The Coming of the Third Reich (62 page)

Confident that the Social Democratic Party would no longer be able to call upon the unions to support any last-minute resistance it might decide to mount, the regime now began the endgame of closing the party down. On 10 May the government seized the party’s assets and property by court order, justified by the General State Prosecutor in Berlin with reference to the supposed embezzlement of trade union funds by Leipart and others, an accusation that had no basis in fact. Wels had arranged for the party’s funds and archive to be shipped out of the country, but the Nazis’ haul was still considerable. This measure deprived the party of any basis on which it could resurrect either its organization or its newspapers, periodicals and other publications. As a political movement it was effectively finished.
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Yet, astonishingly, none of this prevented the Social Democrats from lending their support to the government in the Reichstag on 17 May, when Hitler put before the legislature a neutrally worded resolution in favour of German equality in international disarmament negotiations. The declaration had no real meaning except the assertion of German rights and no purpose apart from winning some credit for the regime abroad after months in which it had been heavily criticized all over the world; the government had no intention of taking part in any kind of disarmament process in reality. Nevertheless, the Social Democratic deputies, led by Paul Lobe, thought they would be portrayed as unpatriotic if they boycotted the session, so those who were able to do so turned up and joined in the Reichstag’s unanimous approval of the resolution, following a hypocritically moderate and neutrally worded speech by Hitler, to the strains of the national anthem, cries of ‘Hail!’ from the Nazis, and overt satisfaction from Hermann Goring, who declared in his capacity as presiding officer of the Reichstag that the world had now witnessed the unity of the German people when its international fate was at stake. The deputies’ action caused outrage in the party, above all among the leaders now in exile: they condemned the action as the negation of the proud vote against the Enabling Act on 23 March. Otto Wels, who had led the opposition to the vote, withdrew his resignation from the Socialist International. The exiled leadership relocated the party headquarters to Prague. In shame and despair at the failure of the Reichstag deputies to realize that they were being used as part of a Nazi propaganda operation, the most passionate opponent of the decision, Toni Pfülf, one of the leading Socal Democratic women in the Reichstag, boycotted the session and committed suicide on 10 June 1933. Lobe himself was arrested; Wels fled the country.
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The gulf between the new party leadership in Prague and those officials and deputies who remained in Germany rapidly deepened. But the regime declared that it could not see any difference between the two wings of the party; those who had decamped to Prague were traitors defaming Germany from a foreign land and those who had not were traitors for aiding and abetting them. On 21 June 1933 Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick ordered the state governments throughout Germany to ban the Social Democratic Party on the basis of the Reichstag fire decree. No Social Democratic deputies in any legislature were to be allowed to take up their seats any more. All Social Democratic meetings, all Social Democratic publications, were prohibited. Membership in the party was declared incompatible with holding any public office or any position in the civil service. On 23 June 1933 Goebbels wrote triumphantly in his diary that the Social Democratic Party had been ‘dissolved. Bravo! The total state won’t have to wait for long now.’
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Social Democrats did not have to wait long either to discover what the total state would mean. As Frick’s decree of 21 June was being published, over three thousand Social Democratic functionaries were arrested all over Germany, severely manhandled, tortured, and thrown into prisons or concentration camps. In the Berlin suburb of Köpenick, when they encountered armed resistance from one house, the stormtroopers rounded up 500 Social Democrats, and beat and tortured them over a period of several days, killing 91; this concerted assault, savage even by the standards of the brownshirts, quickly became known as the ‘Köpenick Blood-Week’. Particular vengeance was wreaked on anyone associated with the left in Munich in the revolutionary days of 1918-19. Kurt Eisner’s former secretary Felix Fechenbach, now editor of the local Social Democratic newspaper in Detmold, had been arrested on 11 March and put into custody along with most of the leading Social Democrats in the province of Lippe. On 8 August a detachment of stormtroopers took him by car out of the state prison, ostensibly to be transferred to Dachau. But on the way, they forced the accompanying policeman out of the vehicle. Then they drove into a wood, where they took Fechenbach a few paces and shot him dead. The Nazi press reported later that he had been ‘shot while trying to escape’.
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Less controversial figures were targeted, too. The former Minister-President of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Johannes Stelling, a Social Democrat, was taken to a brownshirt barracks, beaten up, and thrown semi-conscious out onto the street, where he was picked up by another gang of stormtroopers, taken off in a car, and tortured to death. His body was sewn into a sack weighted down with stones and thrown into a river. It was later fished out with the bodies of twelve other Social Democratic and Reichsbanner functionaries who had been murdered the same night.
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Similar brutal acts of repression against Social Democrats were carried out all over Germany. Particularly notorious was the makeshift concentration camp opened on 28 April at Dürrgoy, on the southern outskirts of Breslau, by the local brownshirt, Edmund Heines. The camp commandant was a former Free Corps leader and member of a far-right assassination squad, who had been convicted of murder under the Weimar Republic. His prisoners included Hermann Lüdemann, former Social Democratic chief administrator of the Breslau district, the former Social Democratic mayor of the city; and the ex-editor of the Social Democrats’ daily paper in Breslau. Inmates were subjected to repeated beatings and torture. The camp commandant held regular fire drills throughout the night, and had the prisoners beaten as they returned to their barracks. Heines paraded Lüdemann through the streets of Breslau, dressed as a harlequin, to the accompaniment of jeers and insults from watching stormtroopers. He also kidnapped the former Social Democratic President of the Reichstag, Paul Lobe, against whom he had a personal grudge, from his prison in Spandau; pressure from Lobe’s wife and friends quickly secured an order for his release, but he refused to leave, declaring his solidarity with the other Social Democratic prisoners.
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With repression such as this, the party was effectively hounded out of existence well before it fell under the same ban as the Communists on 14 July. In retrospect, its chances of survival had been diminishing rapidly for nearly a year. Decisive in this context was its failure to mount any effective opposition to the Papen coup of 20 July 1932; if there had been any moment when it might have stood up for democracy, that was it. But it is easy to condemn its inaction with hindsight; few in the summer of 1932 could have realized that the amateurish and in many ways rather ludicrous government of Franz von Papen would give way little more than six months later to a regime whose extreme ruthlessness and total disregard for the law were difficult for decent, law-abiding democrats to grasp. In many ways, the labour movement leaders’ desire to avoid violence in July 1932 was thoroughly to their credit; they were not to know that their decision was to play a key role in opening the way to much greater violence later on.

With the crushing of the labour movement, the Nazis, assisted by the state’s law enforcement agencies and the sympathetic inaction of the armed forces, had removed the most serious obstacle to their establishment of a one-party state. The labour movement had been brought to heel, the trade unions smashed, the Social Democratic and Communist Parties, whose combined vote considerably exceeded that of the Nazis in the last fully free elections to the Reichstag in November 1932, had been destroyed in an orgy of violence. There remained, however, another major political force whose members and voters had stayed largely loyal to their principles and representatives throughout the Weimar years: the Centre Party. It derived its strength not simply from political tradition and cultural inheritance, but above all from its identification with the Catholic Church and its adherents. It could not be subjected to the kind of indiscriminate and unbridled brutality that had swept the Communists and the Social Democrats off the political stage. More subtle tactics were required. In May 1933 Hitler and the Nazi leadership set about putting them into action.

III

Clemens August Count von Galen was a Catholic priest of the traditional kind. Born in 1878 into a noble family in Westphalia, he grew up in an atmosphere of aristocratic piety, encouraged by relations such as his great-uncle, Bishop von Ketteler, one of the founders of social Catholicism. The eleventh of thirteen children, Clemens August seemed almost predestined for the priesthood. His parents, their political consciousness awakened by Bismarck’s attempt to repress the Catholic Church in the 1870s, taught him that conscience, especially religious conscience, came before obedience to authority. But they also taught him modesty and simplicity, for they were short of money and lived in Spartan circumstances in a castle that lacked running water, indoor toilets and heating in most of the rooms. Educated partly at home, partly at a Jesuit academy, Galen went on to qualify for university at a state school. In 1904 he entered the priesthood after graduating in theology from Innsbruck. From 1906 to 1929 he served as a parish priest in Berlin, an overwhelmingly Protestant city with a strong, mostly atheistic working class. Six feet seven inches tall, Galen was a commanding presence in more ways than one, winning a reputation for personal asceticism as well as an ability to communicate with the poor. There was a large dose of
noblesse oblige
in his attitude to life.
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With such a background, it is not surprising that Galen’s political views were on the right. He supported the German war effort in 1914-18 and tried (unsuccessfully) to volunteer for military service at the front. He abhorred the 1918 Revolution because it overthrew a divinely ordained state order. He firmly believed in the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth of Germany’s defeat in the war, opposed the Centre Party’s initial commitment to Weimar democracy, and took part, though as a moderating influence, in abortive discussions intended to lead to the foundation of a new Catholic political movement further to the right. Galen excoriated the Weimar constitution as ‘godless’, echoing Cardinal Michael Faulhaber’s condemnation of its secular foundations as ‘blasphemy’. Faulhaber, along with many other priests, welcomed the promise of the Nazi leadership to restore strong Christian foundations to the state in 1933. And indeed, Hitler and most of his leading associates were aware of the breadth and depth of Christian allegiance in the majority of the population, and did not want to antagonize it in the course of suppressing parties such as the Centre. They were thus careful in the early months of 1933 to insist repeatedly on the adherence of the new government to the Christian faith. They declared that the ‘nationalist revolution’ intended to put an end to the materialist atheism of the Weimar left and to propagate a ‘positive Christianity’ instead, above confession and attuned to the Germanic spirit.
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Catholic priests like Galen were generally worried about the position of the Catholic Church in a country where atheistic Communism seemed a major threat. But they also had more secular concerns. The Weimar Republic had seen the Catholic community achieve unprecedented participation in the state, in government and in senior posts in the civil service. In pursuit of the promised Concordat which, they were assured, would preserve these gains, the German bishops withdrew their opposition to Nazism and issued a collective declaration of support for the regime in May. They began to clamp down on local priests who insisted on continuing to voice criticisms of the Nazi movement. Catholic brownshirts and Nazi Party members, unable to attend Mass because the bishops had forbidden the wearing of uniforms in church, began to be seen at Protestant services, where there was no such prohibition, raising the alarming spectacle of a mass defection to the religious opposition. Cardinal Bertram persuaded the bishops to lift the ban.
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Soon, passive toleration had turned to active support. Many priests took part in the public ceremonies held to mark the ‘Day of National Labour’ on I May. The Fulda Bishops’ Conference on 1 June 1933 issued a pastoral letter welcoming the ‘national awakening’ and the new stress on a strong state authority, though it also expressed concerns about the Nazis’ emphasis on race and the looming threat to Catholic lay institutions. Vicar-General Steinmann was photographed raising his arm in the Nazi salute. He declared that Hitler had been given to the German people by God in order to lead them.
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Catholic student organizations published a declaration of loyalty to the new regime (‘the only way to restore Christianity to our culture ... Hail to our Leader Adolf Hitler’). Catholic newspapers ceased publication or turned themselves into something like Nazi propaganda organs.
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