The Nazi Capture of Power
Author(s): Richard Bessel
Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 39, No. 2, Understanding Nazi Germany (Apr.,
2004), pp. 169-188
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
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HistoryCopyright? 2004 SAGEPublications,London,Thousand Oaks, CA and
Journalof Contemporary
New Delhi, Vol 39(2), 169-188. ISSN0022-0094.
DOI: 10.1177/0022009404042127
RichardBessel
The Nazi Capture of Power
The captureof state power by Adolf Hitler and the nazi movementin 1933
marks one of the great, and dreadful,turning-pointsin modern history.The
installationof the nazi leader in the Reich Chancelleryon 30 January1933
openedthe door to a brutalracistdictatorship,to a world war which claimed
the lives of perhaps50 million people, to campaignsof mass murderwhich
were unprecedentedeven in the terribletwentiethcentury,to the extinguishing
of Germansovereigntyand to the divisionof Europeinto hostile armedcamps
for nearlyhalf a century.The nazi captureof power was the step which made
the most appallingtrail of destructionpossible - destructionof bricks and
mortar, destructionof human life, destructionof morality and of civilized
behaviour.It openedthe door to barbarism.
As a consequenceof this, the nazi captureof power has come to occupy a
ratherpeculiarpositionin the historyand historiographyof modernGermany:
its significancerests less upon what occurredin 1933 per se than upon what
happenedlater- as a resultof the fact that Adolf Hitlerand his bandof racist
political gangsters,backedby the greatestmass movementwith the broadest
popularappealthat Germanyhad ever seen, were able to gain control of the
most powerful advancedindustrialstate in Europe. As a result, our focus,
increasingly,has been on what followed from that catastrophicevent rather
than on the eventitself;the mainthemeswhich have fuelledinterestin the nazi
capture of power are not necessarilythe main themes of what unfolded in
Germanyduringthe earlymonthsof 1933. Most conspicuously,and for good
reason, the monstrouscrimes unleashedand carriedout by the nazi regime
during the second world war have formed the main focus of the enormous
quantityof recentresearchon and discussionof nazi Germany.The historyof
the Third Reich seems to have become synonymouswith the history of its
crimes,an historiographicalshift which can be seen most clearlyin the recent
synthesisby MichaelBurleigh.1Nazi Germanyis viewedas a house of horrors,
and the accessionof Hitler to power is of interestprimarilyas the gatewayto
this house of horrors.
This, in turn,has meantthat manyof the themeswhich frameddiscussionof
the 'naziseizureof power'20 or 30 yearsago havetendedto recedesomewhat
into the background.The compositionof popularsupportfor the Nazi Party
(particularlyits class composition),the backinggiventhe nazis by leadingeconomic interests,the response of the Left to the nazi advance, the intrigues
This article was first delivered in 2002 as a Trevelyan Lecture at the University of Cambridge.
1
Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (London 2000).
170
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
involved in lifting the 'Bohemian corporal' into the saddle in January 1933 these once were topics of considerable discussion and heated debate, but now
seem consigned largely to that graveyard of historical debate, the A-level syllabus. Topics which now, rightly, demand our attention - most importantly the
persecution of the Jews and the lineages of the racial state - appear peripheral
to the well-rehearsed explanations of how the nazis came to power. And, conversely, the key elements of older, conventional explanations of how Hitler
came to power now may appear peripheral to the profound questions concerning how Germany sank into the abyss of inhumanity and barbarism.
Perhaps the clearest example of this shift of focus and the implications it has
had for our understanding of the nazi capture of power concerns the role of
antisemitism. Due to the central importance which the murder of the vast
majority of Europe's Jews has for any attempt to understand the history of
nazi Germany, and to the fact that racism and antisemitism have been at the
heart of the most informative and perceptive recent studies of the Third Reich,
it can be difficult to accept that overt antisemitism may have been of secondary importance in getting the nazis into power. Of course, there can be little
doubt that hatred of and prejudice against Jews specifically, and racist attitudes generally, formed a primary and obsessive motivation for many activists
to join the nazi movement during the 1920s and early 1930s.2 However, the
same cannot be said of the great majority of the millions of Germans who cast
their votes for the NSDAP between 1930 and 1933. As the leadership of the
Cologne chapter of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish
Belief put it after the shock of the nazi success in the September 1930 Reichstag elections, 'It certainly would be wrong to equate these 6/2 million [nazi]
voters with 6/2 million antisemites'; the danger, they recognized, was rather
different: namely that 'the aversion of the non-antisemitic voters of the Hitler
Party against hatred of Jews was not so large as to deny the NSDAP their
support'.3
Although it is difficult to disentangle the conflicting concerns, resentments,
enthusiasms and fears which framed the snapshots of public opinion afforded
by the elections during the Weimar years, it seems safe to say that economic
problems and class and religious identifications were foremost in determining
voting preferences as German democracy collapsed.4 Antisemitism, like hatred
of the Versailles Treaty and the refusal to accept the 'bleeding frontier' with
Poland, formed a general backdrop, a broad world-view about which many if
not most Germans could agree to a greater or lesser extent. The reluctance of
2 See, for example, Peter H. Merkl, Political Violence under the Swastika. 581 Early Nazis
(Princeton, NJ 1975), 498-517; idem, The Making of a Stormtrooper (Princeton, NJ 1980),
222-8.
3 'Central-Verein deutscher Staatsburger jiidischen Glaubens. Ortsgruppe Koln', Cologne,
November 1930, in Arnold Paucker, Der jiidische Abwehrkampf gegen Antisemitismus und
Nationalsozialismus in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik (2nd edn, Hamburg 1968), 194.
4 See Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter. The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 19191933 (Chapel Hill, NC and London 1983); Jiirgen W. Falter, Hitlers Wahler (Munich 1991).
Bessel:TheNazi Captureof Power
171
any political party demonstratively to defend Jewish interests, the fact that
antisemitism was by no means confined to the Nazi Party, and the widespread
acts of violence and hostility committed against Jews throughout the Weimar
period, all point to a broad culture of a toleration of antisemitism at the very
least - which allowed the growth of the NSDAP to become a mass party
during the early 1930s. However, to assert that the nazis came to power primarily because they successfully tapped into a deep, rabid antisemitic vein in
the German body politic, understandable though this may be given our awareness of what happened in the 1940s, probably would be mistaken.
The challenge which now frames the attempt to describe and explain how
the nazis came to power in 1933 is to integrate that story into our understanding of what came afterwards - an understanding which has changed significantly in recent years. For decades, there has been debate over the degree
to which Hitler's coming to power can be attributed to contingency, to the
personalities involved and the political intrigues during the days and weeks
leading up to Reich President Paul von Hindenburg's naming Adolf Hitler as
Reich Chancellor on 30 January, or to allegedly deeper social and economic
interests and longer-term structural factors.5 Years ago much attention was
focused upon the role of underlying economic structures and economic interests, as some historians (particularly those on the Left) expressed their contempt for the idea that Hitler could have come to power as a result of an
'accident in the works'.6 Of particular interest was the role of established, conservative elites in lifting Hitler into the saddle;7the tendency for the events of
1933 to be described as a 'seizure of power' (Machtergreifung, which was the
term which the nazis themselves used to describe what had happened) came in
for criticism; and some historians pointedly referred instead to a 'handing over
of power' (Machtiibergabe).8While the general question of contingency versus
structural factors in enabling Hitler's success in 1933 has not gone away, today
the underlying issues appear rather different. What follows is an attempt to
sketch out what these issues might be, and thereby to attempt to integrate the
history of the nazi capture of power better into the history of the Third Reich.
In broad, general terms, the themes which link how the nazis captured
power in 1933 with what nazi Germany did in the years thereafter appear to
5 See, for example,GerhardSchulz,Aufstiegdes Nationalsozialismus.Kriseund Revolutionin
Deutschland
am Main,Berlinand Vienna1975);WolfgangMichalka(ed.),Die
(Frankfurt
nationalsozialistische
Machtergreifung(Paderborn,Munich,Vienna and Zurich 1984); Martin
Broszat, Die Machtergreifung.Der Aufstieg der NSDAP und die Zerstorungder Weimarer
(Munich1984).
Republik
6 See FritzFischer,Hitlerwar keinBetriebsunfall.
Aufsdtze(Munich1992).
7 E.g. ReinhardKiihnl, Die WeimarerRepublik.Errichtung,Machtstrukturund Zerstorung
einerDemokratie
beiHamburg
(Reinbek
1985),243.
8 For example,UlrikeHortser-Philips,
WeimarerRepublikund Faschismus.
'Groflkapital,
undAktivitaten
des deutschenIndustrieKonzeptionen
undBankkapitals
zur Zerstorung
des
Parlamentarismus
undzur Errichtung
biirgerlichen
der faschistischen
Diktatur1918-1933'in
ReinhardKiihnl and Gerd Hardach (eds), Die Zerstbrungder WeimarerRepublik (Cologne
1977),115.
172
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
be the following: war, racism, violence and order. Each figure prominently in
the history of German society and polity between 1918 and 1933; each frame
the fateful transition in 1933; and each form an essential part of our understanding of the history of the Third Reich. Together, therefore, they may help
to explain the nature of the profound crisis of modern industrial society which
led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic, to the peculiar constellation of
forces and interests which allowed the nazis to replace the Republic with a
murderous racist dictatorship, and to the ways in which the legacy of 30
January 1933 helped to shape the terrible events which followed from it.
The starting-point for discussion of the nazi capture of power must be the first
world war and its effects upon German society and politics. The war and its
legacy contributed in numerous ways to the capture of power by Hitler at the
end of January 1933, when a popular party leader who had presented himself
successfully as a simple front soldier and the representative of the generation
of the trenches, was named Reich Chancellor by a President whose popularity
rested on having been a Field Marshal and Germany's great war hero. The first
world war was ever-present in the politics of the Weimar Republic. Indeed,
Weimar Germany never escaped from being a postwar society; it remained a
society in which the social, cultural and political points of reference were the
war, a war which had acted as midwife for the Republic and haunted its entire
existence.9 Defeat at the hands of the Allies and the memory of two million
dead and over four million wounded cast a huge shadow over the Weimar
Republic, and lent its politics a peculiarly shrill and strident character.
As was to be expected, the first world war loomed large in the lives of many
prominent political figures of the ill-fated Weimar Republic, particularly members of that generation of politicians born in the 1880s who occupied positions
of power and influence during the early 1930s. This was most obviously true
in the case of Adolf Hitler, whom the outbreak of war rescued from an aimless
and depressing existence as an itinerant would-be artist and inhabitant of
men's hostels who had lost his parents at a comparatively young age. By all
accounts Hitler found, probably for the first time in his life, a reasonably
satisfying existence as a soldier.10It was something which he would never
forget. Furthermore, by giving him a semblance of employment immediately
after the armistice, in the service of the army, Hitler's war provided a bridge
from a life as a pseudo-Bohemian on the road to nowhere to a life as an
activist on the racist right of German politics.
Hitler was not alone in that his experience of wartime military service
changed his life. Among his immediate predecessors as Reich Chancellor,
Heinrich Bruning testified to the importance of his wartime service in an elite
shock-troop of machine-gunners (and recipient of the Iron Cross First Class)
9 See Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford 1993), 254-84.
10 See Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936. Hubris (London 1998), 87-97.
Bessel:TheNazi Captureof Power
173
and introduced his government as a 'cabinet of front solders';"1Kurt von
Schleicher, the general who immediately preceded Hitler in the Reich Chancellery, was a career officer who (while he served only two months at the front, in
Galicia in 1917) spent his war in important positions within the Army High
Command and developed there his understanding of the interdependence of
social, economic, political and military matters; even Franz von Papen, a figure
not exactly associated with military prowess, spent a period as an officer on
the western front between being removed from his diplomatic post in Mexico
in 1915 and serving as a major with the Turkish army in Palestine. Among
Hitler's leading lieutenants in the Nazi Party, Hermann Goring was famous as
a wartime fighter pilot and the last commander of the legendary Richthofen
Fighter Squadron; Rudolf Heg, who had volunteered for military service in
1914, was wounded repeatedly during the war; and Ernst Rohm was a career
officer who also had been wounded repeatedly, and in the trenches had
developed both his ideas about 'political soldiers' and male camaraderie as a
basis for politics and his contempt for the bourgeois world in which he had
been raised.
No less than the politicians they elected, Germany's voters during the
Weimar years were affected by the war. Over ten million German veterans of
military service during the first world war survived the conflict and were able
to cast their votes in the fateful elections of 1932 and 1933, and at least eight
million probably did so.12Among the remainder of the electorate, all had been
affected deeply by what they had been through between 1914 and 1919 whether as workers struggling to navigate a path through the war economy, as
women compelled to provide an income for households deprived of a male
breadwinner, or as children whose early years were scarred by the privations
of wartime. It needs to be remembered that all those entitled to vote in 1932
were old enough to have remembered the war in some form or other; even the
youngest German voter in 1932 would have been six years old at the time of
the Armistice in 1918. The war cast a shadow over all their lives, all the more
so as it coloured so much of the political and social culture of Weimar
Germany from its beginning to its end.
The fact that unreasoning hostility to the Versailles Treaty, and particularly
to the 'war-guilt paragraph' 231, was one of the few points of consensus
across a bitterly-divided polity, not only formed a key element of the context
in which the nazis attracted support and came to power; it also profoundly
affected the way in which they captured power. There were two important elements to this. First, the memory of the war and its legacy served to legitimate
the capture of power. This was expressed most clearly in the remarkably
11 Heinrich Briining, Memoiren 1918-1934 (Stuttgart 1970), 17-26; Wolfram Wette, 'Ideologie, Propaganda und Innenpolitik als Voraussetzungen der Kriegspolitik des Dritten Reiches' in
Wilhelm Deist, Manfred Messerschmidt, Hans-Erich Volkmann and Wolfram Wette, Ursachen
und Voraussetzungen der deutschen Kriegspolitik (Stuttgart 1979), 65.
12 Bessel, Germany after the First World War, op. cit., 270-1.
174
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
successful propaganda spectacle which took place on 21 March 1933, when
Hitler presented his government to a Reich President von Hindenburg decked
out in military uniform in a ceremony opening the new Reichstag session in
the Garrison Church in Potsdam. This was Goebbels' first great propaganda
triumph once his leader had become head of government, and the superbly
stage-managed display in the old residence city of Prussian kings (and its
extensive coverage in the press and newsreels) was an important step towards
transforming Hitler from a partisan party leader into a 'statesman' in the eyes
of conservative Germans who had been lukewarm towards the nazis during
their 'time of struggle' before 1933.13 While the Potsdam ceremony consisted
formally of the head of government presenting his cabinet to the head of state,
its imagery, the famous handshake between the Field Marshal and the corporal, was between the hero of Tannenberg and the representative of the wartime
front generation. The legitimacy of the nazi capture of power rested in large
measure on the memory of war.
The second important element of the way in which the irredentist war consensus shaped the nazi capture of power was that it gave a broad popular basis
for the politics of revenge. Unlike the pacifist (and, in the course of the 1930s,
increasingly defeatist) postwar political culture which developed in interwar
France, the political culture of Weimar Germany was generally bellicoseone in which, as Wolfram Wette has put it, pacifists came to number among
the 'best-hated' people in public life.14The tenor of German political life was
one of bitterness and of calls for revenge; it was characterized by an urge to
strike back at those who allegedly had imposed the hardships of a lost war and
the injustice of a supposedly unfair and dictated peace settlement, and by a
willingness to tolerate and support politicians who militantly and violently
advocated revision. The politics of hatred and revenge which the nazis peddled
with such success in the early 1930s, when the hardships of the Depression
were superimposed on the bitter legacy left by the war, were the politics of a
neurotic postwar society. This was a society in which millions of people bore
war wounds - some physical, some psychological, some financial - and in
which millions of walking wounded nurtured bitter resentments - resentments which the NSDAP and especially its leader, the 'simple front soldier',
were able to express so effectively. The urge was not just to see personal hardships and anxieties removed and Germany restored to economic stability and
military strength; it was also a deep desire to visit revenge on those deemed
responsible for the dire state of affairs in Weimar Germany, which fuelled the
- and which
phenomenal growth of National Socialism as a mass movement
made the crude politics of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen acceptable to both
Germany's elites and Germany's masses.
13 See Ian Kershaw, The 'Hitler Myth'. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford 1987),
54-6.
14 Wette, 'Ideologie, Propaganda und Innenpolitik', op. cit., 88.
Bessel:TheNazi Captureof Power
175
No element of the crude, gutter politics of nazism better merited such a
description than its racism, and no attempt either to explain how the National
Socialists captured power or to suggest how that capture of power may be
integrated into a general history of the Third Reich can ignore the subject of
nazi racism. However, this observation is easy to express but rather more difficult to apply. The problem is that, while the NSDAP was a clearly racist party
with a clearly racist programme and while the most horrible consequences of
the nazi capture of power consisted precisely in making the nazi racist ideology real, racism does not appear to have played a principal role in how
Hitler achieved power. As already noted, although racial prejudice generally
and hatred of Jews specifically led many nazi activists to devote themselves to
the movement, the millions of passive supporters whose votes fuelled the
NSDAP's election successes appear to have been motivated primarily by other
concerns. The same thing may be said with regard to the political violence
which accompanied the nazi successes in the early 1930s and the capture of
power in 1933: the primary targets of the storm-troopers were the nazis'
political opponents - in the first instance the communists and social democrats and their institutional apparatuses (trade union offices, newspapers and
the like) - rather than the Jews. To be sure, Jews did not escape the attention
of the storm-troopers; however, attacks on Jews at this time appear almost
something of an afterthought, an extra outlet for aggression, compared with
attacks on supporters of the Left.15
Similar conclusions may be drawn with regard to the machinations which
took place during 'Hitler's Thirty Days to Power' in January 1933.16 The
matters which most agitated the small group of influential men who paved the
way for Reich President von Hindenburg's decision to allow Hitler to form a
government did not concern race or the Jews; they concerned securing political
stability, directing the economy, subsidizing German agriculture, the role of
the Reichswehr in German politics, and - not least - avoiding embarrassing
scandal. Nazi racism was not high on the agenda, either of the nazi leadership,
or of its mass support, or of the established elites which allowed and facilitated
the formation of Hitler's coalition government, when it came to hoisting the
nazi leader into the saddle in January 1933.
Yet racism and antisemitism did figure in the nazi capture of power, and in
ways which were of considerable significance for the horrors which unfolded
subsequently. In the first place, acts of racist abuse and antisemitic outrages
had not been uncommon in the years immediately preceding the formation of
the nazi government, nor was racism simply left on the back burner during the
crucial months after January 1933 when the dictatorship was consolidated.
15 See Conan Fischer, Stormtroopers. A Social, Economic and Ideological Analysis, 1929-1935
(London 1983), 179-205; Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism. The Storm
Troopers in Eastern Germany 1925-1934 (New Haven, CT and London 1984), 97-118; Eric G.
Reiche, The Development of the SA in Niirnberg, 1922-1934 (Cambridge 1986), 173-86; Peter
Longerich, Die braunen Bataillone. Geschichte der SA (Munich 1989), 165-79.
16 Henry Ashby Turner Jr, Hitler's Thirty Days to Power. January 1933 (Reading, MA
1996).
176
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
Nazi activists made no secret of their hatred of Jews and, even when tactical
considerations dictated that other themes be more prominent in their propaganda during the election campaigns of the early 1930s, antisemitism was
never absent from the nazi repertoire. Nazi speakers fulminated about the
alleged crimes, malicious and all-pervading influence, depravity and inherent
inferiority of the Jews; even when other topics were at the top of the list in nazi
speeches, antisemitism and general racialist assumptions provided the glue
which held the ideology together. More than that, nazi storm-troopers
attacked Jews and Jewish interests both in the pre-1933 campaigns and in the
crucial (and, for the nazis' victims, terrifying) months of early 1933. Unlike the
more frequent assaults on the nazis' Marxist political opponents, the attacks
on Jewish targets essentially were superfluous as regards the actual capture of
power, and yet they provided a constant backdrop to the successful political
campaign of the NSDAP in the early 1930s.
The patterns of the antisemitic attacks which accompanied the nazi rise
therefore merit consideration. Three characteristics stand out: the fact that the
attacks on Jews and Jewish interests often occurred in the wake of even greater
onslaughts against the Left; the sadistic pleasure which nazi activists took in
attacking largely defenceless people; and the widespread toleration of these
attacks, both within the NSDAP and in the wider public sphere. The fact that
antisemitic and racist attacks were of secondary importance to the nazi stormtroopers, whose main (pre-)occupation was the street battles with the Left,
points to a very important aspect of the violence: since it was not really
necessary to the campaign to capture power, in the way that capturing the
streets from the Left appeared to be, it seems a mistake to regard the violent
antisemitism of the nazi activists as politically instrumental. When an SA troop
was confronted, say, by a squad of the Social Democratic Reichsbanner or
when it attacked the offices of a local trade union, it did so to break the power
and morale of the political enemy; in doing so, it proved to the passive supporters of the Hitler movement that here was a political party which really was
capable of ridding Germany of the Reds. Unlike such attacks against the nazis'
party-political opponents, the attacks against Jews were not a means to an
end; instead, they should be regarded as an end in itself. That is to say, the
savagery inspired by racist ideology and directed against the Jews, even during
the campaign to capture power, revealed itself as a goal of nazi politics.
The sadistic nature of the attacks on Jews from the dawn of the Third Reich
cannot be overlooked. The fact that this violence was essentially superfluous
to the campaign to capture power indicates that its meaning and importance
for its perpetrators may not necessarily be found in rational political calculation. Rather, it appears to have satisfied emotional urges, the desire to humiliate and harm people who were alleged to have enormous power and influence
but in fact were largely defenceless in the face of violence. The targets of the
antisemitic violence are revealing in this regard, and need to be seen against
the background of the widespread and frequent antisemitic outrages, from the
desecration of graveyards to attacks on individuals, which (as we now know
Bessel:TheNazi Captureof Power
177
thanks particularly to the work of Dirk Walter) marred the entire history of
the Weimar Republic.17 The targets tended to be defenceless shopkeepers,
lawyers or people of supposedly Jewish appearance attacked on the streets in
fashionable parts of town (as, in the most notorious case, the violence of
roughly 500 SA men along the Kurfiirstendamm in Berlin on 12 September
1932);18 and Jewish shop windows provided welcome targets for bricks and
stones. This, of course, was to some extent a reflection of the composition of
Germany's Jewish population, which was concentrated in commerce and in
the professions (with a disproportionately large number earning their living
from medicine and the law).19In any event, the Jews at the receiving end of
nazi violence were not the sort of people accustomed to being involved in
punch-ups, not the sort of people who readily could fight back.
This is illustrated perhaps most clearly by the antisemitic violence which
occurred during the early months of 1933, as the nazi campaign to establish a
one-party dictatorship was in full swing. While there were attacks against Jews
in the weeks immediately following Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor,
the violence escalated alarmingly in mid-March. Hermann Goring, who by
this point controlled the Prussian police, set the tone on 10 March when he
declared in a speech in Essen that he was 'unwilling to accept the notion that
the police are a protection squad for Jewish shops'.20Increasingly, customers
of Jewish shops were intimidated and individual Jews assaulted while police
stood by, as the authorities cited Goring's speech as justification for failing to
uphold the law.21On 13 March a spectacular outburst occurred when stormtroopers brutally took their anger out on Jewish lawyers in Breslau, home to
Germany's third largest Jewish community: armed SA men broke into the
courtrooms in the city, and forced Jewish lawyers and judges to leave the
buildings; many were dragged from courtrooms while cases were being heard,
and some were beaten.22At the same time storm-troopers turned up on the
17 Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalitdt und Gewalt. Judenfeindlichkeit in der Weimarer
Republik (Bonn 1999).
18 Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalitdt und Gewalt, op. cit., 211-21.
19 Esra Bennathan, 'Die demographische und wirtschaftliche Struktur der Juden' in Werner E.
Mosse and Arnold Paucker (eds), Entscheidungsjahr 1932. Zur Judenfrage in der Endphase der
Weimarer Republik (Tiibingen 1966), 88-131; Donald L. Niewyck, The Jews in Weimar
Germany (Baton Rouge, LA and London 1980), 11-19.
20 Kurt Patzold, Faschismus Rassenwahn Judenverfolgung. Eine Studie zur politischen Strategie
und Taktik des faschistischen deutschen Imperialismus (1933-1945) (Berlin 1975), 40.
21 For example, in Pasewalk: Archiwum Panstwowe w Szczecinie, Regierung Stettin - Prasidial
Abteilung Polizei, Nr. 36, f. 141: The Biirgermeister to the Landrat in Uekermiinde, Pasewalk, 13
March 1933.
22 Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism, op. cit., 105-6. Generally, see also Eric
Johnson, The Nazi Terror. The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans (London 1999), 88-90;
Michael Wildt, 'Violence against Jews in Germany, 1933-1939' in David Bankier (ed.), Probing
the Depths of German Antisemitism. German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933-1941
(Oxford and Jerusalem 2000), 191-4; Dirk Schumann, Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer
Republik 1918-1933. Kampf um die Strafle und Furcht vor dem Biirgerkrieg (Essen 2001),
331-4.
178
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
floor of the Breslau stock exchange, ostensibly to search Jewish stockbrokers
for weapons. This outburst was neither part of a carefully-planned campaign
to remove Jews from German life nor a step necessary to rid the German legal
profession of Jewish colleagues. Rather, it was an almost festive sadistic outburst by young toughs who wanted to enjoy themselves at Jews' expense and
demonstrate to their one-time social betters that they were the masters now.
Similar conclusions are suggested by the boycotts of individual Jewish shops
which were enforced by the SA and which grew more frequent as the month of
March progressed - until the nazi leadership proclaimed a one-day national
boycott of Jewish businesses on Saturday, 1 April.23This allowed nazi activists
to let off steam and revel in their new-found power once Hitler was in the
Reich Chancellery, but the actual removal of Jews from the German economy
would be accomplished later, and far more effectively, by administrative
means.24It was almost as though, after the serious task of capturing political
power was accomplished, nazi activists were now able to enjoy the fruits of
their labours and attack defenceless Jews.
Physical attacks on Jews were not the only manifestation of racism in the
nazi capture of power. Another important aspect was the widespread willingness to profit from racial and antisemitic prejudice. In this, too, the history of
the so-called 'Kampfzeit', the 'period of struggle' up to 1933, and the rapid
consolidation of dictatorial power during the first half of 1933 prefigured
what was to come later. Not a few people were drawn to the nazi movement
out of a desire to eliminate Jewish business competition. They may not have
been prepared to get their own hands dirty by participating in the sort of
violence described above, but they were willing to reap the rewards of raciallyinspired discrimination and intimidation. This was perhaps most crass in the
case of cattle traders who supported the nazi movement and who saw a nazi
victory as a means of getting rid of competitors, as, for example, those who in
1932 formed an 'Association of German Cattle Traders, Gau East Prussia' in
order to combat their Jewish competition.25Boycotts of Jewish shops certainly
did no harm to their competition; ejecting Jewish lawyers from the courts left
more business for their Christian colleagues; dismissing Jews (along with the
nazis' political opponents) from positions in government service left posts
available for the hordes of nazi activists and supporters who looked to a Hitler
government to give them jobs. Thus, already in the course of the nazi capture
of power one could discern a disgusting and depressing pattern which was to
characterize so much of the history of the Third Reich: the willingness of 'ordinary' people to profit from nazi racism and to pocket advantage gained by the
persecution of the Jews.
23 See Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism, op. cit., 105-9; Saul Friedlander, Nazi
Germany and the Jews. The Years of Persecution 1933-1939 (London 1997), 21-3.
24 See Helmut Genschel, Die Verdrdngung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich
(Gottingen 1966); Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of
German Jews, 1933-1943 (Hanover, NH 1989).
25 Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism, op. cit., 24.
Bessel:TheNazi Captureof Power
179
It should not come as any great surprise that few Germans were willing to
stick their necks out in 1933 by taking a firm and principled stand against
racism. Jews and Jewish interests were becoming politically untouchable even
before January 1933, when - it should not be forgotten - not just the
NSDAP displayed a clearly antisemitic tinge. The conservative German
National People's Party under Alfred Hugenberg had made no secret of its
hostility to Jews; the liberal German Democratic Party, the one-time political
home of so many Jews in Weimar Germany, had gambled that its path to
political rebirth in the early 1930s lay in joining with the mildly antisemitic
Jungdeutscher Orden to form the 'German State Party'; the press and leadership of the Bavarian People's Party (the Bavarian cousin of the Catholic
Zentrum) did not shrink from antisemitic comment and reference to the
allegedly deleterious effects of 'Jewish influence' in Germany; and, in this context, the fact that the Social Democratic Party received financial and voting
support from German Jews during the final years of the Republic made it
vulnerable to antisemitic propaganda.26When in 1933 Jews were ejected from
the courtrooms, the civil service, the newspapers and cultural institutions, few
of their fellow citizens were prepared to protest. Ironically, one of the few
moves to shield at least a few Jews from racist discrimination in 1933 came
from the man who had allowed Hitler to form a government in the first place:
President von Hindenburg, who insisted that Jewish war veterans be exempted
from the provisions of the 'Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil
Service' which stipulated the dismissal of Jews from the civil service.
Elsewhere, Jews found that when push came to shove they had few defenders,
as the renowned painter Max Lieberman discovered when he resigned from
the Prussian Academy of Arts in May 1933.27
Yet another important aspect of how racism figured in the nazi capture of
power was the widespread general acceptance within state institutions of
racialist assumptions. This is not to say that the German state bureaucracy
was staffed largely by rabid racists and antisemites, although some earning
their living as public servants no doubt could be so described. Rather, many
people working in German schools, universities, welfare offices, labour
exchanges, social services and the police tended to view society within the
general frame of a hierarchy of human worth - a tenet which lay at the heart
of nazi ideology (and, as we know, of nazi practice). The belief that some
people were congenitally inferior to others was widespread, and helped to
smooth the transition from the structures of the Weimar Republic to the structures of the Third Reich. Germany's new masters were speaking a language
which, while it may have seemed rather extreme to some, was on the whole
well understood and met with broad general agreement. Perhaps the best
example of this may be found in the crucial area of the police, who occupied a
26 See Paucker, Der jiidische Abwehrkampf, op. cit., 85-102; Peter Pulzer,
Jews and the
German State. The Political History of a Minority, 1848-1933 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA
1992), 214-70.
27 Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, op. cit., 12.
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Joural of ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
key position in the successful campaign of 'co-ordination' (Gleichschaltung),
which turned Germany into a one-party state during the first half of 1933.
Here, as Patrick Wagner has shown in his pathbreaking study of the criminal
investigative police (Kriminalpolizei) during the Weimar and nazi periods, a
broad consensus had developed about the existence of an irreducible stratum
of habitual criminals, the 'Berufsverbrecher'. A police which increasingly
viewed criminal behaviour in biological terms and which had been faced (as
had all public services) with financial cutbacks during the final Weimar years,
generally welcomed the new regime. In the new nazi state they would be 'freed
of [their] chains' and could, as Kurt Daluege (the SS-Gruppenfiihrer whom
Goring appointed as his special commissioner in the Prussian Interior Ministry
in February 1933) put it, achieve the 'annihilation' ('Vernichtung') of the
'Berufsverbrecher'.28Material interests, political predilection and essentially
racialist ideology facilitated the easy and fateful accommodation of the
German police to the nazi state, without which the nazi capture and rapid consolidation of power in 1933 would have been difficult to achieve.
Mention of the police brings us to the third major theme which frames the nazi
capture of power, namely violence. Although the nazi 'revolution' of 1933
claimed relatively few lives, at least compared with the extreme bloodshed of
the next dozen years, violence and intimidation were central to it. As with
the creation and consolidation of any dictatorship, control of the police was
essential to the erection of the Third Reich in 1933. This had two main aspects.
First, control of the police allowed the use of state power to suppress opposition to the new order; and second, having the police formally on their side
allowed nazi activists violently to intimidate and attack their opponents without fear that the state might intervene to protect the victims. The result was the
creation of a climate of fear, the undermining of the nazis' opponents and
potential opponents, and the formation of a powerful incentive for those sitting
on the fence to side with the nazis. It also gave cheer to people who, even if
they themselves might have been disinclined to become involved in punch-ups,
were rather pleased to see those whom they regarded as unpatriotic and 'unGerman' get a pasting.
Of course, violence had been a feature of National Socialist politics from the
start. From the beginnings in the beerhalls of Munich, nazi strong-arm squads
were ever-present at the movement's rallies, and during the early 1930s street
violence in which the nazi storm-troopers were prominent participants became
epidemic and cost many dozens of lives. This violence reached a bloody climax
during the summer of 1932. In the ten days preceding the Reichstag elections
at the end of July, 24 people were killed and 284 seriously injured in political
28 Patrick Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher. Konzeption und Praxis der Kriminal193.
polizei in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik und des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg 1996),
Bessel:TheNazi Captureof Power
181
confrontations in Prussia alone.29This was followed in August 1932 by an outburst of what can only be described as nazi terrorism, as storm-troopers
engaged in a short-lived (and politically counter-productive) campaign of
bombings and assassination attempts, particularly in the eastern Prussian
provinces.3?When members of the SA were found guilty of a brutal drunken
murder of a communist sympathizer in the Upper Silesian village of Potempa
in August 1932, Hitler publicly declared his 'unlimited loyalty' to the condemned men and stated that restoring their freedom was 'a question of our
honour'.31That is to say, the leader of Germany's largest party declared his
solidarity with a band of convicted murderers! Well before Germany's political elite arranged for Hitler to form a government in January 1933, and well
before nazi violence helped Hitler and Goring consolidate the nazi dictatorship
with such astonishing speed during the first six months of 1933, the aggressively violent nature of the nazi movement had been plain for all to see.
The violence which accompanied the nazi capture of power cut the ground
from under what had seemed the strongest organizational bulwark against
dictatorship, the trade union movement. It also helped to force the pace of the
consolidation of the dictatorship, by committing the nazi leadership and
government in effect to the elimination of independent trade unions; after all,
once nazi activists had destroyed the trade union movement on the ground,
Hitler and Goring were not about to resuscitate it. From mid-February 1933,
the institutional inhibitions to SA violence were removed. First (on 17
February) Goring, acting in his capacity as Prussian Interior Minister, ordered
the police not to interfere with the SA, SS or the Stahlhelm but rather to
support the storm-troopers 'with all their powers'. Then (on 22 February),
supposedly in response to 'increasing disturbances from left-radical, and especially Communist quarters', he ordered the formation of the 'Hilfspolizei'
('auxiliary police') to be composed of members of the SA, SS and the Stahlhelm.32This opened the floodgates to violence against the Left, and during
March and April virtually the entire, once-so-impressive institutional structure
of the Social Democratic and trade union movement was destroyed - not
through a carefully-planned and centrally-directed campaign but by a mounting number of individual attacks on local party, newspaper and trade union
offices. Storm-troopers, who in effect now had the force of the state behind
them, occupied trade union offices one by one, sometimes together with the
police, sometimes on their own. They arrested trade union officials, wrecked
29 Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers (Munich 1969), 44; Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise
of Nazism, op. cit., 76-7.
30 Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism, op. cit., 87-92.
31 Manfred Overesch and Friedrich Wilhelm Saal, Die Weimarer Republik. Eine Tageschronik
der Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur (Duisseldorf 1982), 609; Richard Bessel, 'The Potempa Murder',
Central European History, vol. x, no. 3 (1977), 241-54.
32 See Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer and Gerhard Schulz, Die nationalsozialistische
Machtergreifung. Studien zur Errichtung des totalitdren Herrschaftssystems in Deutschland
1933/34 (2nd edn, Cologne and Opladen 1962), 866; Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of
Nazism, op. cit., 101.
182
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
the offices of their Marxist political enemies, destroyed printing presses and
ransacked archives, stole cash and other property, converted the erstwhile
offices of their opponents into their own headquarters and torture chambers.33
By the beginning of April, and well before the Hitler government officially
banned independent trade unions and transferred their members and property
to the new 'German Labour Front', the once mighty German labour movement - the movement which 13 years before had put a stop to the Kapp
Putsch - was no more. During the early months of 1933 violence was
effective and practical nazi politics.
The violence of the nazi movement, which was so instrumental in the
capture of dictatorial power in the first half of 1933, was not at all hidden. It
was public, in open view, well-publicized, and nazi activists revelled in it. The
concentration camps which were set up within weeks of Hitler's becoming
Reich Chancellor were not kept secret, nor were the raids conducted by squads
of police and their storm-trooper auxiliaries in working-class neighbourhoods
known as strongholds of the communists and social democrats. These services
to the unfolding national revolution were reported openly in the increasingly
controlled press.34The point here is that this violence, even though it was not
co-ordinated or planned from the centre during the early months of 1933, was
used deliberately and openly to intimidate opposition and potential opposition. It was used to create a public sphere permeated by violence and it provided a ready reminder of what might be in store for anyone who stepped out
of line, who failed to show loyalty to the new order.
It may be tempting to draw a straight line from the violence of the so-called
'Kampfzeit' and the nazi capture of power to the terrible eruptions of violence
which came later. However, this would be too simple. Much of the violence
which characterized the period through 1933 was spontaneous, or at least not
effectively controlled from the centre. That cannot be said for the systematic
repression visited upon Germany from the second half of 1933 onwards, the
principal components of the assault upon the Jews, the launching of war or the
main thrust of the policies of genocide carried out during the second world
war. Instead, the significance of the violence of the nazi movement during
1933 for what came later lies in three areas: first, as already noted, it forced
the pace of and facilitated the rapid consolidation of the nazi dictatorship in
und Volksgemeinschaft
(Opladen
33 T.W. Mason,Sozialpolitikim DrittenReich.Arbeiterklasse
1977), 82-8; Bessel, Political Violenceand the Rise of Nazism, op. cit., 98-105; Reiche, The
Developmentof the SA in Niirnberg,op. cit., 177-80; HeinrichAugustWinckler,Der Wegin die
in der WeimarerRepublik1930 bis 1933 (Bonn
Katastrophe.Arbeiterund Arbeiterbewegung
1933 bis
Arbeiterund Arbeiterbewegung
Unterm
Hakenkreuz.
Michael
Schneider,
893-4;
1987),
1939 (Bonn1999), 48-65. SeealsoJohnson,TheNazi Terror,op. cit., 161-78.
34 See Detlev J.K. Peukert,Inside Nazi Germany.Conformity,Opposition and Racism in
EverydayLife (London1987), 57; Schneider,UntermHakenkreuz,op. cit., 65; SybilMilton,'Die
der dreigigerJahre im Bild der in- und auslandischenPresse' in Ulrich
Konzentrationslager
KonzentrationsHerbert,KarinOrthand ChristophDieckmann(eds),Die nationalsozialistischen
lager- Entwicklungund Struktur(Gottingen1998), 136-7.
Bessel:TheNazi Captureof Power
183
1933; second, the nazi violence and its toleration by government began a fateful process of the breakdown of the rule of law; and third, it demonstrated that
nazi ideology was, at its core, about violence. This latter point is of great
significance in that the horrors unleashed by the Third Reich were a reflection
of the fact that the nazis made their ideology real: they did not limit themselves
to praising war and singing about Jewish blood dripping from their knives; the
nazis actually made war and murdered Jews.
However, that is jumping ahead of ourselves. The consequences of the first
world war, the racism and antisemitism which pervaded German society, and
the violence which poisoned the public life of Weimar Germany provide a
necessary but not a sufficient explanation of how the nazis captured power.
These themes are too general, and general discussion of specific historical
events is too prone to pass over contingency and human agency, to offer satisfactory explanation or analysis. Individual human beings were responsible for
their decisions and actions, and that includes the decision to invite Adolf
Hitler to form a government in January 1933. In order to try to explain these
actions it is necessary to turn to the fourth organizing theme, namely order.
For all the importance of violence in both the nazis' appeal and in paving
Hitler's path to power, that was not going to persuade the men in the key positions of power and influence in late 1932 and early 1933 to open the door of
the Reich Chancellery to Adolf Hitler. What they were looking for was not
violent upheaval, but a way out of the political crisis of the final Weimar years
which would guarantee authoritarian government and a conservative order.
This may seem something of a paradox - that what allowed violent, racist
National Socialism to come to power and then plunge Germany (and Europe)
into chaos and misery and effectively to destroy the old order in Europe, was a
desire by essentially conservative elites to secure a stable authoritarian order.
Yet this is what motivated the main persona of the drama which unfolded in
January 1933. Although they profoundly and disastrously miscalculated, the
plotters who arranged the Hitler coalition government thought that they could
harness the nazi leader, and the mass popular support which he commanded,
to a conservative authoritarian order. In their effort to preserve that order,
Franz von Papen, Alfred Hugenberg, Kurt von Schleicher and Paul von
Hindenburg effectively dug its grave.
The tenures of all three Reich Chancellors who preceded Hitler and governed without a parliamentary majority to back them up - Heinrich Briining,
Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher - were characterized by the attempt
to underpin an authoritarian order, one which effectively excluded the Social
Democrats from national government and the trade unions from influence
and at the same time provided a measure of stability. Each failed. None
managed to find the popular support needed to make a new authoritarian
order stick. Instead, they demonstrated that it was not really possible to rule
the country against the wishes of the vast majority of its population - unless
184
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
the army was prepared to intervene directly, which it was not.35Against the
background of the deepening economic and political crisis, the growth of antidemocratic parties (which by the summer of 1932 made it impossible for any
democratically-based government to enjoy a parliamentary majority), and the
distaste of the aged Reich President (whose signature was necessary for emergency legislation needed to bypass parliament) for the 'Sozis', each of Hitler's
immediate predecessors sought to square the circle - to provide a stable basis
for authoritarian rule but without bringing the Social Democrats into government. Thus it is not surprising that at the eleventh hour, in early January 1933,
von Schleicher rejected an offer by Otto Braun, the deposed SPD Prussian
Premier, to collaborate with him as Reich Chancellor to ward off the nazis in
return for restoring the SPD-led government in Prussia.36The thought of bringing Social Democrats back into power, to restore democratic government as it
had existed in the most important state of Weimar Germany, would not have
been acceptable to the aged Reich President, and it was Schleicher himself who
had been instrumental in proposing the coup which had stripped Social
Democrats of their power in Prussia during the previous July. There was to be
no going back to the faction-ridden democratic politics of Weimar Germany.
However, there could be no going forward either, on such a basis, unless the
nazi movement was somehow dealt with. After all, even after the electoral
defeat which Hitler's party suffered in the Reichstag elections of November
1932 (when the NSDAP lost some two million votes as compared with the previous July), the nazis comprised the largest and most broadly-based political
movement which Germany had ever seen. If democratic government was not
to be an option, some authoritarian order tying in the nazis appeared the only
way ahead. This, in effect, was what the arch-schemer Franz von Papen tried
to cobble together during January 1933. By undermining von Schleicher
(whose own conduct made this rather easy to accomplish) and convincing
Hindenburg that a coalition cabinet including Hitler but with the nazis in a
clear minority and dependent upon the Reich President's approval for emergency legislation offered a viable option, von Papen succeeded.
Of course, what inspired the main actors in the drama which unfolded in
January 1933 was not necessarily grand, general thoughts about how to secure
political order by bringing into government and taming one of the greatest
causes of disorder in German public life. As Henry Turner has shown in great
detail, these men tended to be motivated on a day-to-day basis by an array of
personal weaknesses - jealousy, vendetta, pride. The hostility which had
developed between von Papen and von Schleicher, after the latter had schemed
to undermine the former in the autumn of 1932 and as the former schemed to
undermine the latter in the winter of 1933, lay at the centre of the drama and
drove both to lose sight of what really was at stake: the need to keep a bunch
35 On the position of the army, see Michael Geyer, 'Etudes in Political History: Reichswehr,
NSDAP, and the Seizure of Power' in Peter D. Stachura (ed.), The Nazi Machtergreifung (London
1983), 101-23.
36 Details in Turner, Hitler's Thirty Days to Power, op. cit., 83-4.
Bessel:TheNazi Captureof Power
185
of political gangsters away from the levers of state power. Both embittered
men, at various times during the last weeks of the Republic, demonstrated that
they preferred to risk a Hitler government rather than allow the other to be
Reich Chancellor. For von Papen this was a motivation throughout the
intrigues of January 1933; for von Schleicher, when he realized during the last
days of January that his Chancellorship was doomed and rumours were
circulating that Hindenburg might again name von Papen to head a government, it meant returning the favour.37Into this mix came Oscar von Hindenburg, the Reich President's son who had become his father's closest confidant
and who had developed a strong antipathy towards von Schleicher. Thus at
the centre of the German political process, such as it was, lay a preoccupation
with rather petty concerns made possible by an astonishing degree of shortsightedness and a remarkable tendency to believe what one wanted to believe.
The necessary corrective to this sort of behaviour, which should have been
provided by a head of state cognizant of the bigger issues at stake and capable
of thinking in the longer term, was absent. Instead, the presidential palace
was occupied by an octogenarian Field Marshal who allowed himself to be
deceived by a favourite courtier and who, when it came to the crunch, caved
in.
There therefore can be no denying that the personalities and actions of the
small group of people in whose hands Germany's political fate lay in January
1933 did matter. Had Franz von Papen fallen off his horse and broken his
neck while out riding in 1932 the history of Europe in the twentieth century
probably would have been quite different. Grand general themes do not provide explanations for decisive historical events in and of themselves. Hitler was
levered into power, but just using the passive voice, as though some impersonal force put him into the driving seat, will not do. Individuals, acting out of
combinations of shortsightedness, mendacity, stupidity and opportunism,
handed him power.
Yet the personal intrigues which brought Hitler to office in January 1933
had not developed in a vacuum. All the main actors in this drama, except for
the nazi leadership (whose interests were rather different and were committed
to a different sort of politics from the likes of Franz von Papen or Alfred
Hugenberg), were driven at some level by the need to secure a stable political
order - to bring order to the chaos into which the Weimar Republic had
descended. It is clear that order, with a strong leader who could provide a
stable and business-friendly political environment and who could remain in
office for a long time, stood at the top of the business community's wish list. It
is also apparent that the army, too, had a keen interest in domestic political
order and stability. By the beginning of 1933 it probably was only the
Reichswehr which could have put a stop to the dangerous and ultimately
disastrous turn which German politics was taking - by staging a coup and
imposing military rule. However, after the experiences of the early 1920s,
37
Ibid., 130. Generally, see Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (London 1998), 413-23.
186
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
when the army had been forced to intervene in domestic politics during a
period of great disorder, that was precisely what the Reichswehr wanted to
avoid. The Reichswehr leadership was worried about the prospect of civil
unrest in which it would have to become involved, and in late January warned
the Reich President that reappointing von Papen risked the outbreak of civil
war.38Furthermore, the prospect of military intervention in domestic politics
frightened not just those who were in a position to carry it out. In the crucial
last days, as Hindenburg was manoeuvred toward accepting a government
headed by Adolf Hitler, rumours of an impending military putsch were used
by von Papen to break the final reluctance of the old man to name the nazi
leader as the new Reich Chancellor. Order had to be secured.
The desire for order also figured in other ways in the nazi campaign to
capture power. It motivated many nazi voters who, convinced that the causes
of the disorder of the Weimar Republic lay with the Left in general and with
the communists in particular, were willing to lend their support to a movement which promised to rid Germany of such elements and re-establish order.
It was a trump card in the possession of the new government which in early
1933 was able to justify the suspension of civil liberties and invest itself
with dictatorial powers by claiming that such action was necessary for the reestablishment of order.39It became an important part of the rhetoric of the
nazi leadership when, once the one-party dictatorship had been established
effectively in the late spring of 1933, it sought to rein in the movement's
violent activists. And it was used as a justification for the murder of the SA
leadership, together with dozens of other prominent and not-so-prominent
personalities (including Kurt von Schleicher and his wife) in the summer of
1934 - a justification which brought Hitler wide public approval.40Although
it may sound paradoxical to the point of perversity, the urge for order provided an important theme in the capture of power by a political movement
which brought unimaginable disorder to Germany and Europe.
The importance of the desire for order for the history of the Third Reich
should not be underestimated, for this desire did not dissipate with the nazi
capture of power in 1933 or with the murder of Ernst Rohm in 1934. It continued through the life of the Third Reich. In a country where people prided
themselves on living orderly lives, where a state bureaucracy had prided itself
on maintaining orderly procedures,41 where a brutal dictatorship became
38 Turner, Hitler's Thirty Days to Power, op. cit., 130. Generally, see Geyer, 'Etudes in Political
History', op. cit.
39 See Kershaw, The 'Hitler Myth', op. cit., 52-3.
40 Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) 1934-1940
(Erster Jahrgang 1934) (Frankfurt am Main 1980), 197-202: report dated Prague, 21 July 1934;
Ian Kershaw, 'The FuihrerImage and Political Integration: The Popular Conception of Hitler in
Bavaria during the Third Reich' in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (eds), Der
'Fiihrerstaat':Mythos und Realitat. Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart
1981), 143-4; Kershaw, The 'Hitler Myth', op. cit., 88-95.
41 See Jane Caplan, "'The Imaginary Universality of Particular Interests". The "Tradition" of
the Civil Service in German History', Social History, vol. iv, no. 2 (1979), 299-317; idem,
Bessel:TheNazi Captureof Power
187
enormously popular, not least because it restored a semblance of order by
banishing unemployment and by cracking down on conventional crime, where
for decades after the Third Reich crashed in an orgy of violence Germans still
regarded a decline in (conventional) criminality as a major achievement of the
nazis,42and where the greatest crimes of the twentieth century were characterized by almost manic attempts to systematize mass murder, the importance of
this theme cannot be overlooked. And it provides an important link between
how the nazis captured power and what they did with it.
Two general conclusions may be drawn from this discussion of how the nazis
came to power. The first is that it would be misleading either to state baldly
that Hitler 'seized' power or to say that he was handed power and leave it at
that. If we were to limit our gaze to the intrigues by which the nazi leader was
levered into the Reich Chancellery in January 1933, it might be fair to claim
that he was handed the reins of power. However, there is much more to the
story than that: the transformation within the space of less than six months of
a minority position in a coalition government into a one-party dictatorship
presupposed many other things. The intrigues from above, the violence from
below, the popular longings and embittered politics which fuelled broad popular support, and the widely-held popular assumptions about the nature of
society, and indeed of humanity, combined in 1933 to make possible the nazi
capture of power.
The second concluding observation is to stress that the nazi capture of
power needs to be integrated into the history of the Third Reich as a whole,
and not simply in the sense that the one chronologically preceded and made
possible the other. The world of nazi Germany was not disconnected from the
world of Weimar Germany; the continuities - in terms of mentalities, social
structures and economic interests - were considerable. What changed in
1933, and that change of course was absolutely crucial, was that the levers of
political power fell into the hands of people who came from outside the established political elites, who refused to recognize the normative constraints
which are essential to civilized behaviour, and who made their horrible ideology real. An understanding of what happened in Germany in 1933 cannot
remain separate and distinct from our understanding of what happened in
Germany (and Europe) during the years which followed. The broad themes
which frame the history of the nazi capture of power - war, racism, violence
and order - are also themes which frame the entire history of the Third Reich.
Government without Administration. State and Civil Service in Weimar and Nazi Germany
(Oxford 1988), 10-11.
42 On criminality and the criminal police, see Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher,op.
cit., esp. 214-19.
188
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol 39 No 2
Richard Bessel
is Professor of Twentieth-century History at the University of York.
Among his publications are Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism
(New Haven, CT 1984), Germany after the First World War
(Oxford 1993), (ed.), Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons
and Contrasts (Cambridge 1996) and (ed. with Dirk Schumann), Life
after Death. Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe
during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge 2003). He is currently
working on a study of Germany in 1945.