In Europe (35 page)

In the course of the 1920s, former army officers moulded some of these unoffical clans into symbols of a new order, paramilitary groups that marched through the city, emanating a hitherto unknown élan with their gleaming uniforms and rigid discipline. The original handful of sympathisers with the Band of Robbers soon became thousands, then tens of thousands. In the working-class neighbourhoods, ‘SA marschiert’ became a household term. The unemployed housefather who joined the SA suddenly
became
someone, a part of a ‘powerful folk community’ and that lofty mood was raised to even greater heights with torchlight parades and other rituals. A new jargon arose in which words such as ‘pure’, ‘duty’, ‘soldierly’ and ‘fanatic’ took on a special, laudatory meaning. And there was equality. Within the SA there were no classes; that, too, was part of its attraction. ‘You had the son of the preacher, the son of the judge, the son of the doctor, the son of the lathe operator and of the unemployed man,’ a former SA member recalled years later. ‘We all marched side by side, all in the same uniform, all filled with the same ideals, shoulder to shoulder, without social distinction, without a sense of class conflict.’

It was on 17 August, 1924 that Harry Kessler became acquainted at first hand with this ‘new order’. In Weimar he found himself in the midst of the ‘German Days’ organised by the National Socialists. The shopping streets were filled with pennants and flags with swastikas on them, but he detected little enthusiasm as yet on the part of the population. On the balcony of the national theatre, amid a score of swastika banners, General Ludendorff made his appearance. Someone launched into a tirade against Stresemann's ‘Jewish republic’. Ludendorff gave a speech as well, but lost track of what he was saying halfway through and stopped. The general's face was saved when the band nearby struck up a fast march. This was followed by a parade of ‘swastika-bearers’: straight-backed older gentlemen carrying umbrellas, but very few veterans, few Iron Crosses, lots of foolish students.

The Nazis claimed that somewhere between 30–60,000 supporters had come to Weimar, but Kessler estimated that there were no more than 8,000. The reason for that, he said, was clear: a lack of money and a lack of good speakers. ‘No money and no spirit, that's not how one forges a popular movement, let alone a revolution.’ He was right about that. For it was precisely with regard to those two conditions that the Nazi movement was about to change beyond recognition.

On Black Thursday, 24 October, 1929, the Wall Street stock market collapsed. The crisis was felt everywhere in the world, but for Germany it came as a fatal blow. The country's cautious economic recovery, after all, was being financed largely from the United States. In effect, the Dawes Plan was little more than the forced circulation of money: Germany paid recompense to England and France, those two countries paid off their war debts to America, the United States then lent that money to Germany, and so on and on. From 1929, America suddenly kept the payments for itself, the pump broke down and the German economy collapsed once more.

In the course of January 1930, German unemployment rose from 1.5 million to 2.5 million. By April, Berlin alone had 700,000 unemployed. Shops closed by the hundred. The members of the lower-middle class, who had only just caught a whiff of prosperity, were forced back into the tenements, and the workers were put out on the street. Count Kessler lost almost his entire fortune, was forced to sell his publishing house, his Renoirs and Van Goghs, and finally even his books. In the woods around the city, thousands of the unemployed set up tent camps with collective kitchens, schools and playgrounds. In 1931, four million Germans were unemployed; by 1933 that figure had risen to six million.

Looking back on it, it is amazing to see how casually the peaceful Weimar period disintegrated. The first glimpse of decay is seen in the statistics. In summer 1929, Hitler's NSDAP had approximately 120,000 members. One year later, there were almost a million. The Nazis had expected to win a considerable number of parliamentary seats in the elections on 14 September, 1930, but even so were amazed to see their party skyrocket from twelve seats to more than a hundred. The NSDAP had suddenly become the second biggest party in Germany, after the social democrats. Financiers, particularly those from heavy industry, flocked to
the party. The captains of Krupp, Klöckner and IG Farben were good for at least a million marks annually. After 1930, covert funding grew considerably.

1932 was the year of the great contest. First came the presidential elections. Hitler – after a great deal of hesitation – entered the ring against a fatigued Hindenburg. He lost the first round, but still received 11.3 million votes, which meant his constituency had doubled again in two years. Now the Nazis gave it their best shot. The party applied the most modern campaign techniques. Hitler was flown around the country in his own private plane, allowing him to visit twenty cities a week and speak to a quarter of a million people each day. Goebbels had films made of Hitler's speeches, and 50,000 gramophone records so that even the smallest meeting rooms and cafés could hear him speak. At the height of the campaign, Goebbels had – in today's money – a budget of more than half a million euros a week at his disposal: the industrial financiers had apparently become even more enthusiastic. In the long run, Hindenburg was re-elected (with 19.4 million votes), but Hitler (with 13.4 million) had won an additional two million supporters.

The Nazi campaign went on nonstop. The focus was now on Prussia, that great social-democrat stronghold where two thirds of the German population would be going to the polls in two weeks’ time. At one fell swoop, the Nazis became the biggest party there. With the support of the communists, they immediately entered a motion of no confidence against the prime minister, Otto Braun. The prudent social democrat withdrew from his post. A provisional government was set up; the SA provoked more and more disturbances; and after a few months Chancellor Franz von Papen, along with Hitler, seized the opportunity to place Prussia under political receivership. That step – in fact, an outright coup – was completely unconstitutional, but protest was to no avail. Political violence continued to mount, particularly from within the ranks of the SA. During the month of July alone, sixty-eight people were murdered and many hundreds assaulted. The victims were most often communists and socialists.

On 31 July, 1932, national elections were held for the Reichstag. The NSDAP again became the most powerful party by far: it doubled its seats, to 230 of the 604 now contested. According to constitutional procedure,
Hitler had to be appointed chancellor: more Germans had voted for his party than for any other. But this situation was unacceptable to the nation's political grandees. Hindenburg refused to appoint Hitler chancellor. He could not justify it, he said, ‘to God, my conscience or my fatherland’ if he were to place all power in the hands of one party, especially one party so singularly intolerant towards those with other ideas. Behind closed doors, he said that he would appoint ‘that little corporal’ to the position of postman, but never to that of chancellor.

The threat posed by the Nazis did not drive the social democrats and communists closer together. Their relations were still based on old grudges. In early 1932, the KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann went so far as to call the social democrats ‘the moderate wing of fascism’. Ten months later, however, this did not keep the communists from joining forces with the National Socialists in a wildcat strike of Berlin trams and buses against the moderate proposals made by the ‘reformist’ trade unions. On Alexanderplatz, Nazis and ‘Kozis’ jointly stormed a tram running on line 3, fought against the police together at the Schöneberg garages and cooperated in plundering a car belonging to the SPD house organ
Vorwärts
. Tauntingly, that paper wrote: ‘Yesterday one still heard cries of “Brown-Shirted Thuggery” from one side, and “Red
Untermenschen
” from the other! But today a new and solid alliance has been forged! What class-conscious worker could fail to blush at the sight!’

Papen, meanwhile, remained in office at the head of a ‘national cabinet’ and governed by decree. Hitler was furious. Finally, the Reichstag passed a vote of no confidence against Papen. The violence in the streets increased. New elections were scheduled. On 6 November, two days after the Berlin public transport strike, the Nazis lost two million votes, but nonetheless remained the biggest party with 196 of the 584 seats.

Interestingly enough, it was not in Berlin's working-class neighbour-hoods that the NSDAP lost the most votes. Through their brief alliance with the Nazis, the communists had unintentionally given a signal that was to have far-reaching consequences: the Nazis, at least in certain workers’ circles, were no longer pariahs. They belonged.

The day after the elections, the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution was celebrated with a flourish at the Soviet embassy on Unter
den Linden. The arrival of the new order was in the air. It was to be the last major Soviet gathering – for the time being – in Berlin. Even Papen dropped in. The caviar was flown in from Moscow, the wines from the Crimea. Hundreds of guests, diplomats, army officers and journalists elbowed up to the buffet tables, while Lenin looked on.

Throughout that entire year, the success of Stalin's Five-Year Plan had been the talk of Berlin's diplomatic and financial circles: entire cities had been raised from nothing in the Soviet Union, gigantic factories for machinery and tractors built. The country was laying the foundations for lightning-fast industrialisation. In the eyes of many Europeans, the East was giving flower to an attractive and tempting alternative: it was energetic, modern, socially aware and united. Even the Nazis were fascinated by what was going on in Russia: the four-year plan launched by Göring in 1936, with which he hoped to create the most powerful military-industrial complex in Europe, was clearly inspired by the Soviet example.

In winter 1932, the German political scene was caught in a deadlock. The new chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, tried to forge a national coalition from all the parties represented in the Reichstag. On the right he hoped to draw the most reasonable among the Nazis into his cabinet, and on the left the most modern social democrats. He was also hoping in this way to cause a rift within the Nazi party itself. Following the electoral setback in November, Hitler was encountering major problems within his party, his support was dwindling quickly and the Nazis were faced with huge debts. Schleicher, on the other hand, was in complete control, and enjoyed the full support of the military.

In retrospect, it was this temporary setback that finally brought Hitler to power: by early 1933, a number of the country's conservative leaders considered him weak enough to cooperate with safely. On 4 January, the banker Kurt von Schröder arranged a dinner at his villa in Cologne for Franz von Papen and Adolf Hitler. Later that month they met again, at the home of the champagne dealer Joachim von Ribbentrop in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem. Within the political elite, a milieu from which he had always been carefully excluded, Hitler had become
salonfähig
.

And so it was that Papen betrayed his successor and old friend Schleicher. He told Schleicher about the meeting, and claimed that he had tried to win Hitler's support for Schleicher's government. In fact, however, Papen
and Hitler had decided to form a new coalition and bring about Schleicher's downfall at the first opportunity. Hitler was to be made chancellor, and Papen would ‘neutralise’ this with cabinet ministers of his own persuasion. ‘He is going to work for us,’ is what he literally said about Hitler.

The chief remaining obstacle was the president. Papen had something of a father-son relationship with Hindenburg. For that reason, he was the perfect person to undermine the president's resistance to Hitler's chancellorship. How he did so is a mystery, even today. Papen probably convinced the old gentleman that this was the only way to prevent a putsch. In addition, the presidential family was caught up at that moment in a tax-evasion scandal, and pressure was perhaps exerted on Hindenburg's son Oskar as well.

Whatever the case, the old general became party to the conspiracy against Schleicher. When the chancellor reported to Hindenburg in January that his plans for a national coalition had failed, everyone expected the president to disband parliament and call for new elections. Instead, however, he commissioned Papen to form a new government. That was all the opportunity Hitler needed to slip into the chancellery.

The very next day, Göring was able to hang the swastika banner in front of the ministry of internal affairs. Now the Reichstag could be burned to the ground, a wild, solo attack by the Dutch Soviet-style communist Marinus van der Lubbe that was immediately put to good use by the Nazis. Now a host of decrees and emergency measures could be put into effect. Now all the critical journalists, communists, social democrats, artists, Jews and other troublemakers could be arrested and ground to a pulp.

Was Berlin, in 1933, a pro-Nazi or an anti-Nazi town? Only five days before the change of power, on 25 January, the communists organised a mass demonstration against ‘the rise of fascism’. Hundreds of thousands of people took part, and even
Vorwärts
was impressed: ‘In the bitter cold and lashed by the wind they walked for hours, in threadbare coats, thin jackets and worn-out shoes. Tens of thousands of pale faces which spoke of a crisis, and which spoke of the sacrifices they were willing to make for the cause they consider just.’

Five days later, on the evening of 30 January, tens of thousands of
Brownshirts bearing torches filed past the chancellery, where Hitler – in evening attire – looked on from an open window. Out on the street, Kessler noted ‘a complete carnival mood’. The Nazis were ecstatic about this ‘day of national exaltation’ with its ‘roiling, red and brightly burning sea of torches’. The other part of the city's population was stunned. ‘Thinking’ Berlin had never thought that Hitler could come to power. For a little while, everyone hoped against hope that it would all turn out well. And then the great exodus began. Bertolt Brecht was among the first to pack his bags, immediately after the fire at the Reichstag. Kessler went to Paris in early March and never returned: he died four years later, forgotten and penniless, in a French village inn. At Kessler's funeral, old André Gide saw none of the artists whom he ‘during his life had so generously caused to be indebted to him’. The Mann family left for France, and from there for California. Joseph Roth began his melancholy wanderings across Europe, until he met his end at the Parisian Café de la Poste, felled by wine, Pernod and cognac.