Hitler in Hell Read online

  Two days later, we passed the Enabling Law by a vast majority. How did we do it? Simple: by making sure the Communists would not attend. A few of them were already dead, killed by our brave, if unruly, SA boys as an act of spontaneous revenge for everything that they had gone through during the previous years. Some were interned in the new, improvised, concentration camps we were setting up, and some were running for their lives. That only left those old windbags, the Social Democrats. To a man, those of them who succeeded in getting into the building voted against us. However, as I was not slow to tell them during the meeting itself, their time was past.

  With that, the legal basis we needed for taking decisive action had been put in place. Our next targets were the trade unions. Against them, I used deception—yes, deception. Deception in the service of a great national cause is no vice, especially if your opponents are a bunch of mendacious Marxists. I made my first move as early as 20 February. In a talk to some twenty of Germany’s biggest industrial magnates, I made them understand that I was absolutely not the Red bogyman some of them thought I was. To the contrary, I was going to do what they wanted most: to wit, keep private enterprise intact, make sure proprietors retained control over the property by destroying the Communists once and for all, and rebuild our armed forces on an unprecedented scale. All this would enable them to realize their dream of making lots and lots of money, the only thing those rich creeps care about.

  Having covered my rear in this way, I turned around. First, I made the 1st of May into a national holiday. That was something no previous German government, not even those headed by the Social Democrats, had done. The move took the unions totally by surprise, filling them with euphoria and lulling them to sleep. It was a nice birthday present for them, so to speak. I personally, in a speech held at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport in front of 100,000 people, honored the German worker and promised that May Day would be celebrated forever. On the very next day I sprang a surprise on them. I had the SA and the police occupy the trade unions’ headquarters throughout Germany. The unions’ leaders were arrested, their assets confiscated, and they themselves dissolved. Collective bargaining, that scourge which can and often does paralyze entire countries for weeks on end, was abolished. So, in effect, was the right to strike. We expected no resistance. And none materialized.

  All this having been accomplished, the time had come to deal with the last obstacle to our rule, i.e. the parties. On 10 May 1933 I had the police seize the assets of the Social Democratic Party. The operation went off without a hitch. Ten days later, the remaining Social Democratic representatives in the Reichstag—those who had not yet been arrested or fled—obliged me by voting in favor of my foreign policy. How much spittle can a man take while pretending it is rain? On 22 June Frick, as Minister of the Interior, abolished the Party, for so long the largest and strongest in Germany, by means of a simple decree. The rest took the hint. Over the next fortnight they shut down without any need for further action on our part. On 12 November we held yet another election which confirmed all this. With that, the corpse of democracy was not only buried but had an epitaph erected over it as well.

  That did not prove the end of the matter. It is said that revolutions devour their children. Unfortunately, ours was no exception. Starting as early as 1920, the SA had been one of the strong pillars on which our movement rested. But for it, our progress and ultimate victory would have been inconceivable. Expanding year by year, on the way it spawned various subordinate organizations. Chief among them were the National Socialist Motor Corps, known as the NSKK, and, above all, the SS. Having absorbed other paramilitary organizations, such as the right-wing Stalhelm, by late 1933 it had a paper strength of three million men, thirty times as many as the Reichswehr. More than any other party organization, the SA had always been permeated by socialist ideas. That was especially true of the rank and file. Our seizure of power, far from ending their revolutionary impulse, reinforced it. They felt they could do much, much more. And, of course, they were looking for their proper rewards in the form of jobs for themselves and bread for their families.

  Many of their commanders shared these feelings. However, with them much more was at stake. They hoped and expected to take the place of the Reichswehr, thus turning themselves into the army of the Reich. Röhm personally thought in these terms. He refused to accept that the National Socialist Revolution had largely ended. Nor did he make a secret of his belief that the old officer corps was no good and of his hope to be appointed chief of staff. But for all my sympathy for the ordinary SA-men who had worked so long and so faithfully on our behalf, that was something I could not allow.

  There were two reasons for this, both of them of the utmost importance. First, the army at this time was the one major institution which we National Socialists had not yet been able to bring under our full control. As the Putsch of 20 July 1944 was to show, in a sense we never did. The gentlemen with their monocles, gold leaf, breeches, red stripes, and colored ribbons formed a cohesive caste that had to be treated with some caution. Or else, probably using Hindenburg as their rallying-point, they might have turned against us and taken over. Needless to say, we ourselves would not have taken such a move lying down. The outcome would have been civil war and chaos, perhaps even foreign intervention. Second, with all respect to Röhm and his men, they were not the army. Only the latter had, or could develop, what it took to prepare Germany for war and to fight it if and when necessary.

  There things remained for the time being. In early 1934 I tried to find a compromise between the two organizations several times. A greater contrast could scarcely be imagined. On one side stood my newly appointed Minister of War, General von Blomberg. He was aristocratic, tall, elegant, and very handsome. Too handsome for his own good, as it turned out. His family had provided more than one German state with officers and civil servants for generations past. On the other stood Röhm, a former captain, man of the people, and swashbuckler.

  Several times, I personally drew up documents defining their respective sphere of action. Military training and preparation for the army, which was to remain our nation’s only organization entitled to bear arms; and political tasks for the SA. Much to my annoyance, all my attempts failed. In the spring things went from bad to worse. Göring, drawing on material obtained by his secret, newly established, Forschungsamt (wire-tapping service), started forwarding me reports that the SA was acting like a state within a state. It was setting aside money—some of it, apparently, provided by the French embassy in Berlin—collecting arms, training its men, and preparing to launch a coup. More evidence of the same sort was brought to me by the Army High Command, which had its own intelligence organization.

  I felt obliged to Röhm. He and I had gone through so much together; but for him we would never have been able to mount the 1923 Putsch, unsuccessful though it was. Later, in 1930, when I needed him, he came with no questions asked. Among all my subordinates, he was the only one whom I allowed to address me by my first name. But now, as he apparently prepared to take the route Napoleon had taken in 1799, I felt I had no choice. As I had done with the trade unions, I started by protecting my rear. To this end I arranged a meeting with the commanders of the armed forces aboard the newly commissioned armored cruiser Deutschland. I promised them that, whatever Röhm might say and do, they would remain Germany’s only armed organization. I also stated that they would have a free hand in rebuilding Germany’s military power.

  In return, I demanded that they should not interfere while I was dealing with the SA as I saw fit. I additionally promised them that they would not have to interfere and that, in consequence, their hands would be kept clean. They were, after all, “men of honor.” Few things interested them more than that. The bargain having been struck, in June I turned to Hindenburg and explained the situation. The old war horse was clearly dying. His mind was already more or less in Valhalla; nevertheless, he gave me his blessing.

  This time my main instrument for doing what had to be done w
as Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS. The SS, short for Schutzstaffel or defense squadron, dated back to 1925, when I ordered the establishment within the SA of a small force that would be loyal to me alone and do anything I ordered them to. I called them Verfügungstruppe—roughly translatable as “troops at [my] disposal.” In 1929, the year in which I appointed Himmler as its head, it numbered just 290 men. Two years later, Himmler himself set up the SD within the SS. It soon joined the others in providing me with intelligence about Röhm’s deeds and misdeeds.

  In time Himmler, “Heinrich-you-make-me-shudder” as, like Goethe’s Faust, he was sometimes known, acquired a sinister reputation for terror. Peopled hated seeing him come and were happy to see him go. This was rather curious, for he always looked and behaved like an inoffensive little clerk. And at heart, a petty little clerk is exactly what he was. Born in 1900 as the son of a high-school principal in Munich, he had missed the World War because of his age. Consequently, he developed a life-long romantic view of what war was all about. His greatest dream was to become a general and to command an army in the field, a post for which, it turned out, he was totally unsuited. Meanwhile, he studied agriculture and at one point tried his hand at raising chickens! A photograph taken during our 1923 Putsch shows him standing near a roadblock, with a vacant expression on his face, holding a standard. Later, he married a woman several years his senior of whom, it was said, he was absolutely terrified.

  Appearances can be misleading. In his case they certainly were. Mouse-like as he looked, during the war Himmler surprised everyone by starting a second family with his secretary with whom he had an illegitimate daughter. More important, behind the polite façade, the pedantic demeanor, and the pince-nez with its thick glasses, there was a first-class administrative brain. No one knew better how to acquire power, expand it, and maintain it even if it meant going against other, equally ambitious and equally ruthless men such as Göring and, later, my Minister of Munitions, Albert Speer. He also had a strong sense of the theatrical. That quality helped him and his black-uniformed myrmidons put on some of the most impressive shows—tattoos, parades, and the like—in the whole of history.

  It was Göring and Himmler who, happy to see the SA cut down to size, secretly prepared troops, weapons, transport, and lists of people who were to be executed. I myself once again resorted to deception. First, I summoned the most important SA leaders, with Röhm at their head, to a meeting at the resort town of Bad Wiesee on the Tegernsee, some fifty kilometers south of Munich. Next, I took Göring and Viktor Lutze, an SA general whom I knew I could trust, along with me to the much-publicized wedding of one of our Gauleiters in Essen. It was during that ceremony that the news arrived that Papen, acting by way of his dear friend Oskar, had prevailed on Hindenburg to see him.

  Pygmy though he was, Papen had in fact been causing some trouble. Speaking at the University of Marburg on 17 June, he expressed his dissatisfaction, and that of his conservative friends, with the way things were going. He even dared criticize the way we dealt with the Jews, whom he called “helpless segments of the people”! Parts of the speech were printed in the press. Faced with opposition from both left and right, I knew it was now or never. Any further delay could only make the situation worse.

  The appointed day was 30 June 1934. 29 June found me at Bad Godesberg, where Goebbels and the commander of my personal bodyguard, SS General Joseph (“Sepp”) Dietrich also arrived. That evening we and several others flew to Munch. The sun was just coming up when we entered the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, where the local SA commanders had been summoned. I personally tore the epaulets from the traitors’ shoulders and had them arrested. Next, we drove to Bad Wiesee, where we stormed into the hotel. One by one, Röhm and the rest were rounded up. At least one of them, SA General Edmund Heines, was found in bed with a youth.

  I ordered six of the miscreants to be shot on the spot. Röhm, who was arrested but baited me by refusing to use a pistol that was handed to him, had to be shot as well. But that was only the beginning. In Munich and Berlin the SS execution squads received their orders and went into action. A few dozen other top SA officers apart, the dead included Jung, who had written Papen’s speech for him, Gregor Strasser and General von Schleicher, the traitors who had tried to break up the Party and take it away from me, and General Ferdinand von Bredow. The latter was a trusted collaborator of Schleicher’s and almost as great a traitor as his master. I also took the opportunity to deal with Kahr and Seisser, the men who ten years earlier had given me their “word of honor” and subsequently broken it.

  Not all the killings were ordered from above, i.e. by me, Göring, Himmler, and Himmler’s second in command, Reinhard Heydrich. Several were carried out by individuals out to settle accounts with their personal enemies. At least one, that of a Munich music critic named Willi Schmid, was due to a mistaken identification. One cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs, can one? However that may be, by the evening of the 30th the operation, later nicknamed “The Night of the Long Knives,” was essentially over.

  Abroad, the reaction was as we had expected. Incited by the Jews, both officials and the press did what they could to blacken our image and to denounce us as the new barbarians. Not so inside the country, where the reactions were almost uniformly positive. Not just those of the press, which were orchestrated by Goebbels, but those of Hindenburg and Blomberg, both of whom congratulated me for what I had done. Later, I learned that even some future participants in the conspiracy of 20 July 1944 had expressed their agreement. On 3 July 1934 I went on the air to explain myself to the German nation. Then and later, it was the only community to which I felt myself accountable. The SA leadership, I told them, had conspired with a foreign power to betray the Party. They had planned a Putsch against the Reich Government. They were within hours of going into action when my lieutenants and I discovered them. Given the situation, I had no choice but to appoint myself supreme judge of the German people and to do what had to be done. For this I took full responsibility.

  Just how many men (no women, incidentally) died on that day, not even I have ever been able to find out. Subsequent historians have put their number at anything between 76 and 1,000. However, the last-named figure seems to have been picked out of empty air. It is certainly a vast exaggeration. Taking the unauthorized killings into account, the true one might be around 200. Here I want to put it on record that, street and beer hall brawls apart, our National Socialist struggle for power, though not without some violence, fell far short of civil war. Over ten years or so, the total number of those who died was probably under 2,000. This was not the Chinese Revolution in which, by some estimates, six million died. Nor was it the Russian Revolution, nor the French one with mademoiselle guillotine standing in the city square and waiting for the cartloads of aristocrats who were brought to have their heads cut off. Even the Paris Commune of 1871, a relatively minor episode as such things go, claimed many more.

  On 2 August, just a month after these events, the news arrived that Hindenburg had died. He had certainly not been without his shortcomings. He was slow and obstinate and could be as obtuse as any man has ever been. In his last years he surrounded himself with worthless advisers, whom I shall not name again. It took him a long time to realize that the National Socialist Movement was more than a bunch of rednecks and I, not merely a Bohemian Corporal.

  To repeat, politically, he was a monarchist. Throughout the period from 1919 to 1934 he wanted nothing so much as the restoration of the Kaiser, whom he saw as his only legitimate sovereign, or, if that was impossible, of one of his sons. Only at the last moment did he change his mind and told his son Oskar that he wanted me as his successor. But it must be granted that he also had tremendous courage, strength, and dignity. It was these qualities that, during the war, made him a good counterpart to Ludendorff’s more nervous nature and enabled them to form the excellent team they did. He certainly deserved the place he has taken in German history.

  As had been decided
in advance, I now assumed his duties in addition to mine. On 19 August forty-two million German citizens, both men and women, went to the polls. Outside the U.S., which in this respect has always formed a class of its own, it was the largest occasion of its kind in history until then. When the results came in, it became clear that ninety percent of the voters cast their ballots in favor of my fusing both functions and exercising them. For our country, a new dawn was coming.

  12. It’s the Economy, Stupid

  How many historians have written that the Party and I owed our rise to the 1929 economic crisis? The claim is undoubtedly correct, but it is also trivial. One does not need to be a Herr Professor Doktor or write learned books in order to understand that bad times demand new leaders and new solutions. In addition, unless a leader can come up with such solutions, he will quickly lose the trust of the people. That is why, just two days after I assumed office, I addressed them by radio. I made it crystal-clear that I understood the situation and sympathized with the enormity of their sufferings. And I promised action—quick, decisive action.

  In fact we were in an awful mess. Nor, looking around, could we see anyone to help us get out of it. Certainly not the so-called “international community” as represented by the League of Nations, which kind- but feeble-minded people talked about so much. To the contrary, it did everything it could to make us sink deeper still. The victors in the World War still insisted that reparations be paid, though their ability to extract them in practice was declining fast. Among the most nefarious measures they took was the 1931 Smoot-Hawley Bill. It raised customs-barriers over 20,000 imported goods to their highest levels in American history. The outcome was to cut German, and European, exports to the U.S. by three quarters. One trading company after another was forced to close. Half a century later, President Reagan himself said that the bill “made it virtually impossible for anyone to sell anything in America and… spread the Great Depression around the world.” Right he was.