The Coming of the Third Reich (63 page)

While this situation was developing, the Centre Party leader, Prelate Kaas, went on an extended visit to the Vatican to help draft the Concordat. It soon became clear that he was willing to sacrifice the party as a condition of the regime’s signature. In early May he resigned as party leader, pleading ill-health. He was succeeded by the former Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, who immediately became the object of a pale imitation of the leadership cult that surrounded the person of Hitler. Centre Party newspapers now referred to Brüning as the ‘Leader’ and declared that his Catholic ‘retinue’ would ‘submit’ itself to his decisions.
¹³⁶
All the party’s deputies and officials tendered their resignations and gave Brüning full power to reappoint them or find replacements. This included the Reichstag deputies, who owed their election to their place on the party’s list of candidates and thus could indeed be replaced at Brüning’s whim by others lower down the list. So the Centre Party now, de facto, replaced the idea of an elected Reichstag by an appointed one. Brüning announced a thorough reform of the party’s structure, and in the meantime moved closer still to the Nazi regime, persuading his deputies to vote for the government’s foreign policy declaration on 17 May 1933 and personally helping Hitler draft the remarkably moderate-sounding speech with which he presented it to the legislature. Brüning’s willingness to compromise did not stop the political police from tapping his telephone and opening his mail, as he told the British Ambassador Sir Horace Rumbold in mid-June. According to Rumbold, Brüning now took the view that only the restoration of the monarchy could rescue the situation, an opinion he had in fact held for several years.

The former Chancellor seemed to have little idea of the extent of the repression now bearing down upon his party’s members. Its newspapers were being banned or taken away from it. Its local and regional organizations were being closed down one by one. Its ministers in every state had been removed from office. Its civil servants, despite constant reassurances from Hermann Goring, were under continual threat of dismissal. Its 200,000 members were resigning from the party in ever-growing numbers. From May onwards, leading Catholic politicians, lawyers, activists in lay organizations, journalists and writers, were arrested as well, particularly if they had published critical articles about the Nazis or the government. On 26 June 1933, Himmler, as police chief of Bavaria, ordered that not only the entire body of Reichstag and state legislature deputies of the Bavarian People’s Party, closely allied to the Centre, should be taken into ‘protective custody’ but also all ‘those persons who have been particularly active in party politics’.
¹³⁷
On 19 June the Württemberg State President Eugen Bolz, one of the Centre’s leading conservatives, was arrested and severely beaten; senior civil servants such as Helene Weber, who was also a Centre Party Reichstag deputy, were suspended from office; and the organization of the Catholic trade unions was forced to dissolve itself. These were only the most prominent and widely publicized cases in a whole new round of arrests, beatings and dismissals. At a local level, one Catholic lay organization after another came under pressure to close down or join the Nazi Party, arousing widespread concern amongst the Church hierarchy. While Papen and Goebbels demanded the Centre Party’s dissolution with increasing vehemence in public, negotiations in Rome, joined towards the end of the month by Papen himself, produced an agreement that the party should cease to exist once the Concordat had been concluded.
¹³⁸

The final text of the Concordat, agreed on 1 July with the approval of Papen and Kaas and signed a week later, included a ban on priests engaging in political activity. Centre Party national and state legislators began resigning their seats or transferring to the Nazis, as did a number of councillors in Berlin, Frankfurt and other cities. Even Brüning now finally understood the writing on the wall. The party formally dissolved itself on 5 July, telling its Reichstag deputies, state legislators and local elected representatives to approach their Nazi colleagues with a view to transferring their allegiance to them. The party’s members, declared the leadership, now had the opportunity to place themselves ‘without reservation’ behind the national front led by Hitler. What was left of the party press portrayed the end as the outcome not of external pressure but of an inevitable inner development which placed the Catholic community behind the new Germany in a historic transformation of the national polity. The party administration not only instructed all the party organizations to dissolve themselves but also warned that it was co-operating with the political police in implementing the dissolution procedure. Predictably enough, the Nazis preferred to persuade the party’s legislators to resign their seats rather than find a new home in the Nazi Party delegations as they had envisaged.
¹³⁹

Together with the labour movement, the Centre Party had offered the only effective resistance to the electoral inroads of the Nazis in the early 1930s. The cohesion and discipline of the two political milieux had been the product, among other things, of the persecution they had both suffered under Bismarck. But while the Social Democrats and, later, the Communists, had been driven into a state of permanent opposition and isolation by the experience of repression, the reaction of the Catholics had been to put reintegration into the national community above almost any other aim. Leading Catholic politicians such as Papen and, to a lesser extent, Brüning and Bolz, lacked the commitment to democracy that had characterized figures such as Wilhelm Marx or Matthias Erzberger in the Republic’s early days. The Church as a whole was turning against parliamentary democracy all over Europe in the face of the Bolshevik threat. In this situation, the dissolution of the party seemed a small sacrifice to make in the interests of what almost every leading figure involved saw as the securing of binding guarantees from the new regime for the continued autonomy of the Catholic Church and the full participation of Catholics in the new German order. Just how binding these guarantees were, the Catholics would soon find out.

Meanwhile, on 28 October 1933, Clemens August Count von Galen was consecrated Catholic Bishop of Münster, the first such elevation to take place after the signing of the Concordat. In his address to the congregation, Galen declared that his duty as he saw it was to tell the truth, to pronounce on ‘the difference between justice and injustice, on good and bad actions’. Before his installation, he had called on Hermann Goring, the Prussian Minister-President, to whom, in accordance with the terms of the Concordat, he swore an oath of loyalty to the state. In a symbolic act of reciprocity, local Nazi and brownshirt officials from the District Leader downwards filed past him during the consecration ceremony in Münster, saluting him with the outstretched arm of the ‘German greeting’. Swastika-bearing columns of stormtroopers and SS men lined the roads for the episcopal procession. They paraded past Galen’s palace in a torchlit procession the same evening. The reconciliation of Nazism and Catholicism seemed, at least for the time being, complete.
¹⁴⁰

IV

The destruction of the Communists, the Social Democrats and the Centre Party was the most difficult part of the Nazis’ drive to create a one-party state. Together, these three parties represented far more voters than the Nazi Party itself ever won in a free election. In comparison to the problems they posed, getting rid of the other parties was easy. Most of them had lost virtually every vote and seat in the Reichstag they had ever possessed. They were ripe for picking off one by one. By early 1933 the only one among them which had belonged to the coalition of parties that had supported the Weimar Republic from the beginning, the State Party (formerly the Democrats) was drifting helplessly at the mercy of events, reduced to two seats in the Reichstag and issuing pathetic appeals to other parties to take its deputies under their wing. It continued to advertise its opposition to the Nazis, but at the same time it was also advocating the revision of the constitution in an unmistakeably authoritarian direction. It failed to improve its support in the elections of March 1933, though by tagging its candidates onto the much better supported Social Democratic Party list, it increased its representation in the Reichstag from 2 seats to 5. With strong reservations, but unanimously, the party’s deputies, including the later Federal German President Theodor Heuss, voted for the Enabling Law on 23 March 1933, cowed by Hitler’s threat of a bloodbath should the vote go against him. In practice their votes made no difference, as they must have known. The party’s parliamentary floor leader Otto Nuschke began signing his official letters with the ‘German freedom greeting’ and urged recognition of the government’s legitimacy. Meanwhile, civil servants, who had been a major element in the party, were leaving it en masse to join the Nazis in a bid to keep their jobs. Ever since the party had been pushed to the fringe in the elections of 1930 there had been repeated discussions over the question of whether it was worth going on. The brownshirts unleashed a fresh campaign of terror on the few remaining deputies, officials and local councillors who openly declared their allegiance to the party. The government then stripped its Reichstag deputies of their seats, on the grounds that they had stood on the Social Democratic list in the March election and were therefore Social Democrats. After this, the party leadership finally gave up and declared the State Party formally dissolved on 28 June 1933.
¹⁴¹

The People’s Party, which had moved sharply to the right after the death of its leading figure for most of the Weimar years, Gustav Stresemann, in 1929, began to shed its liberal wing in 1931 - ‘liberal’ being defined by this time as support for the Brüning government, yet another measure of how far the political spectrum had shifted to the right - and agitate for a general coalition of all nationalist forces, including the Nazis. The more the party lost electoral support, however, the more it disintegrated into a chaos of warring factions. With only 7 seats left in the Reichstag after July 1932, the People’s Party had been pushed far out onto the political fringe. Its leader by this time, the lawyer Eduard Dingeldey, thought it a good idea to join forces with the Nationalists in a common electoral list in November 1932. This drove out the remaining liberals from the party but failed to bring it any real gains. Alarmed at this sign of further dissolution, Dingeldey abandoned the pact with the Nationalists for the next election, with the result that the People’s Party was able to win only 2 seats in March 1933. This was all that was left of the proud tradition of Germany’s National Liberal Party, which had dominated the Reichstag in the 1870s and done so much to soften the harsh contours of Bismarck’s creation with a broad palette of liberal legislation. While Dingeldey withdrew from politics for two months as a result of a serious illness, the party’s remaining members, and in particular civil servants frightened for their jobs, began to leave in large numbers, while others, led by the deputy leader, urged the party to dissolve itself and formally merge with the Nazis. When Dingeldey succeeded in preventing this, the party’s right wing resigned. His efforts to obtain an audience with Hitler or Goring were rebuffed. Fearing for the safety of the party’s remaining officials and deputies in the general atmosphere of intimidation, Dingeldey announced the dissolution of the People’s Party on 4 July. As a reward, he obtained an audience with Hitler three days later, and the Nazi Leader’s assurance that former party members would not suffer any discrimination because of their political past. Needless to say, this did not prevent the Nazis from enforcing the resignation of former People’s Party deputies from legislatures all over Germany, nor the dismissal of civil servants on grounds of opposition to the National Socialist movement. Dingeldey’s protests at such actions were contemptuously brushed aside.
¹⁴²

The Nationalist Party under Alfred Hugenberg had hardly been any more successful than the two liberal parties in electoral terms. It had lost almost all its votes to the Nazis in the early 1930s. Yet it regarded itself as the main coalition partner of the Nazis, whom it had always treated with a certain degree of condescension. Leading Nationalists welcomed the fact that the Hitler cabinet marked the definitive end of the parliamentary system and the beginning of a dictatorship. Hugenberg campaigned vigorously in the elections of 5 March 1933 for an overall majority with the Nazis that would provide popular legitimacy for this transformation. Yet the leading Nationalists were uncomfortably aware that this left them extremely vulnerable. They warned against the ‘socialism’ of the Nazis and pleaded for a ‘non-party’ government. Certainly, the Nazis were careful to maintain the illusion of a genuine coalition during the campaign. No Nationalist newspapers were banned, no Nationalist meetings broken up and no Nationalist politicians arrested. But the massive repression and violence of the campaign were wholly exerted in favour of the Nazis. On 5 March the Nazis got their reward, increasing their representation in the Reichstag from 196 seats to 288. The Nationalists, by contrast, did not manage to improve their situation significantly, winning 52 seats instead of 51. These seats, and the 8 per cent of the vote they represented, were enough to push the coalition over the 50 per cent mark. But the electoral results demonstrated graphically how unequal the coalition partners were. On the streets, the paramilitary ‘fighting leagues’ associated with the Nationalists could in no way compete with the might of the brownshirts and the SS. And the Nationalists had failed to win the unconditional allegiance of the Steel Helmets, the one major paramilitary group that seemed to share their political views.