdue. Many, however, went beyond this and positively welcomed the National Socialist state, particularly if they taught in the humanities and social sciences. loc: 7515

Walter Jellinek defended the ‘revolution’ of 1933 as anti-liberal but not anti-democratic, and declared that citizens gained the dignity of being fully human only through their subordination to the state. loc: 7521

Other professors in the same faculty demanded that the law should be the expression of the people’s soul, and judges should deliver their verdicts in accordance with Nazi ideology. loc: 7526

The Bavarian Minister of Culture told a gathering of professors in Munich in 1933: ‘From now on it is not up to you to decide whether or not something is true, but whether it is in the interests of the National Socialist Revolution.’82 loc: 7531

It was above all the students who drove forward the co-ordination process in the universities. loc: 7541

In one university after another, respected Rectors and senior administrators were elbowed aside to make way for often mediocre figures whose only claim to their new position was that they were Nazis and enjoyed the support of the Nazi students’ organization. loc: 7546

as the Prussian Ministry of Education declared, it was the duty of the student unions ‘to keep every one of its members orderly and disciplined’.87 Before this happened, however, the students dealt their most dramatic and most notorious blow to intellectual freedom and academic autonomy, loc: 7564

On 10 May 1933, German students organized an ‘act against the un-German spirit’ in nineteen university towns across the land. They compiled a list of ‘un-German’ books, seized them from all the libraries they could find, piled them up in public squares and set them alight. In Berlin the book-burning event was joined at the students’ request by Joseph Goebbels. He told them that they were ‘doing the right thing in committing the evil spirit of the past to the flames’ in what he called a ‘strong, great and symbolic act’.88 loc: 7567

All this marked the culmination of a widespread action ‘against the un-German spirit’ set in motion weeks before by the Propaganda Ministry. 91 As so often in the history of the Third Reich, the apparently spontaneous action was in fact centrally co-ordinated, though not by Goebbels, but by the national students’ union. loc: 7592

The Nazi book-burning was a conscious echo of an earlier ritual, performed by radical nationalist students at the celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s launching of the Reformation loc: 7602

as the flames rose to the skies in Germany’s ancient seats of learning on 10 May 1933, encouraged or tolerated by the newly Nazified university authorities, there must have been more than a few who recalled the poet Heinrich Heine’s comment on that earlier event, over a century before: ‘Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too.’94 loc: 7608

As the expulsion of Jews from key cultural institutions such as the Prussian Academy of Arts, the major orchestras, or the art schools and museums, dramatically illustrated, the Nazis saw the Jews above all as the repositories of an alien, un-German spirit, and their removal as part of a cultural revolution that would restore ‘Germanness’ to Germany. loc: 7615

Already in the autumn of 1932, indeed, brownshirts had carried out a series of bomb attacks on Jewish shops and businesses, synagogues and other premises. In the weeks following Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor, stormtroopers broke into synagogues and desecrated the religious furniture, smashed the windows of Jewish shops, and subjected Jews to random acts of humiliation, loc: 7620

stormtroopers burst into courthouses all over Germany, dragged Jewish judges and lawyers out of the proceedings and beat them up, telling them not to return. loc: 7632

The disruption caused by all this was too much even for Hitler, who called on 10 March for a stop to ‘individual actions’ of this kind if they disrupted official business or harmed the economy loc: 7633

In the legal profession, the attacks met with little or no resistance even from those who disapproved of them. loc: 7640

As Hitler’s intervention suggested, these incidents were not part of any preconceived plan. Rather, they expressed the antisemitic hatred, fury and violence that lay at the heart of Nazism at every level. The stormtroopers’ brutality had hitherto been directed mainly against the Reichsbanner and the Red Front-Fighters’ League, but it was now released in all directions by the Nazi election victory. Unchecked by the intervention of the police or by any serious threat of legal prosecution, it vented itself particularly in attacks on Jews. loc: 7654

Despite their desire to control the violence, the Nazi leaders in practice continually fuelled it with their rhetoric, and with the constant antisemitic diatribes in the Nazi press, loc: 7658

Hitler decided to take action, in order to channel the antisemitic energies of the rank-and-file into a concerted action. On 28 March he ordered the Party at every level to prepare a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses to be carried out on 1 April. loc: 7667

Protest meetings in a number of American cities on 27 March were followed by a campaign to boycott German goods that met with an increasing amount of success in the months after 1 April.105 This only served to confirm Goebbels in his view that the boycott should be carried out ‘with the greatest toughness’. ‘If the foreign smears come to an end, then it will be stopped,’ he added, ‘otherwise a fight to the death will begin. Now the German Jews must influence their racial comrades in the world so that they’re not in for it over here.’ loc: 7676

‘There is’, reported Goebbels with satisfaction, ‘an indescribable mood of boiling rage loc: 7684

Only small shops and businesses were affected by the boycott; the largest Jewish firms, who had borne the brunt of the Nazis’ verbal attacks over the years, were exempted because of their importance to the national economy, and because they were major employers who would be forced to lay off workers if the boycott really had a serious impact on their economic position. loc: 7708

The general lack of public opposition to the action was striking, but so too was the general lack of public enthusiasm for it; loc: 7714

A major purpose of the boycott had been to advertise to the Nazi rank-and-file that antisemitic policy had to be centrally co-ordinated and pursued, as Hitler had written many years before, in a ‘rational’ manner rather than through spontaneous pogroms and acts of violence. The boycott thus prepared the way for Nazi policy towards the Jews to take on a legal, or quasi-legal, course, in pursuit of the Party Programme’s statement that Jews could not be full German citizens and therefore, clearly, could not enjoy full civil rights. loc: 7722

’Non-Aryan’ civil servants, defined in a supplementary law on 11 April as people with one or more ‘non-Aryan, particularly Jewish’ grandparent, were to be retired, unless (on Hindenburg’s explicit insistence) they were war veterans or had lost a father or son in combat, or had been in the forces before the First World War. loc: 7727

where the state led, other institutions followed. A central part of the whole process of co-ordination at every level was the exclusion of Jews from the newly Nazified institutions which resulted from it, from the German Boxing Association, which excluded Jewish boxers on 4 April 1933, to the German Gymnastics League, which ‘Aryanized’ itself on 24 May. Municipalities began banning Jews from public facilities such as sports fields.114 loc: 7749

By the late summer of 1933, amidst a continuous barrage of antisemitic propaganda from the political leaders of the Reich at every level, from newspapers and the media, the Jews of Northeim had effectively been excluded from the town’s social life. And what happened in Northeim, happened all over the rest of Germany, too.115 loc: 7759

Jews began to emigrate from Germany, as the Nazis indeed intended. Thirty-seven thousand left in 1933 alone. loc: 7765

But many also decided to stay, particularly if they were elderly.116 For the older generation, finding a job abroad was difficult if not impossible, especially since most countries were still deep in the throes of the Depression. They preferred to take their chance in the country that had always been their home. Others harboured the illusion that things would get better once the Nazi regime had settled down. loc: 7767

The Nazi assault on the Jews in the first months of 1933 was the first step in a longer-term process of removing them from German society. By the summer of 1933 this process was well under way. loc: 7795

It was the core of Hitler’s cultural revolution, the key, in the Nazi mind, to the wider cultural transformation of Germany that was to purge the German spirit of ‘alien’ influences such as communism, Marxism, socialism, liberalism, pacifism, conservatism, artistic experimentation, sexual freedom and much more besides. All of these influences were ascribed by the Nazis to the malign influence of the Jews, despite massive evidence to the contrary. loc: 7796

the extraordinary speed with which this transformation had been achieved suggested at the same time powerful continuities with the recent past. loc: 7803

Between 30 January and 14 July 1933, after all, the Nazis had translated Hitler’s Chancellorship in a coalition government dominated by non-Nazi conservatives into a one-party state in which even the conservatives no longer had any separate representation. loc: 7804   • Delete this highlight

Note: This is the part that I don't get. How could such a transformation come so quickly? Edit

By the second half of 1932, a military regime of some description was the only viable alternative to a Nazi dictatorship. The slide away from parliamentary democracy into an authoritarian state ruling without the full and equal participation of the parties or the legislatures had already begun under Brüning. It had been massively and deliberately accelerated by Papen. After Papen, there was no going back. A power vacuum had been created in Germany which the Reichstag and the parties had no chance of filling. Political power had seeped away from the legitimate organs of the constitution onto the streets at one end, and into the small cabal of politicians and generals surrounding President Hindenburg at the other, loc: 7822

Hitler was put into office by a clique around the President; but they would not have felt it necessary to put him there without the violence and disorder generated by the activities of the Nazis and the Communists on the streets.119 loc: 7828

In such a situation, only force was likely to succeed. Only two institutions possessed it in sufficient measure. Only two institutions could operate it without arousing even more violent reactions on the part of the mass of the population: the army and the Nazi movement. loc: 7830

A military putsch could, as many feared, have led to violent resistance by the Nazis as well as the Communists. Restoring order would have caused massive bloodshed, leading perhaps to civil war. The army was as anxious to avoid this as the Nazis. Both parties knew that their prospects of success if they tried to seize power alone were dubious, to say the least. The logic of co-operation was therefore virtually inescapable; loc: 7837

In many countries in the 1920s and 1930s, democracies were being replaced by dictatorships. What happened in Germany in 1933 did not seem so exceptional in the light of what had already happened in countries such as Italy, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Portugal, Yugoslavia or indeed in a rather different way in the Soviet Union. loc: 7843

Everywhere, too, the authoritarian right shared most if not all of the antisemitic beliefs and conspiracy theories that animated the Nazis. loc: 7849

Seen in the European context of the time, neither the political violence of the 1920s and early 1930s, nor the collapse of parliamentary democracy, nor the destruction of civil liberties, would have appeared particularly unusual to a dispassionate observer. loc: 7852

To begin with, no one would have thought it worth their while shoehorning Hitler into the Reich Chancellery had he not been the leader of Germany’s largest political party. The Nazis, of course, never won a majority of the vote in a free election: 37.4 per cent was all they could manage in their best performance, the Reichstag election of July 1932. Still, this was a high vote by any democratic standards, loc: 7862

The roots of the Nazis’ success lay in the failure of the German political system to produce a viable, nationwide conservative party uniting both Catholics and Protestants on the right; in the historic weakness of German liberalism; in the bitter resentments of almost all Germans over the loss of the war and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles; in the fear and disorientation provoked in many middle-class Germans by the social and cultural modernism of the Weimar years, and the hyperinflation of 1923. loc: 7866

The lack of legitimacy of the Weimar Republic, which for most of its existence never enjoyed the support of a majority of the deputies in the Reichstag, added to these influences and encouraged nostalgia for the old Reich and the authoritarian leadership of a figure like Bismarck. loc: 7869

The myth of the ‘spirit of 1914’ and the ‘front generation’, particularly strong among those too young to have fought in the war, fuelled a strong desire for national unity and an impatience with the multiplicity of parties and the endless compromises of political negotiations. loc: 7871

The legacy of the war also included political violence on a massive and destructive scale and helped persuade many non-violent and respectable people to tolerate it to a degree that would be unthinkable in an effectively functioning parliamentary democracy. loc: 7873

key factors, loc: 7875

The first is the effect of the Depression, which radicalized the electorate, destroyed or deeply damaged the more moderate parties and polarized the political system between the ‘Marxist’ parties and the ‘bourgeois’ groups, all of which moved rapidly towards the far right. loc: 7875

The ever-growing threat of Communism struck fear into the hearts of bourgeois voters and helped shift political Catholicism towards authoritarian politics loc: 7877

Business failures and financial disasters helped convince many captains of industry and leaders of agriculture that the power of the trade unions had to be curbed or even destroyed. loc: 7879

Even without the Depression, Germany’s first democracy seemed doomed; but the onset of one of history’s worst economic slumps pushed it beyond the point of no return. loc: 7881

mass unemployment undermined Germany’s once-strong labour movement, a solid guarantor of democracy loc: 7882

The second major factor was the Nazi movement itself. loc: 7887

The Nazi Party was a party of protest, with not much of a positive programme, and few practical solutions to Germany’s problems. But its extremist ideology, adapted and sometimes veiled according to circumstance and the nature of the particular group of people to whom it was appealing, tapped into a sufficient number of pre-existing popular German beliefs and prejudices to make it seem to many well worth supporting at the polls. loc: 7893

substantial overlap between the Nazis’ ideology and that of the conservatives, loc: 7899

Nazi propaganda, for all its energy and sophistication, did not manage to win round people who were ideologically disinclined to vote for Hitler. loc: 7907

The Nazi vote was above all a protest vote; and, after 1928, Hitler, Goebbels and the Party leadership recognized this implicitly by removing most of their specific policies, in so far as they had any, from the limelight, and concentrating on a vague, emotional appeal that emphasized little more than the Party’s youth and dynamism, its determination to destroy the Weimar Republic, the Communist Party and the Social Democrats, and its belief that only through the unity of all social classes could Germany be reborn. loc: 7911

The Nazi propaganda effort, therefore, mainly won over people who were already inclined to identify with the values the Party claimed to represent, loc: 7918

inspired by a vague yet powerful vision of the future, a future in which class antagonisms and party-political squabbles would be overcome, aristocratic privilege of the kind represented by the hated figure of Papen removed, technology, communications media and every modern invention harnessed in the cause of the ‘people’, and a resurgent national will loc: 7923

a mythical Germany that would recover its timeless racial soul from the alienation it had suffered under the Weimar Republic. loc: 7931

The death of democracy in Germany was part of a much broader European pattern in the interwar years; but it also had very specific roots in German history and drew on ideas that were part of a very specific German tradition. German nationalism, the Pan-German vision of the completion through conquest in war of Bismarck’s unfinished work of bringing all Germans together in a single state, the conviction of the superiority of the Aryan race and the threat posed to it by the Jews, the belief in eugenic planning and racial hygiene, the military ideal of a society clad in uniform, regimented, obedient and ready for battle—all this and much more that came to fruition in 1933 drew on ideas that had been circulating in Germany since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. loc: 7944

they came together in Germany in a uniquely poisonous mixture, rendered all the more potent by Germany’s pre-eminent position as the most advanced and most powerful state on the European Continent. loc: 7952

For all his electoral successes, there has never been any doubt that Hitler came into office as the result of a backstairs political intrigue. ‘The Germans’ did not elect Hitler Reich Chancellor. Nor did they give their free and democratic approval to his creation of a one-party state. Yet some have argued that the Weimar Republic destroyed itself rather than being destroyed by its enemies: a case of political suicide rather than political murder.124 loc: 7955

The Republic’s fatal lack of legitimacy caused people to look all too readily to other political solutions for Germany’s ills. loc: 7959

it is in the nature of democratic institutions that they presuppose at least a minimal willingness to abide by the rules of democratic politics. Democracies that are under threat of destruction face the impossible dilemma of either yielding to that threat by insisting on preserving the democratic niceties, or violating their own principles by curtailing democratic rights. loc: 7968

At every point, therefore, Hitler and his associates sought a legalistic fig-leaf for their actions. loc: 7975

Hitler’s constant reassurances that he would act legally helped persuade his coalition partners and his opponents alike that the Nazis could be dealt with by legal means. Legal cover for the Nazis’ actions allowed civil servants to draft the decrees and laws they demanded, loc: 7981

For civil servants, state employees and many others, the measures by which the Nazis seized power between the end of January and the end of July 1933 seemed irresistible because they appeared to carry the full force of the law. loc: 7985

Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, in particular, which gave the President the power to rule by decree in time of emergency, had never been intended to be the basis for any more than purely interim measures; the Nazis made it into the basis for a permanent state of emergency that was more fictive than real and lasted in a technical sense all the way up to 1945. loc: 7988

German judicial authorities were, in fact, fully aware of the illegal nature of Nazi violence even after the seizure of power. The Reich Ministry of Justice made strenuous efforts to have the mass arrests of the first half of 1933 subjected to a formal legal process; its intervention was simply disregarded. loc: 8009

Everybody, including not least the Nazis, was aware throughout 1933 and 1934 that the brutal beatings, torture, maltreatment, destruction of property and violence of all kinds carried out against the Nazis’ opponents, up to and including murder by the brown-shirted stormtroopers of the SA and the black-uniformed squads of the SS, were in flagrant violation of the law of the land. Yet this violence was a central, indispensable part of the Nazi seizure of power from February 1933 onwards, and the widespread, in the end almost universal fear that it engendered among Germans who were not members of the Party or its auxiliary organizations was a crucial factor in intimidating Hitler’s opponents and bringing his sometimes rather unwilling allies into line.132 loc: 8025

There can be no doubt, finally, about the ultimate responsibility of Hitler and the Nazi leadership for these illegal acts. Hitler’s contempt for the law and the Weimar constitution had been made clear on many occasions. loc: 8031

What counted, in the words of one Nazi journalist, was not the ‘mendacious hypocrisy’ of Germany’s legal and penal systems, but ‘the law of power, that incorporates itself in the blood ties and military solidarity of one’s own race loc: 8043

Hermann Rauschning, who began by working with the Nazis but by the late 1930s had become one of their fiercest and most persistent critics, described it as a ‘nihilist revolution’, a ‘directionless revolution, a revolution merely for revolution’s sake’. It destroyed all social order, all freedom, all decency; it was, as the title of the English edition of his book claimed, a ‘revolution of destruction‘, nothing more.136 loc: 8049

Some authors have argued that a direct historical line can be drawn to Nazism from the French Revolution of 1789, the Jacobin ‘Reign of Terror’ in 1793-4, and the implicit idea of a popular dictatorship in Rousseau’s theory of the ‘General Will’, decided initially by the people but brooking no opposition once resolved upon.139 loc: 8067

The Nazis, indeed, thought of themselves as undoing all the work of the French Revolution and rolling back the clock, in a political sense at least, much further: to the early Middle Ages. Their concept of the people was racial rather than civic. All the ideologies to which the French Revolution had given birth were to be destroyed. The Nazi Revolution was to be the world-historical negation of its French predecessor, not its historical fulfilment.140 loc: 8071

the Nazis had no explicit plan to reorder society, indeed no fully worked-out model of the society they said they wanted to revolutionize. Hitler himself seems to have thought of the Revolution as a changeover of personnel in positions of power and authority. In a speech to senior Nazi officials on 6 July 1933, he implied that the core of the Revolution lay in the elimination of political parties, democratic institutions and independent organizations. He seems to have regarded the conquest of power as the essence of the Nazi Revolution, loc: 8078

A national renaissance in these men’s understanding meant above all the reassertion of Germany’s position in the world, the overturning of the Treaty of Versailles and its provisions, and the restoration, by war in all probability, of German hegemony in Europe.143 loc: 8102

the stormtroopers’ idea of revolution was in the end little more than the continuation of the brawling and fighting to which they had become accustomed during the seizure of power. loc: 8107

the speed and enthusiasm with which so many people came to identify with the new regime strongly suggests that a large majority of the educated elites in German society, whatever their political allegiance up to that point, were already predisposed to embrace many of the principles upon which Nazism rested.144 loc: 8115

for the Nazis and their supporters, the very term ‘Third Reich’ constituted a powerful symbolic link to the imagined greatness of the past, embodied in the First Reich of Charlemagne and the Second of Bismarck. Thus, as Hitler said on 13 July 1934, the Nazi Revolution restored the natural development of German history that had been interrupted by the alien impositions of Weimar: loc: 8128

We wanted once again to create a state to which every German can cling in love; to establish a regime to which everyone can look up with respect; to find laws which are commensurate with the morality of our people; to install an authority to which each and every man submits in joyful obedience. loc: 8132

Once more, revolution appeared here as little more than the conquest of political power and the establishment of an authoritarian state. loc: 8137

What mattered to them above all else was race, culture and ideology. In the coming years, they would create a whole new set of institutions through which they would seek to remould the German psyche and rebuild the German character. loc: 8145

Now the Nazis would set about constructing a racial utopia, in which a pure-bred nation of heroes would prepare as rapidly and as thoroughly as possible for the ultimate test of German racial superiority: a war in which they would crush and destroy their enemies, and establish a new European order that would eventually come to dominate the world. loc: 8149