Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The new Reichstag met on March 23rd at the Kroll Opera House. In order to secure a majority, the Nazis excluded from the session all of the Communist and 30 Socialist members, about 109 in all. The rest were asked to pass an “enabling act” which would give the government for four years the right to legislate by decree, without the need for the presidential signature, as in Article 48, and without constitutional restrictions except in respect to the powers of the Reichstag, the Reichsrat, and the presidency.

Since this law required a two-third majority, it could have been beaten if only a small group of the Center Party had voted against it. To be sure, Hitler made it very clear that he was prepared to use violence against all who refused to cooperate with him, but his power to do so on a clear-cut constitutional issue in March 1933 was much less than it became later, since violence from him on such a question might well have arrayed the president and the Reichswehr against him.

In spite of Hitler’s intimidating speech, Otto Wels of the Social Democrats rose to explain why his party refused to support the bill. He was followed by Monsignor Kaas of the Center Party who explained that his Catholic Group would support it. The vote in favor of the bill was more than sufficient, being 441-94, with the Social Democrats forming the solid minority. Thus, this weak, timid, doctrinaire, and ignorant group redeemed themselves by their courage after the eleventh hour had passed.

Under this “Enabling Act” the government issued a series of revolutionary decrees in the next few months. The diets of all the German states, except Prussia (which had had its own election on March 5th) were reconstituted in the proportions of votes in the national election of March 5th, except that the Communists were thrown out. Each party was given its quota of members and allowed to name the individual members on a purely party basis. A similar procedure was applied to local governments. Thus the Nazis received a majority in each body.

A decree of April 7th gave the Reich government the right to name a governor of each German state. This was a new official empowered to enforce the policies of the Reich government even to the point of dismissing the state governments, including the prime ministers, diets, and the hitherto irremovable judges. This right was used in each state to make a Nazi governor and a Nazi prime minister. In Bavaria, for example, the two were Epp and Rohm, while in Prussia the two were Hitler and Göring. In many states the governor was the district leader of the Nazi Party, and where he was not, he was subject to that leader’s orders. By a later law of January 30, 1934, the diets of the states were abolished; the sovereign powers of the states were transferred to the Reich; and the governors were made subordinates of the Reich Ministry of the Interior.

All the political parties except the Nazis were abolished in May, June, and July 1933. The Communists had been outlawed on February 28th. The Social Democrats were enjoined from all activities on June 22nd, and were expelled from various governing bodies on July 7th. The German State Party (Democratic Party) and the German People’s Party were dissolved on June 28th and July 4th. The Bavarian People’s Party was smashed by the Storm Troopers on June 22nd, and disbanded itself on July 4th. The Center Party did the same on the following day. A series of pitched battles between the SA and the Stahlhelm in April-June 1933 ended with the absorption of the latter into the Nazi Party. The Nationalists were smashed by violence on June 21st; Hugenberg was unable to penetrate the SA guard around Hindenburg to protest; and on June 28th his party was dissolved. Finally, on July 14, 1933, the Nazi Party was declared to be the only recognized party in Germany.

The middle classes were coordinated and disappointed. Wholesale and retail trade associations were consolidated into a Reich Corporation of German Trade under the Nazi Dr. von Renteln. On July 22nd the same man became president of the German Industrial and Trade Committee, which was a union of all the chambers of commerce. In Germany these last had been semipublic legal corporations.

The breakup of the great department stores, which had been one of the Nazi promises to the petty bourgeoisie since Gottfried Feder’s Twenty-five-Point program of 1920, was abandoned, according to Hess’s announcement of July 7th. Moreover, liquidation of the cooperative societies, which had also been a promise of long duration, was abandoned by an announcement of July 19th. This last reversal resulted from the fact that most of the cooperatives had come under Nazi control by being taken over by the Labor Front on May 16, 1933.

Labor was coordinated without resistance, except from the Communists. The government declared May 1st a national holiday, and celebrated it with a speech by Hitler on the dignity of labor before a million persons at Tempelhof. The next day the SA seized all union buildings and offices, arrested all union leaders, and sent most of these to concentration camps. The unions themselves were incorporated into a Nazi German Labor Front under Robert Ley. The new leader, in an article in the Volkischer Beobachter, promised employers that henceforth they could be masters in their own houses as long as they served the nation (that is, the Nazi Party). Work was supplied for labor by reducing the work week to forty hours (with a corresponding wage cut), by prohibiting aliens to work, by enforced “labor service” for the government, by grants of loans to married persons, by tax cuts for persons who spent money on repairs, by construction of military automobile roads, and so forth.

Agriculture was coordinated only after Hugenberg left the government on June 29th and was replaced by Richard Darre as Reich minister of food and Prussian minister of agriculture. The various land and peasant associations were merged into a single association of which Darre was president, while the various landlords’ associations were united into the German Board of Agriculture of which Darre was president also.

Religion was coordinated in various ways. The Evangelical Church was reorganized. When a non-Nazi, Friedrich von Bodelschwing, was elected Reich bishop in May 1933, he was forcibly removed from office, and the National Synod was forced to elect a Nazi, Ludwig Müller, in his place (September 27th). At the elections for Church assemblies in July 1933, government pressure was so great that a majority of Nazis was chosen in each. In 1935 a Ministry of Church Affairs under Hans Kerrl was set up with power to issue Church ordinances having the force of law and with complete control over Church property and funds. Prominent Protestant leaders, like Martin Niemoller, who objected to these steps, were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

The Catholic Church made every effort to cooperate with the Nazis, but soon found it was impossible. It withdrew its condemnation of Nazism on March 28, 1933, and signed a Concordat with von Papen on July 20th. By this agreement the state recognized freedom of religious belief and of worship, exemption of the clergy from certain civic duties, and the right of the Church to manage its own affairs and to establish denominational schools. Governors of the German states were given a right to object to nominations to the highest clerical posts; bishops were to take an oath of loyalty, and education was to continue to function as it had been doing.

This agreement with the Church began to break down almost at once. Within ten days of the signing of the Concordat, the Nazis began to attack the Catholic Youth League and the Catholic press. Church schools were restricted, and members of the clergy were arrested and tried on charges of evading the monetary foreign-exchange regulations and of immorality. The Church condemned the efforts of Nazis like Rosenberg to replace Christianity by a revived German paganism and such laws as that permitting sterilization of socially objectionable persons. Rosenberg’s book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, was put on the Index; Catholic scholars exposed its errors in a series of studies in 1934; and finally, on March 14, 1937, Pope Pius XI condemned many of the tenets of Nazism in the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge.