In the course of spring and summer 1933 these were either outlawed (starting with the KPD) or they dissolved themselves (the Centre Party formally dissolved itself on 5 July 1933). With the ‘Law Against the Formation of New Parties’ of 14 July 1933 a one-party state was formally established. No longer was there any legal parliamentary opposition: the sole function of the Reichstag was to acclaim the decisions of the Nazi government. Yet this government itself became progressively more chaotic in nature: cabinet meetings were less and less frequent, eventually being so rare that they ceased to fulfill any governmental function; and political decision-making processes became more and more a matter of gaining direct access to the Führer – an increasingly difficult task as he spent more time in his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden and became less interested in the minutiae of most aspects of domestic policy.
On 30 January 1934, one year after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Reichsrat, or upper chamber of the Reichstag, was abolished and the federal system was effectively terminated by removing independent authority from the states. Perhaps the final major event in terms of initial constitutional change came with the death of President Hindenburg on 2 August 1934. Hitler made use of the occasion to merge the offices of President and Chancellor and to take personal command of the armed forces. Abolishing Hindenburg’s title of Reich President, Hitler now styled himself ‘Führer and Reich Chancellor’. The army and public officials had to swear personal oaths of obedience to Hitler – oaths that subsequently proved for many to be a moral obstacle to resistance against Hitler’s regime.
The army was able to ignore or surmount its potential misgivings about Hitler in August 1934 for a number of reasons. For one thing, Hitler had made no secret of his intention to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, revising the much-hated Treaty of Versailles. Hitler’s whipping-up of resentment against Versailles, and his sharp denunciations of the Jews and Bolsheviks whom he held to be the ‘November Criminals’ responsible for Germany’s national humiliation, had been constant themes prior to his coming to power. After becoming Chancellor Hitler had lost little time in setting revisionist policies in motion: on 8 February 1933 Hitler informed ministers that unemployment was to be reduced by rearmament; in July 1933 Krupp’s euphemistically named ‘agricultural tractor programme’ started the production of tanks; and by 1934 explosives, ships and aircraft were in production – all contrary to the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, but greeted with approval by the army itself.
Furthermore, Hitler had just resolved a potential source of friction in relation to the traditional armed forces. The SA, under its leader Ernst Röhm, had become a large and rather unruly organization, propagating unwelcome notions of the need for a ‘second revolution’ and developing into a rival not only for the elite SS but also for the army proper. Hitler decided that the support of the latter two groups was more important to him than was the SA, so he instigated the so-called Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934, during which the leaders of the SA were murdered along with other individuals with whom Hitler had fallen out, including Gregor Strasser, Gustav Kahr (who had been state commissioner for Bavaria at the time of the abortive putsch of 1923) and General von Schleicher. There were also a few cases of mistaken identity. Retroactively this mass murder – which continued for three days, entailing 77 officially admitted deaths, although the true figure was much higher – was ‘legalized’ on 3 July 1934, when a law was passed simply stating that ‘the measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July to strike down the treasonous attacks are justifiable acts of self-defence by the state’.2 Although few can have been genuinely taken in by the Nazi version of the terror, which they represented as a nipping in the bud of a treacherous plot against the regime, the garb of legality helped to allay disquiet in many circles; and many were also to an extent relieved that the more radical, unruly elements in the Nazi Party appeared to be being put in their place. In any event, the purge certainly helped in the co-option of the army by Hitler.
Meanwhile, the Nazi regime was bolstered by an elaborate apparatus of terror. The first concentration camp for political opponents of the regime was opened at Dachau, near Munich, with considerable fanfare and publicity in March 1933. In subsequent years, well before the radicalization of the wartime period, a network of concentration camps was set up across Germany. These camps made use of prisoners as forced labour, sending labour gangs to Aussenlager or subsidiary camps, in the vicinity. Gangs of concentration camp inmates were marched through surrounding towns and villages to work long hours under inhumane conditions with very little food. Within the camps, brutality and violence were the norm. While certain methods of torture and execution were employed, these camps were not intended primarily for the physical destruction of their inmates (as were the extermination camps in the East that functioned from 1942). The SS, under the command of Heinrich Himmler, was able to arrest, detain, imprison, torture and murder, with little respect for any rule of law or putative notion of justice. Himmler, who between 1934 and 1936 took over the police powers of the Reich and State Ministries of the Interior, became on 17 June 1936 ‘Reichsführer-SS und Chef der deutschen Polizei im Reichministerium des Innerns’, thus effectively controlling the means of terror in the Third Reich. Fear of arrest, and fear of informers, led to public conformity and the leading of a double life for many Germans, who withheld their real views and feelings for expression only in complete privacy in the company of family and close friends.
The Nazis attempted to promote a great display of power and unity under the national Führer. The mass parades, the battalions marching past Hitler, the apparently adoring populace, hands raised in the Heil salute, fostered the image of a strong leader and a united people – as encapsulated in the slogan of ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!’ (‘one people, one empire, one leader’) – and indeed the myth of the Führer, above all the petty everyday conflicts and frictions, constituted a powerful element of cohesion in the Third Reich. But to a certain extent the Nazis’ self-promotion has been misleading. The myth of a strong leader in a one-party state, with a single official ideology and the back-up of force, fed into the concept of totalitarianism – a concept that proved particularly useful in the Cold War period after the Second World War when dictatorships of the Left and Right, communist and fascist, were simplistically equated. But it has become increasingly clear to serious analysts of the Third Reich that the monolithic image does not correspond to a more complex reality.
While the Nazis clearly took over the government of Germany, they never entirely took over the state: the tendency was rather to create new parallel party agencies, with spheres of competence and jurisdiction overlapping or competing with those of the existing administration, and armed with plenipotentiary powers directly dependent on the Führer’s will. In this ‘dual state’ there was no rational means of adjudicating between the rival claims of competing agencies to represent the undisputed fount of authority on a given issue – and there were, in addition to conflicts between party and state, also disputes between different party agencies. In the final resort, recourse had to be had to the Führer, and the ‘Führer’s will’ became the ultimate source of authority to resolve all disputes. The ‘Hitler state’, with the Führer often remaining the only final source of arbitration, was to some extent a structural result of this relative administrative chaos.
Since Hitler often stood aside from the fray, only to enter at the last moment to side with the emerging winner, historians such as Hans Mommsen have been inclined to see him as a ‘weak dictator’. However, as many others have rightly pointed out, when it mattered to Hitler he made sure his own views were predominant.3 The degree to which Hitler was able to realize given aims, or intervene in detailed policymaking, varied with respect to economic, foreign and racial policy in both the peacetime and wartime years. German society also proved somewhat resistant to its own reformation into a harmonious ‘national community’.
Society, Culture and Everyday Life
The Nazis wanted not only to control the German people but also to transform them into a cohesive, racially pure ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) of national comrades (Volksgenossen) that would of course exclude those ‘community aliens’ (Gemeinschaftsfremden) who were deemed inferior, ‘pollutants’
