Who Chose Hitler

The version of this story that most people carry is a kind of weather report. Germany was ruined by Versailles, then ruined again by the Depression, six million were unemployed, the population despaired, and out of that despair the Nazis rose inevitably. Nobody chose it; it simply happened.

Look at the actual months and that account collapses. In November 1932 the Nazi party lost two million votes and 34 seats. It was effectively bankrupt. Its organisation was fracturing; its second most powerful man resigned; and its leader, according to the diary of the man closest to him, was talking about shooting himself. Ten weeks later he was Chancellor of Germany.

Nothing in the economy changed in those ten weeks. What changed is that a small number of identifiable men made a decision, and their reason for making it was that they preferred him to the alternative on the left.

November 1932: the party in trouble

The numbers are not in dispute.

The Nazi vote had peaked and turned down. The communist vote was still climbing. In the Berlin transport strike of November 1932, Nazi and communist activists found themselves on the same picket line, a sign of how volatile the working-class vote was, and how alarming that was to anyone with property.

The party was broke. Four national campaigns in one year (two presidential rounds and two Reichstag elections) had exhausted it. Goebbels's diary through late 1932 is a running account of unpaid printers, unpaid SA men and creditors. The entries are blunt about the situation being hopeless.

It was also splitting. On 8 December 1932, Gregor Strasser (the party's chief organiser and the leader of its more anti-capitalist wing) resigned after Hitler refused to let him take a vice-chancellorship under Schleicher. It was the most dangerous internal moment in the party's history. It is in the entries around this crisis that Goebbels records Hitler saying that if the party fell apart he would finish it with a pistol in three minutes.¹

That is the state of the Nazi movement seven weeks before it took power: losing votes, out of money, splitting, its leader talking about suicide.

The decision

Hitler was never elected Chancellor. He was appointed, by the 85-year-old President Hindenburg, on the advice of a circle around him. Weimar's constitution had been running on presidential emergency decree since 1930; the Reichstag had already ceased to govern. The question of who ruled Germany was therefore in the hands of perhaps a dozen people.

4 January 1933: the meeting in Cologne. Hitler and Franz von Papen met at the house of the banker Kurt von Schröder, with Himmler, Hess and Keppler present. Papen (recently dismissed as Chancellor and determined to get back at his successor Schleicher) proposed a joint government. Schröder gave an account of this meeting under oath at Nuremberg.²

The petition. In November 1932, a group of businessmen, bankers and landowners assembled by Hjalmar Schacht and Wilhelm Keppler petitioned Hindenburg to appoint Hitler head of a government of national concentration. Around twenty signatures were obtained.

The agrarian pressure. The Junker landowners of the east (Hindenburg's own class, and beneficiaries of the Osthilfe subsidy scheme then under parliamentary scrutiny) pressed hard against Schleicher, who had floated land redistribution for settlement. Hindenburg was himself an East Elbian landowner.

30 January 1933. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of a cabinet in which only three of eleven members were Nazis. Papen took the vice-chancellorship and the right to be present whenever Hitler saw the President, and told his allies the arrangement had Hitler boxed in. Hugenberg, the media magnate and DNVP leader, took economics and agriculture and believed the same.

They had, they thought, hired a demagogue at a discount, with a mass following they could use and a party too broke to be independent. Within six months every one of them had been sidelined, and by June 1934 Papen's own staff were being shot.

Who went into the camps first

The clearest evidence of what the arrangement was for is the order in which people were arrested.

The Reichstag fire of 27 February produced, the next day, the Decree for the Protection of People and State, suspending civil liberties. What followed immediately was a mass round-up of the Communist Party: some 10,000 arrests in Prussia within weeks, KPD deputies seized, the party's press shut. Dachau opened on 22 March 1933; Himmler's press announcement described it as a camp for communists and, as he put it, functionaries who endangered the state. The first inmates were communists, social democrats and trade unionists.⁴

The persecution of Jews escalated in a series of steps over the following years, culminating in mass murder. The persecution of the organised left was immediate, comprehensive, and first, because that was the deliverable.

What employers got

On 2 May 1933 (the day after the regime had co-opted May Day as a national holiday) the SA and SS occupied every trade union office in Germany, seized the funds, and arrested the leadership. Independent unions ceased to exist. Collective bargaining was abolished; the Law for the Ordering of National Labour (1934) applied the leadership principle inside the enterprise, making the employer the Betriebsführer and the workforce his followers, with disputes handled by state trustees.

What followed was, from the standpoint of German capital, extremely good:

• Labour discipline restored. Strikes gone, wage bargaining gone, works councils gutted. Wages recovered slowly while profits and dividends rose.
• Rearmament orders. Public money on an enormous scale flowed into steel, chemicals, vehicles, aircraft and construction.
• "Aryanisation". Jewish-owned firms and property were transferred, generally at a fraction of value, to non-Jewish owners, a straightforward transfer of assets to the politically favoured.
• Forced labour. By 1944 the German war economy was using millions of foreign civilian workers, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates. IG Farben built a plant at Auschwitz-Monowitz with camp labour; Krupp, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen and many others used forced workers.⁵

And afterwards, almost nothing

This is the part with the longest shadow.

The industrialists. At the IG Farben trial (1947–48), thirteen of twenty-four defendants were convicted, with sentences from eighteen months to eight years; all had been released by 1951. Alfried Krupp was sentenced in 1948 to twelve years with confiscation of property; the US High Commissioner John J. McCloy commuted the sentence and restored the property in January 1951. Friedrich Flick, convicted of using slave labour, was released in 1950 and died the richest man in West Germany.

The officials. Denazification in the western zones processed millions of cases and classified the overwhelming majority as nominal followers. The law of 1951 restored the pension and employment rights of civil servants dismissed after the war, returning large numbers of former party members to public office. Hans Globke, who had written the official legal commentary on the Nuremberg race laws, became head of the Chancellery under Adenauer and served eight years.

The recruited. The United States took what it wanted. Operation Paperclip brought roughly 1,600 German scientists and engineers to America, most notably Wernher von Braun, whose V-2 programme had used slave labour at Mittelbau-Dora; von Braun went on to direct the rocket that reached the Moon. Reinhard Gehlen, Wehrmacht intelligence chief for the Eastern Front, was set up by the Americans running a network that became West Germany's federal intelligence service. Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon, was employed by US counter-intelligence and helped out of Europe; France convicted him in 1987, forty-two years late.⁶

The reason was stated openly at the time: the new enemy was communism, and men who had spent their careers fighting communists were assets. The Cold War recycled the personnel of the anti-communist project because the anti-communist project had not ended. That is exactly the argument of chapter 16.

The other failure

Honesty requires naming the left's own contribution. The Communist International's "social fascism" line, in force until 1934, held that social democrats were the main enemy and forbade a united front with them. The KPD spent the crucial years attacking the SPD, at moments cooperating tactically with Nazis against it. The two parties together consistently outpolled the NSDAP and never combined. That was a catastrophic decision taken in Moscow and executed in Berlin, and it belongs in this account alongside the decisions taken by Papen and Hindenburg.

The lesson this chronicle takes

Fascism did not arrive because a population went mad. It arrived because, at a specific moment, a propertied elite facing a rising left decided that the greater danger was redistribution and the lesser danger was a violent movement it believed it could steer. It was wrong about the steering. It was not wrong about the profits.

Keep the shape of that decision in mind. It recurs, with different actors and lower casualty figures, in Guatemala in 1954, in Iran in 1953, in Indonesia in 1965, in Chile in 1973, and in a smaller, hotter form in Rwanda in 1994, where a threatened elite chose extermination over sharing power, and calculated that the outside world would not stop it.

It was also right about that.

Footnotes

1. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: Saur, 1987– ), entries of late 1932; discussed in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998), pp. 391–405, which is the standard account of the Strasser crisis and the weeks that followed. ↩
2. Affidavit of Kurt Freiherr von Schröder, in Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals (Washington: USGPO, 1949–53); see also Kershaw, Hubris, pp. 409–415. ↩
3. Henry Ashby Turner Jr., German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). For the economic history of what followed, Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (London: Allen Lane, 2006). ↩
4. Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), ch. 1. ↩
5. Ulrich Herbert, Hitler's Foreign Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge, 1987). ↩
6. Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip (New York: Little, Brown, 2014); Norbert Frei, Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); on Barbie, the 1983 report of the US Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (the "Ryan Report"). ↩