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

by Richard J. Evans

The mood amongst large parts of the Protestant middle classes was captured in the diary of Luise Solmitz, a former schoolteacher living in Hamburg. Born in 1899, and married to an ex-officer, she had long been an admirer of Hindenburg and Hugenberg, saw Brüning with typical Protestant disdain as a ‘petty Jesuit’, and complained frequently in her diary about Nazi violence.153 But in April 1932 she had gone to hear Hitler speak at a mass meeting in a Hamburg suburb and had been filled with enthusiasm by the atmosphere and the public, drawn from all walks of life, as much as by the speech.154 ‘The Hitler spirit carries you away,’ she wrote, ‘is German, and right.’155 All her family’s middle-class friends were supporting Hitler before long, and there was little doubt that they voted for him in July. But they were repelled both by Göring’s cavalier treatment of the Reichstag when it met, and by what they saw as the Nazis’ move to the left in the November election campaign. They now inclined more towards Papen, though never with much enthusiasm because he was a Catholic. ‘I’ve voted for Hitler twice,’ said an old friend, an ex-soldier, ‘but not any more.’ ‘It’s sad about Hitler,’ said another acquaintance: ‘I can’t go along with him any more.’ Hitler’s backing of the Berlin transport workers’ strike, Luise Solmitz thought, cost him thousands of votes. He was not interested in Germany, she concluded pessimistically, only in power. ‘Why has Hitler abandoned us, after he showed us ...