Burning the Reichstag (12 page)

In a public debate in October 1932 against Oberfohren's friend Otto Schmidt-Hannover, Goebbels again bared the Nazis' teeth. “We are convinced,” he said, that only a popular movement that could “deploy the demonstrative weight of fourteen million” would be able to “bring Bolshevism down.” Goebbels pointed to the stormtroopers in the audience. “In Berlin,” he said, “we have laid twenty-six SA men in the grave.” Where, he asked Schmidt, “are your martyrs?”
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YET, FOR ALL THE ACTUAL
and rhetorical violence of the Nazi party, in his first weeks in office Chancellor Hitler seemed to govern with surprising moderation. The records of his early cabinet meetings reveal a Hitler who rode herd on the authoritarian drive of his German National colleagues, demonstrating the political instincts of a man who led the most popular political party in German history while the German Nationals languished around the 8 percent mark in voter esteem. When Hugenberg urged the outlawing of the Communist Party, Hitler said he thought such a move would be pointless: It was “impossible to outlaw the six million people who stood behind the Communist Party.” In another cabinet debate he asked rhetorically if it were “psychologically correct” in the context of the election campaign to minimize the Communist threat by banning the party.

In his public speeches, too, Hitler often struck a conciliatory tone. In his February 1st address to the nation, broadcast over all radio stations, he told Germans that his government's “highest and first task” was the restoration of unity. The government would defend Christianity and the family, while veneration for Germany's past and pride in its traditions
would form the foundation of education. This was far from the violent and demagogic tone Hitler had struck since entering politics in 1919. The speech hit its target. Even Erich Ebermayer, far from sympathetic to the Nazis, wondered if “the Chancellor Hitler might think differently than the vote-catcher Hitler did?”
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Hitler's seeming moderation did not stem from any lack of readiness to do battle with his political enemies. On February 1st he told his cabinet that the slogan for the coming election campaign would be “Attacking Marxism.” In his radio address he ranted about Communist madness attempting to destroy the people. Nothing—not the family, not honor and loyalty, not devotion to the fatherland, not culture and economy, not morality and faith—was safe from this “all-destroying idea.” Fourteen years of Marxism, said Hitler, had ruined the country (and here he was certainly stretching the point to suggest that Germany had been ruled by “Marxism” since 1919.) One year of Bolshevism, he continued, would destroy it.

Hitler was, in short, playing a calculated game. Goebbels captured Hitler's tactical thinking in a February 1st diary entry: “Discussed the terror of the reds with Hitler. For now, still no counter measures. First let it flare up.”
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“First let it flare up” was, in fact, a concise summary of what had for several years been the Nazis' plan for consolidating power. In November 1931 a Nazi official and member of the Hessian state parliament had given the Frankfurt police chief a set of documents laying out contingency plans for a Nazi counter-coup against a Communist uprising. The author of the documents was a young Nazi lawyer named Werner Best, later a senior Gestapo official and deputy of Reinhard Heydrich. Best's drafts, which became known as the “Boxheimer Documents,” specified that in the event of a Communist coup the SA would step into the legal vacuum, claiming “the right and the duty to seize and exercise the abandoned authority of the state for the salvation of the people.” All orders from SA personnel were to be followed on pain of death, while the SA had the right to pass further emergency decrees as necessary. Field courts were to be established to enforce these decrees; all Germans over the age of sixteen would be subject to compulsory labor, or they would have no right to food. Jews were expressly excluded from both the duty to work and the right to rations.
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The revelation of the Boxheimer Documents cast considerable doubt on the Nazis' claims to legality. They responded in a predictable way. The
documents, said Goebbels's
Angriff
, were Best's purely private plan for defeating “a hypothetical bloody takeover by the Commies” and restoring legal German state authority. But Communist provocation was never far from Nazi propaganda, and Goebbels's paper also reported that Best was responding to “a plan drafted according to the most precise orders from Moscow for the violent seizure of power in Germany.” The Communist document had been obtained by the Nazis' own intelligence service. The Social Democratic authorities in Hesse knew about it, said the
Angriff
, but were covering it up.
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The Nazis' private reaction was very different. In March 1932 the local governor in Düsseldorf reported to the Prussian interior minister on an SA circular, signed by Hitler and Ernst Röhm, which said that “the matter in Hesse” had shown that one had to be careful with documents, and that plans for the seizure of power should be drawn up only by the officially designated Nazi authorities. “Obviously after the takeover of power we will settle the scores with our opponents in the most severe way.”
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Goebbels's diary suggests that for the Nazi leaders the Boxheimer Documents represented a general, not just local, plan for power. In mid-September 1931 (precisely the time that Best was reporting to the Nazis' “Reich Leadership” on the nature of his plan) Goebbels recorded a conversation with Hitler, setting out what seems to be the Berlin counterpart. “SA questions,” wrote Goebbels. “What to do when the KPD [Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, the German Communist Party] strikes. Concrete plan of action. I will be police commissioner for the entire east … Helldorff my military leader. We will work well together.” In March 1932 the Berlin police confiscated SA mobilization plans, which called for surrounding the capital in the event of an “emergency.” As with the Boxheimer Documents, the “emergency” the Nazis had in mind was a coup or counter coup by democratic or left-wing forces. Nazi coup plans were never, therefore, aimed against the state: they were always aimed at the political left on
behalf
of the state. Later, when the Nazis had just come to power and there were rumors that former Chancellor Schleicher might try a military coup against them, Goebbels noted in his diary that Helldorff and Police Major Wecke were collaborating on counter-measures. As Hitler's biographer Joachim Fest points out, that the Nazis would be called in to deliver the state from a Communist threat had been Hitler's governing idea since his ill-fated Munich coup attempt in 1923. It suited his “dramatic as well as his eschatological temperament,” even his fixation with Wagnerian themes.
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Rudolf Diels had the impression that in early 1933 the Nazi leaders were waiting hopefully for a Communist uprising, “like a tiger that waited for its prey to appear before tearing it to pieces.” For Diels's boss Göring, the struggle against Communism had become an all-consuming idea. Göring imagined this struggle taking violent forms: battles at the barricades and bloodily suppressed uprisings. He believed that the Communists would appear voluntarily for this war. At the very least he was certain that once the Nazis outlawed the Communist Party—which both he and Hitler were determined to do—“the enemy would then have to come out of his lair.”
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Unlike most of the Nazi leaders, Hermann Göring came from a relatively elite social background. His father had been a colonial governor in German South West Africa. Göring himself was a dashing fighter pilot in the First World War, a member of the renowned Richthofen squadron and the last commander of that squadron after Manfred von Richthofen, the “Red Baron,” was shot down in 1918. Göring's press secretary at the Prussian Interior Ministry, Martin Sommerfeldt, recalled that Göring was proud of his past and his origins in a “good house.”

Göring liked to think of himself as the “right wing” of the Nazi Party, which in this context meant the moderate wing, and many in Germany and abroad did see him this way. Among friends and associates Göring chalked up Nazi lawlessness and radicalism to his bitter rival Goebbels, whom he dubbed “the poison dwarf.” Göring had been furious to learn that Goebbels had sided with the Communists in supporting the striking Berlin transit workers in November 1932. He would have liked to “kill the little devil” with his own hands when Goebbels got Hitler to send a telegram supporting the “Potempa murderers,” five SA men sentenced to death in 1932 for an especially brutal killing. Goebbels's “National Bolshevism,” as Göring saw it, constantly jeopardized negotiations with President Hindenburg for Nazi participation in the government. “Every time I have gotten that hard East Prussian head almost soft,” Göring complained, “Jupp [Goebbels's unflattering nickname] clubs me one between the legs.”
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However, Göring's good old boy persona and seeming moderation were just for show. Sommerfeldt, who admired Göring at first, came to learn how he could “throw off the sheep's clothing” and let out the “raging wolf.” Rudolf Diels was not the only one of Göring's associates to liken his cruelty and extravagance to a prince of the Renaissance. And in early 1933 Göring was zealously preparing for his civil war.
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As Prussian interior minister, Göring was in command of 50,000 armed police officers, already organized in military fashion. Göring put the police forces of the western Prussian provinces, industrial areas that were Communist bastions, under a special command. To Police Major Walther Wecke—the same man who had suddenly appeared in command of “Inspection West” on the day of the Ku'damm riot—he gave the command of an “especially reliable” squad of police for “motorized deployment” in the capital city. Wecke was constantly by Göring's side.
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From the middle of February there came a steady escalation in police measures aimed primarily at the Communists, but also at Social Democrats, liberals, pacifists, left-wing intellectuals, members of human rights organizations, and anyone else likely to be an opponent of the Nazis. On February 14th sixty or seventy Berlin political police officers, led by the Commissars Reinhold Heller and Rudolf Braschwitz, who would figure importantly in the Reichstag fire investigations, searched the Communist Party's offices in the Reichstag. On February 24th the Berlin police closed down the Karl Liebknecht House, the headquarters of the Communist Party, after a search supposedly uncovered leaflets inciting acts of violence and treason. Two weeks later, the building, as we've seen, had been renamed the “Horst Wessel House” and taken over by Diels's Department IA.
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Preparations for battle against the Communists were in the works on the legal level as well. Hitler's government revived what it called the “Decree in the Drawer” (
Schubkastenordnung
), left over from the Papen administration and the November transit strike. The draft decree set out penalties—fines or minor jail terms—for anyone who advocated a strike in, went on strike against, locked out workers in, or vandalized an essential service. More ominously, the decree specified that anyone who was suspected of violating its terms could be taken into police custody in the interests of “public security.” More ominously still, in a cabinet meeting on November 25th, the then-Reich Interior Minister, Baron Wilhelm von Gayl, argued that stronger provisions had to be added to the decree, including the introduction of “protective custody” (
Schutzhaft
). The cabinet agreed to all this in principle, and work on the draft continued. A few days later came Papen's replacement by Schleicher. Schleicher's shortlived administration did not get around to passing the decree. But the draft sat—literally “in the drawer”—at the Interior Ministry, awaiting its moment.
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At a cabinet meeting on February 1st, 1933, Hermann Göring claimed that Communist “acts of terror” were on the increase and that existing legal provisions were inadequate. He said it was time to revive the Decree in the Drawer. The following day, a new draft, now called “Decree for the Protection of the German People” was set before the cabinet. This draft allowed the banning or breaking up of political meetings, political associations, or periodicals, if they posed a danger to “public safety and security.” It also contained the former sections on “essential services.” But here again, Hitler demonstrated his sense of timing and political calculation. He asked whether it was “psychologically correct” to minimize the Communist danger in the election campaign with the passage of such a decree. Hitler understood that fear of the Communists drove many voters to the Nazis; banning the source of this fear could only hurt his Party. He suggested passing only some sections, and leaving the “essential service” provisions for later.

The cabinet approved a revised draft, and President Hindenburg signed it into law the next day. In addition to the new restrictions on press freedom and political meetings, the decree allowed the police to carry out arrests in the interest of “public security” and hold the prisoners in custody for up to three months. The Social Democrats and Communists began to feel the effects right away. Even before the decree, the Berlin police had banned the Social Democratic paper
Vorwärts
; armed with the new decree they extended the ban. Other newspapers, along with Social Democratic and Communist election rallies, began to be treated in a similar fashion.
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The
Berliner Tageblatt
reported on February 23rd that if the trends continued, this election would prove to be the bloodiest yet in Germany. Nazi stormtroopers were now regularly attacking the moderate Catholic Center Party's activists and meetings, along with those of the Communists and Social Democrats. Nazis fired on Catholic demonstrators in Kaiserslautern, while in Krefeld they broke up a meeting and beat the speaker, the former Prussian Prime Minister and Reich Transport and Labor Minister Adam Stegerwald. Göring, following the standard Nazi script, blamed the violence on “provocateurs” from outside the Nazi Party.
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