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

by Richard J. Evans

When the sailor Richard Krebs, leader of a detachment of a hundred members of the Red Front-Fighters’ League, was instructed to break up a Nazi meeting in Bremen addressed by Hermann Göring, for instance, he made sure that ‘each man was armed with a blackjack or brass knuckles’. When he rose to speak, Göring ordered him to be thrown out after he had said only a few words; the brownshirts lining the hall rushed to the centre, and: A terrifying mêlée followed. Blackjacks, brass knuckles, clubs, heavy buckled belts, glasses and bottles were the weapons used. Pieces of glass and chairs hurtled over the heads of the audience. Men from both sides broke off chair legs and used them as bludgeons. Women fainted in the crash and scream of battle. Already dozens of heads and faces were bleeding, clothes were torn as the fighters dodged about amid masses of terrified but helpless spectators. The troopers fought like lions. Systematically they pressed us towards the main exit. The band struck up a martial tune. Hermann Göring stood calmly on the stage, his fists on his hips.89 Scenes like this were being played out all over Germany in the early 1930s. Violence was particularly severe at election-time; of the 155 killed in political clashes in Prussia in the course of 1932, no fewer than 105 died in the election months of June and July, and the police counted 461 political riots with 400 injuries and 82 deaths in the first seven weeks of the campaign.90 The task of curbing political vio...