The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany

by Richard J. Evans

Berlin in particular, as it grew rapidly to the size and status of a cosmopolitan metropolis, had already become the centre for a variety of social and sexual subcultures, including a thriving gay and lesbian scene.134 Critics linked these trends to what they saw as the looming decline of the family, caused principally by the growing economic independence of women.

also gave increasing numbers of young, unmarried women a financial and social independence they had not enjoyed before. This became even more marked after 1918, when there were 11.5 million women at work, making up 36 per cent of the working population. Although this was by no means a dramatic change from the situation before the war, many of them were now in publicly conspicuous jobs such as tram-conducting, serving in department stores, or, even if it was only a handful, in the legal, university and medical professions.135 Increased female competition for male jobs, and a more general fear among nationalists that Germany’s strength was being sapped by the birth rate decline that set in around the turn of the century, merged with wider cultural anxieties to produce a backlash that was already becoming evident before 1914.136 There was a discernible crisis of masculinity in Germany before the war, as nationalists and Pan-Germans began to clamour for women’s return to home and family in order to fulfil their destiny of producing and educating more children for the nation.

To nationalists, the feminists seemed to be little better than national traitors for encouraging women to work outside the home. Yet the feminists themselves were scarcely less alarmed by the new atmosphere of sexual liberation.

Young people, and especially adolescent boys, were already developing a distinctive cultural style of their own before the First World War. A key role in this was played by the ‘youth movement’, a disparate but rapidly growing collection of informal clubs and societies that focused on activities such as hiking, communing with nature and singing folk songs and patriotic verses while sitting around camp fires. Of course, all the political parties attempted to recruit young people, particularly after 1918, by providing them with their own organizations – the Bismarck Youth for the Nationalists, for example – or the Windthorst League for the Centre Party – but what was striking about the youth movement in general was its independence from formal political institutions, often combined with a contempt for what its leading figures saw as the moral compromises and dishonesties of adult political life. The

Many if not most youth groups wore paramilitary uniforms along the lines of the Boy Scouts, and were more than tinged with antisemitism, often refusing to admit Jews to their ranks. Some underlined the need for moral purity, and rejected smoking, drinking or liaisons with girls.

For young men who subsequently became Nazis, the beginnings of political commitment often lay more in political rebellion against the rigidities of the school system than in the inspiration of Nazi or proto-Nazi teachers.

The Student Unions formed a national association and began to have some influence in areas such as student welfare and university reform. But they too fell under the influence of the far right. Under the impact of political events, from the final acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923, fresh generations of students streamed into nationalist associations, and flocked to the colours of the traditional student corps. Soon, right-wing slates of candidates were being elected to all the Student Unions, while students’ disillusion with Germany’s new democracy grew as inflation rendered their incomes worthless and overcrowding made conditions in the universities ever more unbearable.

A young clerk, born in 1911, later wrote: We were not spared anything. We knew and felt the worries in the house. The shadow of necessity never left our table and made us silent. We were rudely pushed out of our childhood and not shown the right path. The struggle for life got to us early. Misery, shame, hatred, lies, and civil war imprinted themselves on our souls and made us mature early.149 The generation born between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the First World War was indeed a generation of the unconditional, ready for anything; in more than one respect, it was to play a fateful role in the Third Reich.

The huge publicity given to serial killers convinced many, not only that the death penalty had to be rigorously enforced against such ‘bestial’ individuals, but also that censorship needed to be reintroduced to stop their celebration in popular culture and the daily boulevard press.

Yet the judges themselves, in the altered context of the advent of a parliamentary democracy, could be regarded as exploiting trials for their own political purposes, too. After years, indeed decades, of treating Social Democratic and left-liberal critics of the Kaiser’s government as criminals, judges were unwilling to readjust their attitudes when the political situation changed. Their loyalty was given, not to the new Republic, but to the same abstract ideal of the Reich which their counterparts in the officer corps continued to serve; an ideal built largely on memories of the authoritarian system of the Bismarckian Reich.

In the mid-1920s the left-wing statistician Emil Julius Gumbel published figures showing that the 22, political murders committed by left-wing offenders from late 1919 to mid-1922, led to 38 convictions, including 10 executions and prison sentences averaging 15 years apiece. By contrast, the 354 political murders which Gumbel reckoned to have been committed by right-wing offenders in the same period led to 24 convictions, no executions at all, and prison sentences averaging a mere 4 months apiece; 23 right-wing murderers who confessed to their crimes were actually acquitted by the courts.157 Of course, these statistics may not have been entirely accurate.

The creation of these courts, with their bypassing of the normal legal system, including the absence of any right of appeal against their verdicts, and their implicit ascription of justice to ‘the people’ rather than to the law, set an ominous precedent for the future, and was to be taken up again by the Nazis in 1933.161

In order to try and counter these influences, the Social Democrats managed to push through a Law for the Protection of the Republic in 1922; the resulting State Court was intended to remove the trial of right-wing political offenders from an all-too-sympathetic judiciary and place it in the hands of appointees of the Reich President.

Democrats, although supposedly committed to opposing the death penalty as a matter of political principle, inserted it into the Law for the Protection of the Republic and gave retrospective approval to summary executions carried out in the civil disorders of the immediate postwar period. In doing so, they made it easier for a future government to introduce similarly draconian laws for the protection of the state, and to confound a central principle of justice – that no punishments should be applied retrospectively to offences which did not carry them at the time they were committed.163 This, too, was a dangerous precedent for the future.

The distinction the Reich Court made between the two kinds of state, and the hint that the Weimar Republic was merely some kind of temporary aberration which was not ‘constitutionally anchored’, demonstrated only too clearly where the judges’ real allegiance lay.

As the social welfare administration mushroomed into a huge bureaucracy, so the doctrines of racial hygiene and social biology, already widespread among

welfare professionals before the war, began to acquire more influence.

Legal officials in many parts of Germany now made liberal use of terms such as ‘vermin’ or ‘pest’ to describe criminals, denoting a new, biological way of conceptualizing the social order as a kind of body, from which harmful parasites and alien micro-organisms had to be removed if it was to flourish.

‘What an agonizing tragicomedy’, he wrote, ‘that 5,000–8,000 soldiers can overthrow the whole German Reich.’

After the war, the widespread belief on the right that the German army had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by revolutionaries in 1918 translated easily into antisemitic demagogy. It was, men like Ludendorff evidently believed, ‘the Jews’ who had done the stabbing, who led subversive institutions like the Communist Party, who agreed to the Treaty of Versailles, who set up the Weimar Republic. In fact, of course, the German army was defeated militarily in 1918. There was, as we have seen, no stab-in-the-back. Leading politicians who signed the Treaty, like Matthias Erzberger, were not Jewish at all.

Most Jewish Germans supported the solid liberal parties of the centre, or to a lesser extent the Social Democrats, rather than the revolutionary left, whose violent activism shocked and appalled a respectable citizen like Klemperer. Nevertheless, the events of 1918–19 gave a boost to antisemitism on the right, convincing many waverers that racist conspiracy theories about the Jews were correct after all.198

Suddenly a whistle sounds. In a long human chain, covering the entire width of the street, a police cordon advances. ‘Clear the street!’ an officer cries. ‘Go into your houses!’ The crowd slowly moves on. Everywhere with the same shouts: ‘Beat the Jews to death!’ Demagogues have manipulated the starving people for so long that they fall upon the wretched creatures who pursue a miserable goods trade in the Dragoon Street cellar … it is inflamed racial hatred, not hunger, that is driving them to loot.

Young lads

immediately follow every passer-by with a Jewish appearance, in order to fall upon him...

Such a public outburst of violence was symptomatic of the new preparedness of antisemites, like so many other groups on the fringes of German politics, to stir up or actively employ violence and terror to gain their ends, rather than remaining content, as they mostly had been before 1914, with mere words. A wave of still imperfectly documented incidents of personal violence against Jews and their property, attacks on synagogues, acts of desecration carried out in Jewish cemeteries, was the result.

While the overwhelming majority of Germans still rejected the use of physical force against Jews during the Weimar Republic, the language of antisemitism became embedded in mainstream political discourse as never before. The ‘stab-in-the-back’, the ‘November traitors’, the ‘Jewish Republic’, the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy’ to undermine Germany – all these and many similar demagogic slogans could be regularly read in the papers, whether as expressions of editorial opinion or in reporting of political incidents, speeches and trials. They could be heard day after day in legislative assemblies, where the rhetoric of the Nationalists, the second largest party after the Social Democrats during the middle years of the Republic, was shot through with antisemitic phrases.

The sensibility of many Germans was so blunted by this tide of antisemitic rhetoric that they failed to recognize that there was anything exceptional about a new political movement that emerged after the end of the war to put antisemitism at the very core of its fanatically held beliefs: the Nazi Party.

When things began to fall apart on 7 November 1918, it was Eisner who, thanks to his gift for rhetoric and his disdain for political convention, took the lead in Munich.

Accompanied by a group of followers, Eisner proceeded to do just that, meeting with no resistance from the soldiers. Obtaining authorization from the local revolutionary workers’ and soldiers’ council, Eisner proclaimed Bavaria a Republic and established a revolutionary government staffed by Majority and Independent Social Democrats, with himself at its head. But his government failed utterly in the basic tasks of maintaining food supplies, providing jobs, demobilizing the troops and keeping the transport system going. The conservative Bavarian peasantry, outraged at the events in Munich, were withholding foodstuffs, and the Allies had requisitioned most of the railway locomotives. Workers began to heckle Eisner and shout him down at meetings. In cabinet, Eisner was angrily told by one of its members: ‘You are an anarchist … You are no statesman, you are a fool … We are being ruined by bad management.’3 Not surprisingly, therefore, elections held on 12 January resulted in a crushing victory for the Majority Social Democrats and a humiliating defeat for Eisner’s Independents.

Eisner was everything the radical right in Bavaria hated: a bohemian and a Berliner, a Jew, a journalist, a campaigner for peace during the war, and an agitator who had been arrested for his part in the January strikes of 1918.

He was, in short, the ideal object onto which the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend could be projected.

Once more, literary bohemianism had come to the fore, this time in the form of a dramatist rather than a critic. Only 25, Ernst Toller had made his name as a poet and playwright. More of an anarchist than a socialist, Toller enrolled like-minded men in his government, including another playwright, Erich Mühsam, and a well-known anarchist writer, Gustav Landauer.

Meanwhile, Toller announced a comprehensive reform of the arts, while his government declared that Munich University was open to all applicants except those who wanted to study history, which was abolished as hostile to civilization.

In this situation, a panicky unit of the Red Army began to take reprisals against hostages imprisoned in a local school, the Luitpold Gymnasium. These included six members of the Thule Society, an antisemitic, Pan-German sect, founded towards the end of the war. Naming itself after the supposed location of ultimate ‘Aryan’ purity, Iceland (‘Thule’), it used the ‘Aryan’ swastika symbol to denote its racial priorities.

‘The psyche of the great masses’, he wrote, ‘is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak … The masses love a commander more

than a petitioner.’ He added: ‘I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror towards the individual and the masses … Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror.’

And he gained much of his oratorical success by telling his audiences what they wanted to hear. He used simple, straightforward language that ordinary people could understand, short sentences, powerful, emotive slogans.

His speeches often began with an account of his own poverty-stricken early life, to which he drew an implicit parallel with the downcast, downtrodden and desperate state of Germany after the First World War, then, his voice rising, he would describe his own political awakening, and point to its counterpart in Germany’s future recovery and return to glory. Without necessarily using overtly religious language, Hitler appealed to religious archetypes of suffering, humiliation, redemption and resurrection lodged deep within his listeners’ psyche;

the party changed its name in February 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party; hostile commentators soon abbreviated this to the word ‘Nazi’, just as the enemies of the Social Democrats had abbreviated the name of that party earlier on to ‘Sozi’.

The ‘National Socialists’ wanted to unite the two political camps of left and right into which, they argued, the Jews had manipulated the German nation. The basis for this was to be the idea of race. This was light years removed from the class-based ideology of socialism. Nazism was in some ways an extreme counter-ideology to socialism, borrowing much of its rhetoric in the process, from its self-image as a movement rather than a party, to its much-vaunted contempt for bourgeois convention and conservative timidity. The idea of a ‘party’ suggested allegiance to parliamentary democracy, working steadily within a settled democratic polity.

By presenting itself as a ‘movement’, National Socialism, like the labour movement, advertised its opposition to conventional politics and its intention to subvert and ultimately overthrow the system within which it was initially forced to work.

The synthesis of right and left was neatly symbolized in the Party’s official flag, personally chosen by Hitler in mid-1920: the field was bright red, the colour of socialism, with the swastika, the emblem of racist nationalism, outlined in black in the middle of a white circle at the centre of the flag, so that the whole ensemble made a combination of black, white and red, the colours of the official flag of the Bismarckian Empire.

Nazism would also have been possible, however, without the Communist threat; Hitler’s anti-Bolshevism was the product of his antisemitism and not the other way round.33 His principal political targets remained the Social Democrats and the vaguer spectre of ‘Jewish capitalism’.

The other man whom Eckart brought into the Nazi Party was Hans Frank.

He qualified as a lawyer, with a doctorate in 1924, and his legal expertise, however limited, was to prove extremely useful to the Party. Up to 1933 he represented it in over 2,400 cases brought against its members, usually for acts of violence of one kind or another. Soon after he defended some Nazi thugs in court for the first time, a senior lawyer who had been one of his teachers said: ‘I beg you to leave these people alone! No good will come of it! Political movements that begin in the criminal courts will end in the criminal courts!’41

The new note of physical violence in the Nazi campaign reflected not least the rapid growth of the Party’s paramilitary wing, founded early in 1920 as a ‘hall protection’ group, soon renamed the ‘Gymnastics and Sports Section’. With their brown shirts and breeches, jackboots and caps – a uniform that only found its final form in 192447 – its members soon became a familiar sight on Munich’s streets, beating up their opponents on the streets and attacking anyone they thought looked like a Jew.

The relative immunity from police interference which they enjoyed reflected in the first place the fact that the Bavarian government, led by Gustav Ritter von Kahr, had long been sympathetic to paramilitary movements of the far right, as part of the counter-revolutionary ‘white terror’ of 1919–20.

Mussolini’s example influenced the Nazi Party in a number of ways, notably in its adoption in late 1922 and early 1923 of the title of ‘Leader’ – Duce in Italian, Führer in German – to denote the unquestionable authority of the man at the movement’s head.

It was masculinist and anti-feminist, seeking a state in which men would rule and women would be reduced mainly to the functions of childbearing and childrearing. It elevated the leader to a position of unchallenged authority. It espoused a cult of youth, declaring its intention of sweeping away old institutions and traditions and creating a new form of human being, tough, anti-intellectual, modern, secular and above all fanatically devoted to the cause of his own nation and race.56 In all these respects, it provided a model and a parallel for the emerging Nazi Party.

Many Germans living in the Rhineland and the Saar felt humiliated that, as one of them later put it, ‘Siamese, Senegalese and Arabs made themselves the masters of our homeland’.60 Soon, cartoonists were arousing racist and nationalist emotions by penning crude, semi-pornographic sketches of bestial black soldiers carrying off innocent white German women to a fate worse than death.