TURNING POINTS IN THE NATIONAL REVOLUTION OF 1933

TURNING POINTS IN THE “NATIONAL REVOLUTION” OF 1933 February 27: The Reichstag Fire leads to ban of KPD. March 5: Reichstag election (Nazis win 44% and the DNVP, 8%). March 23: The Enabling Act. May 2: The Nazis suppress the trade unions. May-June 1933: Every party but the NSDAP dissolves. June 1934: The Blood Purge (SA leader Ernst Röhm and 90 other problematic persons are murdered). August 2, 1934: After Hindenburg dies, all soldiers swear loyalty to Hitler as both President & Chancellor.

In October 1931 Hugenberg proclaimed that unity had been achieved on the Right in the Harzburg Front (here with leaders of the Stahlhelm and Reichslandbund)

But Hitler refused to appear on the same reviewing stand with them

HITLER’S STRATEGY IN 1931/32 (see Otto Wagener, Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, ed. Henry A. Turner) Hitler felt certain that the Weimar Republic and democratic parties were doomed. His great fear was that “the reactionaries” would close ranks against him and found a military dictatorship. Nazi leaders must therefore engage in personal outreach to army generals, captains of industry, and bourgeois politicians, to keep “the reactionaries” divided, while assuring the voters that Nazis were nothing like the reactionaries. Against the advice of Gregor Strasser, Hitler resolved on an “all-or-nothing” strategy; Nazis must not enter any cabinet unless Hitler became Chancellor, with the right to issue presidential emergency decrees.

The Hitler-Papen Cabinet, January 30, 1933 (only Goebbels, Göring, and Frick were Nazis, but Gen. Blomberg backed them)

“In the hour of greatest need, Hindenburg chose Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor. You too should vote for List #1” (February 1933)

Hitler as the heir to Frederick the Great and Bismarck (postcard from 1933)

Berliners watch the Reichstag burn, 27 February 1933

SA round-up of Communists

Stormtroopers guard the new concentration camp at Oranienburg, 1933

A newly deputized SS trooper patrols the streets with a Prussian policeman on election day, March 5, 1933

Torchlight victory parade by the SA and Stahlhelm after the government parties won 52% of the vote

“Der Tag von Potsdam, ” March 21, 1933: The Corporal greets the Field Marshall

Hindenburg’s speech to the new Reichstag: “The place where we are assembled today summons us to look back on old Prussia, which became great through fear of God, dutiful work, never failing courage, and devoted love of the fatherland, and which united the German tribes on this basis. May the old spirit of this place inspire today’s generation, may it free us from selfishness and partisan quarrels, may it bring us together in a national revival and spiritual renewal for the sake of a united, free, proud Germany!”

Hitler charms Crown Prince Wilhelm of Hohenzollern

Stormtroopers mustered at the entrance to the Reichstag’s provisional quarters (the Kroll Opera House), 23 March 1933

Hitler demands an Enabling Act, 23 March 1933: Only the SPD voted against this grant of absolute power for 4 years

“Germans! Defend Yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!” This boycott announced on April 1 was soon called off, but all Jews were dismissed from the civil service

The occupation of the Berlin headquarters of the Free Trade Unions, May 2, 1933: By June all parties but the NSDAP had dissolved

“Now as then, we remain comrades: The German Labor Front” (1933/34): There were no more social classes, the government declared, just unity between “workers of the head” and “workers of the hand. ”

“German Students March Against the Ungerman Spirit”

STORMTROOPERS BRUTALIZED MANY THOUSANDS OF “ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE” “I am the biggest pig in town, because I only go out with Jews. ” SPD politicians, forced to remove anti-Hitler graffiti

The Nazi cartoonist Josef Plank celebrated the flight from Germany of Jews and leftists in 1933/34

Reichstag delegates hail their Leader, January 30, 1934

Ernst Röhm sought to place the SA in charge of rearmament and called for a “Second Revolution” Hitler gained credibility among non. Nazis after Göring and Goebbels persuaded him to order the killing of SA leaders in the “Knight of the Long Knives, ” June 30 -July 2, 1934

Heinrich Himmler reviews SS formation in 1934

The Army’s new loyalty oath to Hitler, August 2, 1934

German judges hail Hitler

THE NEW INSTITUTIONS OF THE “THIRD REICH” The NSDAP becomes the ONLY party, and 20% of civil servants and 30% of schoolteachers join it. To replace the trade unions, all workers must join the German Labor Front; strikes are banned. The Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel) merges with Prussia’s Gestapo to form a new secret police; concentration camps spread to hold people without trial. Elected state governments are replaced by 20 Reich Commissars, and the 40 Nazi Gauleiter fight over those jobs: Gauleiter+Commissar=Satrap. In a process of Gleichschaltung, every club and interest group must affiliate with the NSDAP or dissolve.

“Support the Aid Program for MOTHER AND CHILD” “The NSDAP protects the Volksgemeinschaft”

The Animals’ Friend (postcard, 1934)

The Children’s Friend (ca. 1934)

The Nazi Leadership: Joseph Goebbels, Ernst Röhm, and Hermann Göring belonged to the inner circle

Rewriting History after 1933: Otto Wagener, Wilhelm Kube, Ernst Röhm, and Rudolf Hess all became unpersons.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), chapter V: “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness…. In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows…. Neither was it an unaccountable chance that the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for anti. Semitism as its complement; and it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois. ”