President Hindenburg swore in Chancellor Hitler at mid-day January 30, 1933. The political compromises that led to this decision were driven by desperation. The country was hopelessly divided between the extremists of each side. The Nazis and Communists were electorally equally matched and of much more importance in the body politic than the centrist parties of the Catholic Center and the Social Democrats. Reason had departed from whatever was left of the Weimar Republic. The previous decade-and-a-half had seen defeat, degradation, devaluation, anti-semitism, reparations, and depression. Indeed, the Berlin of that winter was marked by malnutrition, unemployment and grinding poverty. The Nazis had been a feature on the national scene for years,
but powered to the top in 1930-1932 when their share of the Reichstag vote moved from 2.8% to 37%. They accomplished their move by relentless effort all around the country, with a well organized ground game led by the hardest worker of them all, Hitler. He never tired of driving and flying around Germany and making multiple speeches a day. It is believed he spoke to 4 million people in person in 1932. His rabble rousing denunciations of the 'stab in the back' and Versailles resonated across all classes and religions. The Nazis sought to unify the country by first breaking down the barriers dividing the country. That said, the Nazis could not unseat Hindenburg's majority party for the presidency, nor could Hindenburg and the forces of the right find a chancellor other than the 'Bohemian corporal'. The conservatives who acquiesced to Hitler disdained him and his mob and believed they could control him. Von Papen, a recent chancellor, said, "We'll box Hitler in......after all, we've hired him." The right wished to break Weimar and they did, just not quite how they had anticipated. There was a massive torchlight rally that night in Berlin, reviewed by Hindenburg and Hitler, celebrating what the Nazi's called the "spirit of 1914." Hitler, hoping for a legislative majority, persuaded Hindenburg to call Reichstag elections for March 5th. The campaign was the first time the Nazis had access to the radio and they blanketed the airwaves for a month. The Reichstag fire of February 27th proved to be a pivotal moment, as it led the following day to emergency legislation that paved the way for dictatorship. Goring, as Prussian Minister of the Interior, arrested innumerable communists and basically frightened the Reds from voting. On the 5th, the Nazis achieved 44% and the Nationalists 8%, thus allowing a right wing conservative majority to form a government. "The week that followed the elections was the single most consequential in German history." The Nazis attacked Jews, communists, Social Democrats and prepared to take over the state. Newspapers were abolished. "Assertions about communist terrorism produced a concrete policy of ant-terrorism that installed the dictatorship." From one end of the country to the other, brown shirted SA stormtroopers marched to city hall and beat and tortured officials until they quit, were jailed or executed. It was a literal and illegal reign of terror. By the middle of March, the communist and SD parties ceased to exist. On March 23rd, the Reichstag passed an Enabling Act authorizing Hitler's dictatorship. "Most Germans preferred a Nazi future to the Weimar past." It offered renewal and reunion. "Germans credited the Nazis with finally putting in place the national solidarity they had yearned for after the lost war and years of revolution and counterrevolution." The Protestant establishment viewed the immorality of the Weimar years as if it were the 'passion of Christ', assisted in its degradation by Jews and communists in the big cities. The Nazis also embraced and honored the one-third of German males who were war veterans. They attracted the working man by co-opting May Day by recognizing it as a national holiday and calling it the National Day of Labor. April saw the boycott of Jewish businesses and the removal of Jews, of whom there were about half-a-million, from all civil service positions in the Reich. The SA began indiscriminately beating and murdering Jews in the street. German society was severed, and Jews were excluded. The year 1933 marked the end of the post-war period and the ascendancy of the Nazis as the number one news story in the world. All of a sudden, the world became focused on the likelihood of a second war. The Nazis had taken over Germany quickly and violently and the Germans went along willingly after the first weeks and months. This is a magnificent and highly recommended book. It tells not what happened, but how and why it happened better than any I can recollect. My only quibble is that the author stretches out the last third of the book on events after the first hundred days, and around Europe as well. But again, I think this is a must for those who seek to try and understand the story behind the century's greatest calamity.
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