Joachim Fest: Plotting Hitler's Death

The events in Berlin were echoed in dozens of other cities. Count Harry Kessler, a prominent diplomat, recalled “an atmosphere like pure Mardi Gras”: Crowds, parades, bands, and flags filled the streets, though nothing more dramatic had happened than a change of government, like many others in the past. But there was undeni­ably a sense that a new era had dawned. A feeling of anticipation swept the nation, filling some with dread and others with hope. Hitler picked up on this mood in his radio address on the evening of Febru­ary 1. Striking a moderate, statesmanlike tone, he recited the many hardships the people had known: the “betrayal” of November 1918, the “heartrending division” in the land, the hate and confusion. He described the self-inflicted “paralysis” of the multiparty state and held out the prospect of German society “coming together as one.” He spoke of dignity, honor, tradition, family, and culture. He assured the nation, which felt reviled by the entire world and humiliated by the victorious powers, that he would restore the pride of old. At the end he appealed for divine blessing.

The majority of the population, however, remained uneasy about Hitler. Too much had been said in rabid speeches, and too much had been done in bloody street fights for his words to calm those who felt hostile toward or even just wary of the new leader. Furthermore, the much-maligned Weimar Republic was not without supporters. It had faithful champions among all the parties of the center, in particular among the Social Democrats and the trade unions. In the Reichsbanner, an elite paramilitary defense troop formed in February 1931, and the Iron Front, an alliance of the Reichsbanner, the SPD, and the unions that was formed the following November, the republic had two militant, prodemocratic organizations working to defend it against assault from the left or right. The Iron Front alone had three and a half million members, of whom 250,000 belonged to so-called protective formations, trained armed units that regularly carried out field exercises. Both of these organizations now awaited a signal to take action against a government that-with its party’s million-strong militia, the Sturmabteilung or SA-they saw as threatening a coup of its own.

But the signal never came, no matter how much the local organizations and their individual members pressed their political leaders. Weakness, fear, and a sense of responsibility played their parts in this, of course. Even more decisive, however, were Hitler’s tactics, which quickly undermined the willingness of the republic’s supporters to take action. They had always assumed that the Nazi leader would stage a coup and had prepared themselves exclusively for this eventu­ality. But Hitler’s experiences during his long rise to power, especially the well-remembered failed putsch of November 1923, had per­suaded him that it was best not to be seen seizing control through overtly violent means. Having risen to chancellor through constitu­tional channels, he was not about to stigmatize himself as a revolu­tionary. The considerable forces still arrayed against him in the democratic fighting organizations; the cautious attitude of the majority of citizens, who remained hesitant amid all the stage-managed displays of jubilation; the respect Hitler felt compelled to show the president and the armed forces, the Reichswehr–all these factors forced him to continue ostensibly observing the rule of law while doing all he could to seize the reins of power. Later it would be said that the republic did not fight but simply froze helplessly-and then crumbled-in the face of these unexpected tactics.

Hitler’s opening gambit in the struggle for power not only confused his avowed enemies but tended to reassure the wary in all social classes and organizations, overcoming or considerably reducing the apprehension they had always felt about him. A coup achieved through legal channels was something thoroughly unknown. The clas­sical literature on resistance to tyrants, stretching back to the days of the ancient Greeks, dealt exclusively with violent seizures of power; there was no talk of silent takeovers through outwardly democratic methods, of obeying the letter of the law while mocking its spirit. By leaving the facade of the constitution in place, Hitler hopelessly con­founded the public’s ability to judge the legality of the new regime, to choose whether as good citizens they should feel loyal to it or not. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, radical change was under way.

The paradoxical idea of a legal revolution dumbfounded not only Hitler’s opponents but his allies as well. The civil service was similarly perplexed but took comfort in the basically legal nature of the up­heaval, despite its obvious excesses. Thankful to be spared the inter­nal divisions and conflict that a revolution might have brought, the civil service willingly placed itself and its expertise at the disposal of the new government. As a result the Nazis eased smoothly into con­trol of the entire apparatus of state. Indeed, since the days of the kaisers, civil servants had tended toward antidemocratic sentiments, but it was primarily the appearance of legality that won them over to the new regime or at least prevented any doubts from arising about the propriety of what the Nazis were doing. It is particularly signifi­cant that both the emergency decree (suspending virtually all major civil liberties) issued on February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichs­tag fire, and the Enabling Act wresting legislative authority from the Reichstag and conferring it on the government were crafted by loyal civil servants with no particular affection for the Nazi Party. The bureaucracy responded in the same acquiescent way to subsequent legislation, which led step by step to the demolition of the entire constitutional order.

The tactic of a “legal revolution” was complemented by another clever move, namely the depiction of the Nazi seizure of power as a “national revival.” After all the humiliations of the Weimar Republic, many members of the middle class and other Germans understood this to signal a kind of liberation. The Nazis’ single-minded pursuit of power did not, therefore, raise much protest and was even cheered as a sign of the nonpartisan resurgence of a country that had been di­vided against itself for too long and was finally gathering its strength. This confusion of the Nazi lust for power with the revival of Germany itself, encouraged by incessant, stage-managed festivities and the ex­citement generated by various plebiscites, led to a shift in mood that gradually enabled Hitler to shed any pretense of legality and boldly claim a right to govern in his own name.

Hitler’s opponents were never allowed so much as a moment to catch their breath, consider their options, or prepare a counterattack. The new chancellor immediately set his sights on the innermost sancturns of power, working with stunning speed but with a highly effec­tive overall plan to seize key positions one after the other or else to drain them of their importance so that little more than hollow shells remained. The opposition was left off-balance, discouraged, and de­moralized. To fathom the speed and vigor of this operation one need only look at Italy, where it took Mussolini nearly seven years to accu­mulate the kind of power Hitler amassed in only a few weeks. Even then the monarchy still lay outside Mussolini’s orbit, providing Italians with a legitimate alternative-whatever its weaknesses-for which there was no equivalent in Germany.

One cannot fully comprehend the ease with which Hitler seized power, however, without giving some consideration to the weariness of the nation’s democratic forces after fourteen years of political life in an unloved republic that seemed fated to stumble from one crisis to the next. Most of the leading figures in the republic, men who shortly before had appeared so stalwart, simply packed their bags and vanished in a state of nervous exhaustion-Otto Braun, for example, the “Red Tsar of Prussia”; his minister of the interior, Karl Severing, who presided over the best-equipped police force in the Reich; the leaders of the Reichsbanner, and many others. Men who had always insisted that they would yield only to force melted before any heat at all was applied. It seemed as if the Weimar Republic never overcame the impression that it was somehow just a temporary phenomenon. Born of sudden surrender and tainted from the outset by the moral condemnations heaped upon Germany, it never gained the broad loyalty of the population. Their contempt only increased with the virtual civil war that raged during its early years, the inflation of 1923, which impoverished much of the traditionally loyal middle class, and finally the Great Depression, when confusion, mass misery, and polit­ical drift destroyed any claim the young republic might have had to being the kind of orderly state Germans were accustomed to. This series of disasters contributed enormously to the impression that such a republic would not long endure.