Burning the Reichstag (8 page)

Goebbels had a relationship with Hitler wholly unlike that of any of the other Nazi leaders. “There was no one but Goebbels” in Hitler's inner circle, Diels wrote, “who could even capture [Hitler's] attention in free, agreeable conversation.” The young writer Erich Ebermayer once had a chance to watch this. In February 1933, Hitler still kept his habit of taking afternoon coffee with his entourage at the Kaiserhof Hotel. Ebermayer was a regular at the hotel, and he bribed an elevator attendant to tell him when Hitler arrived for his coffee. Ebermayer noted with surprise that Hitler was quiet and disengaged from the conversation around him, and little interested in the obsequious followers who came to pay their respects. Then Goebbels appeared, “limping more than one would suspect from the news reels,” and sat down self-confidently next to Hitler. Hitler immediately became livelier; his stiffness softened. “He relates completely differently to this man than to all the others,” Ebermayer noted. Diels thought that Hitler would have been unthinkable without Goebbels. Goebbels was the top man in Hitler's inner circle, “the first interlocutor of the evil demon in Hitler.” He “stabilized when Hitler was indecisive, gave his confused plans logical form and his immoderation justification, incitement, and boundlessness.”
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THE NAZIS CALLED IT
“Red Berlin,” and indeed since the nineteenth century the city had provided a solid base for Germany's political left: first the liberals, then the Social Democrats, and, by the 1920s, the Communists (the pattern continues: today Berlin is a base for the Greens and the Left Party as well as the long-established Social Democrats). Berlin was one of Germany's leading industrial centers; it was Germany's financial capital, its media capital, and its cultural and intellectual capital as well as its political capital. Since the expulsion of the Huguenots from seventeenth-century France, Berlin had provided
a home to migrants from all over Europe. This made Berlin's population, at least by German standards, regionally, ethnically, and religiously diverse. A popular saying had it that “all real Berliners come from Silesia.” About 7 percent of Berliners were Jewish, in a country where Jews made up less than 1 percent of the population. Many Berliners proudly claimed Huguenot ancestry (some of them very prominent, like the novelist Theodor Fontane); the many towns and streets around Berlin with “Oranien” (from the Dutch “oranje,” or “orange”) in their names give witness to the Netherlanders who came to lend their expertise to drainage works. The Nazi Party, as it rose to power, drew support from Protestant rural areas and from regions where the Nazis could play on anti-Prussian and especially anti-Berlin resentments. Berlin itself seemed far from fertile Nazi ground.

So it was an inspired choice when, in 1926, Hitler named Joseph Goebbels
Gauleiter
, or party boss, of Berlin. In a book published in 1932, Goebbels demonstrated his rhetorical and propaganda skills in an appreciation of his post. Berlin, Goebbels conceded, was not Munich, the Nazis' birthplace. Its population was not homogenous, as in other German cities, but a composite of regions, classes, and confessions. Nonetheless, when Nazism arrived in Berlin, Berliners took it up with “the utter vehemence of Prussian toughness and discipline.” The Berliner could “devote himself to a cause with the whole passion of his mobile soul, and nowhere is dogged fanaticism, above all in politics, so at home as in Berlin”—which for Goebbels was naturally a compliment. Goebbels thought that Berlin political activists were more brutal than elsewhere. The brilliant, ruthless, fanatical Gauleiter and his adopted city were well matched.
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In the autumn of 1930 Hitler made the Gauleiter of Berlin the national director of propaganda for the Nazi Party as well, and Goebbels could dedicate the full force of his agile mind to the promotion of Nazism. The nature of Berlin dictated both the content and the style of his propaganda. “Berlin needs its sensation like a fish needs water,” he wrote. “This city lives on it, and all political propaganda that does not recognize that will fail to reach its goal.” Red Berlin had hardly greeted the Nazis with open arms. The Party's stormtroopers were soon involved in unremitting and increasingly bloody battles with the paramilitary forces of the other political groupings. In response the Nazis learned how to transmute their experience of violence into effective political propaganda. Nazi propaganda, said Goebbels, “developed organically out of the daily struggle,”
and over time was systematized “through ever-repeated application.” Effective propaganda had to appeal to modern Berlin as it was: to its size and diversity, its toughness, its violence.
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Goebbels's business was to lie, but this much was true: he did fabricate a style of political propaganda that grew organically out of the street battles of Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Goebbels understood that violence got headlines, especially in Berlin, where the national media was concentrated. In his diary he was always happy to record that the “Jew press” had written about another case of Nazi violence: “The main thing is they are talking about us,” he liked to say. Key to this strategy was the deployment of the SA.
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The Nazi party, from its earliest days as a fringe movement in Munich's beer halls, needed tough young men both to protect its meetings from being broken up by its rivals, and to try to break up those rivals' meetings as well. At first these toughs were known as the “Meeting Police” (
Versammlungs Hauspolizei
); by late 1920 the Nazis had converted them into the “Gymnastics and Sport Section.” The evolution of the SA was, however, not just a story internal to the Nazi Party. A bewildering profusion of right-radical militias played a part: in the early and middle 1920s these groups were formed and reformed, banned and formed again. What united them was a burning hatred of Socialists, Communists, Jews, and the Weimar Republic, coupled with an enthusiasm for violence. The personnel moved from one group to another, and among the leading figures in this radical militia scene of the 1920s we can find most of those who would, ten years later, be the leaders of the Berlin SA.
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One of the streams that fed the later SA flowed from various militias formed after the First World War by the former naval officer Corvette Captain Hermann Ehrhardt: the
Freikorps
(free corps) known as the Ehrhardt Brigade, and later the “Organization Consul” and the “Viking League.” Men of the Organization Consul carried out some of the most notorious assassinations of the Weimar Republic, including the murders of Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger in 1921 and Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in 1922. In 1921 Ehrhardt agreed with Adolf Hitler that Ehrhardt's organization would work politically for the Nazi Party while remaining militarily under his own command. This, according to historian Peter Longerich, marked the real beginning of what were soon being called the
Sturmabteilungen
(SA) or storm sections. A furious November 1921 brawl in Munich's Hofbräuhaus became this new SA's baptism of fire.
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There were other paramilitary groups in northern Germany, most of the important ones loosely affiliated in an organization called the
Frontbann
. The Frontbann was founded in the spring of 1924 as a covert means of sustaining the SA when all Nazi organizations were banned in the aftermath of Hitler's failed 1923 Beerhall
Putsch
, or coup. The effective commander of the Frontbann was Ernst Röhm, another war veteran who had fought with a Freikorps unit in Bavaria. One of the Berlin groups affiliated with the Frontbann was the Charlottenburg
Turnerschaft Ulrich von Hutten
(Ulrich von Hutten gymnastics society). Among its members were future Berlin SA leaders Fritz Hahn and Karl Ernst; it later evolved into Hans Maikowski's infamous SA unit Storm 33. Ernst Röhm so impressed the dissolute aristocrat and war veteran Wolf-Heinrich Count von Helldorff that Helldorff left the conservative veterans' organization the
Stahlhelm
(steel helmet) and joined the Frontbann; at the time of the Reichstag fire Helldorff would be the commander of the Berlin SA. At the end of October 1925 the Frontbann was dissolved and in March 1926 the Berlin SA was officially relaunched with Kurt Daluege, despite his nickname “Dummy-Dummy” one of the key early Berlin Nazi leaders, as its commander.
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This complex history, in which the SA developed substantially autonomously from the leaders of the Nazi Party, left an important legacy. Relations between the Party and the SA were always tense and competitive. Already in 1924 Hitler had worried about “his” SA being dissolved into the Frontbann, which claimed to be nonpartisan and which Röhm controlled. When Hitler was released from prison at the end of that year he set about recovering his hold on both Party and SA. In February 1925 he declared in the
Völkischer Beobachter
that the SA would have to return to its functions of 1923, which meant “steeling” and “disciplining” Nazi youth for the “idea,” rather than actively seeking to overthrow the republic through violence. Röhm, an incurable soldier of fortune, quit and went to join the Bolivian army.
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Hitler would later bring Röhm back, but the tensions between Party and SA never went away, and were complicated by ideological as well as tactical differences. The SA was as anticapitalist and antibourgeois as it was anti-Republican and anti-Semitic. SA rhetoric was often hard to distinguish from that of the parties of the left. The Berlin SA's official history characterized the typical Berlin stormtrooper as a “bruiser” (
Rabauke
) with a combination of “hard soldierliness,” “stirring revolutionary fire,”
and “radical socialism.” Horst Wessel himself wrote that Nazis from Vienna did not understand his “radical socialist” politics and considered him a “half-Communist.” After Hitler had become Germany's dictator, the members of Storm 33 looked back on what they called the “time of struggle” (
Kampfzeit
) and recalled that although they had fought hard against the Communists, they would not forget their struggle against “the thoughtlessness and cowardice of the middle class,” which neglected “the economic needs of its national comrades so long as things were going well for itself,” which “cravenly left the streets to Marxism,” whose lack of political instinct meant that it had “failed even to recognize the danger of the Jews,” and all in all was “fundamentally just as hostile to us as was the Red Front.” Talk like this could only complicate Hitler's efforts to win over conservative middle-class voters.
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Yet it was this SA that Goebbels employed as his main instrument in winning Berlin for the Nazis, in a complicated set of maneuvers that depended for success on ruthless violence coupled with breathtaking mendacity, and a high degree of voter credulity. The result was a string of violent clashes of various kinds—shootings, brawls, ambushes, bombings, and arson attacks, mostly between the SA and the Communist paramilitaries. Goebbels himself, testifying at the Reichstag fire trial in November of 1933, embedded the fire in this longer narrative of political violence. Goebbels's theme here—as it was in his propaganda all the way from 1926 to 1933—was that the Communists committed repeated acts of violence on Nazis, while trying to shift the propagandistic blame onto their opponents.
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There was, for instance, the case of Horst Wessel. Wessel, only twenty-two years old in early 1930, was the leader of SA Storm 5 in the rough Berlin neighborhood of Friedrichshain. Despite his youth he had passed through all the typical stations of a Berlin stormtrooper: the Viking League, the
Schwarze Reichswehr
(literally “black army,” the underground armed forces that some German officers maintained in the 1920s in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles), and the gymnastics club Olympia, similar to the Turnerschaft Ulrich von Hutten. In Goebbels's account Wessel was a young man who had brought enormous idealism to the Nazi movement, a law student who had gone to live among the workers in the mean streets of Friedrichshain, and recruited them with such success that the Communists assassinated him. The Communists then painted Wessel as a pimp who had been killed by a business rival.

In fact, while it was true enough that Horst Wessel had been killed by a man with Communist ties, Albrecht or “Ali” Höhler, Höhler was more of a pimp and a gangster than a political activist, and Wessel's killing had little to do with politics. It seems to have arisen primarily out of a dispute over rent. At the time of his death, Wessel was mourning the recent death of his brother, and according to one source seemed to be withdrawing from the Nazi movement. He was living with a former (or perhaps still active) prostitute named Erna Jaenichen, with whom he now seemed to spend more evenings than he did with the men of his storm. (Noting this, the men talked of replacing him.) Ali Höhler's lawyer Alfred Apfel claimed later in the 1930s—although unreliably in the view of Wessel's most authoritative biographer—that “I could fill a concentration camp with Nazis if I were ever to reveal the names of the Hitlerites who came to me and thanked me” for having treated Wessel's pimping with discretion.
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Wessel's murder roused Goebbels's newspaper, the
Angriff
(Attack), to a demonstration of the Nazi tactic of doublespeak regarding “legality,” or whether or not the Party planned to come to power through elections rather than through violence. To its base, especially to the young men of the SA, the Party typically suggested with a wink that the “legality” talk was just a ruse to put the authorities off the scent. At the same time, middle-class nationalist voters could be reassured that maybe the Nazis were not so frightening after all. As Wessel lay dying in the Friedrichshain hospital—he lingered for five weeks after the shooting—the
Angriff
concluded that the only thing to do was to “gather power” in order to “exterminate root and branch” the “noxious Communist brood”—this threat indented and set off in bold type from the rest of the article. Immediately after, in an undertone of regular type, came the almost satirical qualifier: “In the most legal way,” followed by “just as one kills off rats or bugs.”
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